Flossing Her Legs - Michelle R. Brady
Content warnings: Miscarriage, death of a baby, blood
In the glare of the artificial light that fills the windowless strip club every Sunday morning with Madonna's Lucky Star blaring from out on the floor, I found a tiny, bloody baby in the trashcan of the dancers' bathroom. Too small to have been born alive, but big enough to recognize.
The room smelled like stale smoke and sweat and fruity lotion and felt like an incubator—of heat, of shame, of headaches and hangovers. I covered it with my used paper towel, carefully tucking it around its feet, knowing that the baby came from the world of last night, one that doesn’t exist on Sunday mornings when we dancers wear sweats and come in after church for pole lessons with Glitter. I stood looking at myself I the mirror, the bags under my brown eyes, greasy dark hair and too-tan skin. My hand was on the lid of the metal trashcan, which covered the damp paper towel, which covered the mucus and blood-smeared baby girl. Yes, I could tell it was a girl.
“Time to work, Girls,” Glitter said over Madonna on the loudspeaker.
I wanted to puke but trained my eyes on their reflection instead. I turned off the faucet, my heart beating hard, irrationally afraid that the discarded child would suffocate in there with the towel over its mouth.
Glitter glared at me with forty-five-year-old eyes hovering over a twenty-five-year-old body as I mounted the glass stairs to the main stage. “Well, Natasha, you look like shit,” she said, her face crinkling in spite of her Botox. “Honey, you didn’t even work last night.”
Glitter wore her tiny silver shorts and skinny heels like skin and shimmied up and down the pole like she was flossing her legs. I wondered how many babies she’d given birth to and then let die in bathrooms. But that wasn't fair. That wasn't really a baby; not yet, anyway.
“Tasha—do ya mind if I call you that, Hon? I want you really watch what I’m doin’ with my ass as I come down. Do ya see how it gets extra tight, and my ankles are crossed right at the top of my Gucci’s? That’s the way you slow yourself down to slide—just like this; are ya watchin’?—to the stage, and then grind your rips real rhythmic—see?—‘til everyone is watching you. We don’t want you to make ‘em all go soft seein’ that cheek get scraped up when you slam your big ass on the stage like last time, do we?”
She stood up and leaned over me, one huge, perpetually hard nipple an inch from my mouth and said softly, “And Tasha, I won’t be the one cleaning up your shit when it comes flyin’ out, cause trust me, Baby, I’ve seen it before, and it ain’t pretty.”
I wiped her spittle off my face and suddenly remembered Genie, a girl—a stripper, but still a girl—with round green eyes that made her look like a porcelain doll, and gold bracelets on each arm that jingled when she danced or detangled her curly blonde hair or smoked. She worked my first night, and before we went on stage, she stood behind me in the dressing room, smoked two cigarettes and said, blowing the smoke out, “Are you nervous?”
I shook my head and tried not to breathe. “We’ll be fine,” I said, glancing at her shaking fingers.
Her eyes darted from my face to my reflection and back again. “Can I ask you something?”
I put my earrings in, dangly red ones in hoops of rhinestones. “Don’t worry,” I said, wondering why she needed a pep talk on my first night and wishing she’d stop blowing smoke at my face. “You look beautiful.”
Genie blinked at me. “I’m just getting so fat.”
She actually looked a little emaciated. Her elbows were dangerously sharp, her skin a little too see-through. “Genie,” I said. “I’m sorry. I really hate smoke.”
She put her cigarette out on the countertop. “But, am I showing?” she asked and turned so her stomach was in profile. A gold navel ring hung from a tiny mound. “You can’t tell, right?”
I shook my head and watched her light up again, feeling sick.
"Don't look so judgy," she said, her reflection frowning at mine. "What do you think happens here when we close? This will happen to you, too, one day."
When the class was over, I snuck a peek in the trashcan, but the little girl was gone. The janitor had even cleaned the blood from around the toilet.
Previously published under the author’s maiden name in Bath Spa University Press’s print anthology Open to Interpretation, 2008
Michelle is a writer and attorney. Her fiction is included in Umbrella Factory Magazine, Roi Fainéant Press, Broken Antler Magazine, Hair Trigger Magazine, Ginosko Literary Journal, The Maudlin House, The Big Ugly Review, Fine Lines Journal, and others, and has been awarded a Gold Circle Award for fiction from the CSPA. She holds a BFA in fiction writing and a JD. Find her at www.michellereneebrady.com. Follow her on X @BradyMichelleR
