Two Pigeons on a Windowsill, Sleeping

Same Walk, Different Shoes

“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a community writing project thatBen Wakemanorganized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.

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I closed my eyes and willed the stick in my hand to show anything other than a plus sign.

It didn’t work.

“Fuck,” I muttered.

Panic rose through my veins like a tide of bubbling acid, making my hands shake and then clench into fists. Around the test. I threw it across the bathroom as if that was going to make any difference.

It clattered down into the laundry basket.

Fantastic.

I hauled myself up from the cold tiles, feeling their imprint sticking into the flesh of my legs, a grid pattern I would carry with me into the other room. The only other room, because the bathroom was the one private area in this studio apartment – the only thing I’d been able to afford in this shitty college town.

Even then, I had to share it with her.

I’d loved Alison when we first met working at the bar, but after six months of living together, I was deliberately scheduling myself onto the opposite shifts to hers. It was the only way I could get any time to myself in an empty apartment.

Only that had all gone out the window when I met Bryson and we started hanging out together every minute of the day.

He could. He was eighteen. Unemployed. Ostensibly a student, though it was summer and he hadn’t yet started classes. Way too young for me, I thought now as the specter of that test hung in the back of my mind like the sword of Damocles. He hadn’t even been to college yet. I was seven years ahead of him in life, and maybe that wouldn’t make a difference if we were in our forties, but it made all the difference now.

How was he going to support us?

He wasn’t, of course. And I could barely look after myself.

“FUCK!” I shouted, kicking the metal wastepaper basket we kept in the kitchen and then hopping, howling, clutching my foot. A pair of pigeons took urgent flight from the windowsill, their flapping wings a staccato pair of castanets accompanying my awkward dance.

Fuck.

One time. Just one time that he didn’t have a condom in his pocket and I was too drunk on new love to care. It was the first time we’d ever done it without protection. Things were so new between us that we were still having a lot of first times.

And this? This was a first time with bells on.

I stalked over to the fridge and opened it, looked inside. It seemed absurd for my stomach to feel empty, given what I now knew was growing inside of me, but the sight of every single half-eaten tray of junk food in there made me want to run back to the bathroom and throw up. I slammed the door vindictively and one of the hinges dropped. This happened at least once a week, but it still made me unspeakably angry to have to shove the damn thing back into place.

I sat down heavily on the sofa.

Time to figure out how I was going to deal with the fact that I had fucked up my life.

---

“Baby,” he said, and his tone was so serious it made me want to run to the bathroom and throw up again. “Baby, I want to do this with you.”

I looked down at our fingers. Our hands clasped together. Only I wasn’t the one grasping – he was.

There was a detached kind of feeling in my head like I was watching all of this happen from somewhere else. Someplace else. And I knew that at any other time, this would be the moment when I knew it was the end for us.

We were just too different. Too far apart in our lives. When he graduated, he had big plans. I kind of had the feeling that Bryson was the kind of guy who would follow them. And here I was, still no idea what to do with my life.

Not that it mattered now. A baby would dictate the path of my life for me. Mother. Nursemaid. Housemaid. Wife.

This was the end for us. Only it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. As much as I knew Bryson wasn’t going to be able to help enough, I also knew it would be even worse to try to do this on my own.

I took a breath.

“We’re doing it, I guess,” I said, my dry throat clogged with the promise of words I could have said instead, words I could still say, still might.

---

Nights dragged back into days. I had months until anyone would be able to tell. Still, I felt like I could see it written all over my face every time I looked into the mirror. Carrier. How could they not see it written all over my face?

---

I lay awake in the depths of the night, my shift untaken as I tried to settle my stomach, and listened to the pigeons. They preened and cooed and settled down to sleep again. Feathers scraping against glass. A windowsill passed for a nest in the city.

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The blood on the tissue seemed so red, it couldn’t possibly be real. Like I’d somehow managed to dip it into red paint.

I wasn’t supposed to be bleeding. Not now. I was six, coming up on seven weeks.

I stopped staring at the tissue and dropped it fast, like it was on fire, letting it fall into the toilet.

I looked up, my gaze going directly to the bathroom unit. I’d stashed the spare test in there. I hadn’t needed to take it to confirm what I had already felt in my body was the truth, not when the first one had already told me everything I needed to know.

But now…

My body felt the truth. I just needed to confirm it.

I snatched the test down and waited, my legs going numb from sitting there for so long, waited until I had enough liquid in my bladder to take it.

A minus sign.

I looked at the stick in my hands. That faint, straight line.

Negative. No. Nothing.

And I knew.

I took a deep, healing breath of the air – stale as it was – and I knew.

Negative. Nothing. Nada.

Put a straight line under my name on the family tree.

I was done.

And I didn’t feel anything at all.

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No progress report this week - I wanted this post to stand on its own. I also wrote a second entry for SWDS based on a different prompt - you can find the other one here.

If you want to check out the rest of my short stories, you can do so here (there is considerably more heat in my average post, so be warned).

If you’re reading this post from the SWDS challenge and you’ve never heard of me before: Crowhill Cove is a spicy, angsty gay romance writing experiment aiming to answer the question of whether a relatively unknown author can run a Substack alongside book launches and build up enough of a following to make the amount of work required worthwhile. Subscribe if you want to follow my progress, including in-depth analysis and sharing of everything I’m doing to try to make it happen, from marketing efforts to the actual writing of the books. You can even vote on what I’ll write about next. And it’s all free!