Baby Jay

“What are you doing?” Jay intends the question for Michael, but it’s Mom who answers.
“I thought it would be better in the garage. I didn’t want you breathing the chemicals.” Her voice hikes to a piercing pitch. “What is this thing? How is it doing this?”
Jay doesn’t fully understand it, himself. Michael makes his body from refuse, and now that the cleaning fluids have revitalized him, it seems he can start reforming himself.
Jay’s lips flap, shaping words that never come. There’s no way out. Any excuse he finds will shrivel under the slightest scrutiny. Mom panics, a whine rising in her throat. Dad gawks, caught between confusion, amusement, and mild annoyance.
So, Jay takes control. “It’s… it’s Michael.”
In that moment, the world stops being real. It’s as though his consciousness has been knocked a few feet from his body. He can observe everything that happens but feels nothing, controls nothing. He’s a living camera.
He crosses the garage, and pulls the bin against his chest, as if it’s a living thing. He hears himself say, “Michael, say something.”
Silence.
Jay jostles the bin.
Nothing.
Mom holds her hand over her mouth. She’s trying. He sees it in her eyes. She wants to believe him, but he can also see her rationalizing everything, turning Michael’s reconstruction into a hallucination, a product of stress and cleaning chemicals getting to her brain.
“Michael, come on,” Jay says. “Please.”
Mom’s hand drops from her mouth to her side. A thunderous movement, the kind that shifts continents. She kneels beside Jay. Timidly, as if afraid he’ll lash out, she rubs the backs of his knuckles. “Oh, my boy,” she says.
Jay begs his lips to part, for an explanation to spill out. He’s not crazy, or broken, or desperate for attention and love. Michael is real. Michael is here, but he’s…
He’s being his usual self.
Then make him talk.
Jay pulls back from Mom’s touch and flips the bin, dumping chemicals and Michael’s “face” onto the garage floor. It lands facedown, losing detail and depth, turning again into a pile of muck. Jay kicks the lump of muck across the garage, away from the chemicals. It slides a few feet, landing in a dry, empty spot, glowing yellow under an ancient light bulb.
The muck flexes and contorts, shifting back into a face, the expression clearer than before, more detailed. Maybe it’s a trick of the light, or maybe it’s Michael’s renewed strength.
“What a shitty fucking day,” Michael says.
Mom makes a sound between a hiccup and a gasp. Dad’s eyes, once half-shut, bulge from his skull.
“You were going to let them think I was crazy,” Jay says.
Michael’s laugh is more of a wheeze. “Nah man, just… y’know. Stage fright.”
“Oh my God…” Mom doubles over, fingers digging into her scalp.
“But if I had been trying to make them think you were crazy,” Michael continues, “I think sitting here’s giving me a good reminder of how much I need you. So maybe you can stick me back in that bin and gimme some more Lysol or whatever. ‘Cause I gotta say, I’m starting to feel itchy.”