You stand on the back deck and stare at your neighbor's yard, your yard. You're looking for Olympian hills, but there's only fresh mowed lawn, trimmed bushes and beyond the property line, a patch of saplings and weeds. You stare in that direction and try to figure it out for yourself.

Why is everything you buy a lemon even if it is brand new and never been out of the box or off of the showroom floor?

Why do you work so long and so hard and someone else gets the big accounts?

Why does the baby cry and cry and the doctors say nothing is wrong, and your wife says nothing is wrong, but when you look down at the baby it has the head of three dogs and all three heads are howling?

You stand on the back deck staring into the saplings and weeds until the sun goes down and the air is dusty with mosquitoes, and then you go into the house.

Inside you find your wife, her name is Sara, on the phone. She's talking to her mother, Minnie, or her best friend, Megan. You know it is one of them because when she sees you, she turns her back and lowers her voice. They are talking about you or they are talking about her, either way, you aren't supposed to hear what they say or ask what they say or even mention that whatever they are saying bothers you. You walk past the refrigerator, the stove and her cord-wrapped body, as you make your way to the family room. Your laptop is in there and that is where you go over accounts in the evenings. You wish you had thought to pull a Heineken out of the refrigerator as you walked by.

The baby lies sleeping in his playpen. He is named after Sara's father, Geoffrey. You stand back and look at your offspring. Two of his heads are sleeping. One of them has his eyes wide open and is watching you. One head always stays awake. Maybe that is why he cries so much; one head never gets enough sleep. Geoffrey is three months old and already his neck and shoulders are muscular. It is from holding his heads up, you think. His limbs are plump with fat. Baby fat, all those heads sucking at his mother's breast, all those greedy mouths and lapping tongues feeding off your wife's titties until they grow so large and heavy that they rest on her chest like loaves of bread instead of the sweet tiny breasts you called your Betty Boobies. You called them that to yourself.

The head that is awake starts to whine and whimper. "Shhhhh…" you hush from your distance; it's a small attempt to sooth your son. It only makes him snarl and whine louder. The other heads wake up and join in.

"Can you get Geoffrey?" your wife calls from the kitchen, "He needs a diaper change."

"Sure, Sara," you answer. You know that she would find any other reply unacceptable, but even walking over to Geoffrey makes your mouth dry, your stomach clench and your balls slide up into your body. As you reach down into the playpen, the heads lash out at you. You know there are only gums in those jaws, but it still makes you flinch. Geoffrey howls louder.

"Oh, for crying out loud, Daniel..." Sara says as she strides into the room and snatches Geoffrey out from under your reach. She smells of milk, sweet and sour at the same time, and you see the damp spots on her red blouse where the milk has leaked out just from hearing the baby cry. You look away, but not before you see the look she gives you. You would try grinning it away, but seeing the laptop, you reach for it instead.

The laptop was given to you by your employer. Everyone has one. Yours is two years old and never worked right from the beginning. You lose files. You find other's people's emails in your box. Someone named Emily wants to meet you at cheap diners and seedy motels. You keep deleting her messages and new ones keep reappearing. Recently, she has become depressed. She threatens to call you at home or to tell your wife or to end her life. You sent her an email telling her you aren't who she thinks you are, but she doesn't believe you.

Geoffrey keeps crying through the diaper change. He keeps crying even as Sara sits on the couch, loosens her blouse and opens her nursing bra. After that, two of his heads cry as one of them suckles.

You rub your brow as you try to get the Morrow account to come up. You have been rubbing your brow too often lately. You think you have rubbed furrows there deeper than a farmer's field. You can see the lines when you look in the mirror. And you think your hairline is receding or there is this spot in the back where the hair seems thinner. You think about trying Rogaine. You told Sara about it and she just looked at you funny. "Male pattern baldness doesn't run in your family," she said.

Then she stated, "I am losing my hair. It is part of having a baby. After the baby is born, women lose some of their hair, then, it grows back." The next day she had cut her hair shorter than yours.

"You could have asked me," you told her that night.

"What would you have said?"

"That I like your hair long."

"That's why I didn't ask you."

You can't find the Morrow account. You can't find any of the accounts. You don't want to look in your email file. You rub your brow. You run your hand through your hair. You look up at Sara feeding Geoffrey and Sara is looking down at your dog-headed son and smiling. His fat hand opens and closes on her blouse. The tongue from the closest head is hanging out. It is an almost perfect picture. When the phone rings, the heads not feeding start to bark.

The phone rings again, louder than Geoffrey' barks.

"Would you get that?" Sara asks and although you don't want to, you do.

It is a wrong number. The woman at the other end is crying and you can't understand who she is asking for, but it isn't Sara. You hate to hang up on her, but what else can you do. You grab a Heineken out of the refrigerator and when you turn to go back into the room, Sara and Geoffrey are gone.

Later, you still can't find the Morrow account. You decide this can't go on. You have had enough. You think about becoming a giant insect, a cockroach, maybe or a fly, but you don't think about it long because insects' lives are so limited, look what happened to Jeff Goldblum when he turned into one. You think about calling Minnie or Megan or maybe your father, Dan the Man. You know that the women would not be consoling, and Dan would say, "Buck up, Junior. Be a man. So what if your baby has three heads. So what if you get lemons. God damn it, mash the things. Better yet, run over them with the riding mower. Make yourself some damn lemonade." You never got along with your father. You settle for another beer.

When you open your email, there is another letter from Emily. She is distraught. Her typing is in capital letters. She says, "I CANT TAKE THIS ANYMORE!!!" You delete it. After that, you find the accounts, the Morrow account is right where it should be. When you open it, you discover a series of numbers have been typed in all wrong. You make corrections. You get creative and discover a way to make the account look better. You get yourself another Heineken and with your legs all stretched out in front of you, you sit not thinking of anything in particular. You belch long, heavy belches. On the other side of the house, you can hear Geoffrey crying. Had he even stopped? Poor baby crying all the time. You think maybe you can do something about that -- help Sara with the baby.

On your way through the kitchen, you pause to get honey cakes. You think honey cakes might do the trick. You think you have it all figured out. Sara's hair will grow out again, fuller and silkier, her titties will shrink back to the little sweet playthings they used to be, Emily will find her lost lover or learn to live without him, and Geoffrey, eating his honeycakes, will wag his serpent tail and let you pass through the gate.

The End

Bio

Pam McNew is the mother of four and spends her day job at a manufacturing facility working with sheet metal. She wants to mention that the Siamese Kittens still do not have names.