We got some chairs and sat there for ten minutes close together while
baby played with the invisible monster. "I don't know what to do!" I
said. "It's alive. Maybe it's poisonous. But it's friendly. Maybe it's
another baby!"
"From another dimension," said Mabel.
"Rot," I said; I think I picked that up from the detective in the
Saturday Evening Post serial. "Let's keep our heads."
"If baby keeps his," said my friend Mabel.
That got me. "I've got to call Harry," I chattered. "They don't like him
to be called at work, but I've got to call him."
"You'll just worry him," said Mabel. "Call the police."
"No!" I said. I felt like crying myself. Baby was so happy. Maybe the
baby monster was happy, too. The police would do something awful to it.
But what about my maternal instinct? Something told me I simply had to
save my baby! "I've _got_ to call Harry," I insisted, and I went to the
'phone.
The dial tone sounded peculiar, I remember, but I called Harry's place
of employment. A brisk female voice cut in:
"What number are you calling, please?"
"CHarlemont 7-890," I whispered.
"Sorry. You must have the wrong dimension." There was a click as she
disconnected. I sat like a statue. A haggard statue with a greasy
housedress on. A statue that hadn't plucked its eyebrows in two months.
I had a lot of nerve. I was a bad mother, and a poor mistress. And I had
a swell husband, who could lie like a trooper. I wasn't any good, I was
ugly, I was greasy. I cried. "Mabel," I choked.
It took her a while to get it out of me, and then her blue eyes flashed.
"I told you!" she cried. "From another dimension!" In her broken-down
green wedgies she clattered toward the door. I heard her fighting it.
She couldn't get it open. Then she tried a window. It opened, but she
couldn't stick her hand out. She flung herself around.
"Stella," she said, with a quiver of that good-looking short upper lip
of hers, "we're trapped in. We're in the middle of some kind of fantasy.
It's a crazy world we're living in, Stella. A-bombs and H-bombs and
flying saucers and space-flight--it's all the fiction stuff coming true.
Now we're lost in some other dimension, and I have to get dinner in the
oven."
"Please," I mumbled. "Let's don't get desperate about the wrong things."
I tried all the doors and windows in the house, and it was true. We were
trapped in. There was some barrier surrounding the house. There wasn't
anything to see outside except a kind of grey steam.
We went back to check on baby. He was still playing with the monster. I
bent over the crib and held a fluffy, fifty-cent toy bear out. The baby
monster took it invisibly out of my hand. He shoved it at baby. Baby
squealed so darned happily. And I began to get some perspective.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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