She left with the baby.

IMAGE BY BRANDY MCKENZIE instagram.com/dontjumpanna/

I bought diapers and clothes and toys and bouncers and bottles and everything I could think of to make that little one happy when he got here. And she took him. She took the baby, a month old.

SHE DROVE WEST BY BRANDY MCKENZIE 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 92

She left with the baby, the car he’d left parked high and uninventoried, and what money she could take from the accounts even though it wasn’t hers. Nothing was. Not even the song she’d never heard before rising up in a drone of road noise, one breath after another. Not even the dog, her soft whine drawing foggy versions of rounded hearts on the window in certain time with the baby’s dreaming, the dog, the car, the cash, all of a man who’d inked “Free Hate” on the ridges of his fists.

Not even her understanding of the words, illusions of an anagram rolling up in the rhythm of headlights because, after all, who could love a man who lied about his hate for love, each scarred knuckle i…