I don’t know how to tell it, I really don’t, it happened slowly and then all at once and the very next weekend we took a hammer to the cot, repainted the walls of the nursery, and posted a listing online. The new tenant would have to be single, since the apartment wasn’t big enough for another couple. Ideally, they’d be our age or younger. They had to be childless.  

We uploaded the ad on Sunday afternoon. By Monday morning, our inbox had been inundated with applicants. We sat down that evening with a bottle of Hendrick’s and went through them together. The majority were easy to eliminate—first-year college students, couples in their forties, and so on. It wasn’t really up to me, and it didn’t take long before Leila said she’d found the girl for us. 

“Maria,” she read aloud. “Twenty-eight. Single. Looks a bit like a nun.” 

She turned the laptop around. The prim young woman blown up to fill the screen did, in fact, look a bit like a nun. In the selfie attached to her application, she wore a sensible blouse buttoned up to her neck and an apprehensive expression. Blink twice if you’re being held at gunpoint, I thought. 

“Working professional,” Leila said. “No kids. Calls herself a neat freak.” 

“If you’re happy, I’m happy.” 

Was I? On the one hand, a little extra income would be nice, and there was obviously no reason to keep the spare room as a nursery. Still: it felt like too much, too soon. But this was home stuff. The world—work, bills, anything that involved the outside—was my domain. Inside, the decisions belonged to Leila. That had been the arrangement for as long as we’d been a couple, and I didn’t see why we should change it up now. We were still together, after all. Something had gone right. 

“I’ll ask her to come over tomorrow for an interview.” Focusing made Leila look angry—forehead furrowed, blackcurrant eyes snarling. “Sound good?” 

Jesus, I wish I knew how to tell it all properly. 

Maria did nothing to disavow our impression of her during the visit, declining to ask a single question as we showed her around. On the rare occasions she did speak, like when Leila quizzed her about her work, she did so in a high-pitched, tentative voice and often ended her sentences with a nervous giggle. 

“And this would be your room,” Leila said, once the time for that came. 

It still smelled of paint. My electric drill and handsaw lay where I’d left them in the far corner. I went over and unplugged the drill as Maria said, “Everything looks fine.” 

I wondered whether she meant it. The cramped, basically unfurnished box room would leave a little to be desired by all but the most forgiving of beholders. Given the rental situation in our city, though, it was possible she was just glad to secure anything.  

Later, Leila filled in the contract we’d had a lawyer draw up. Maria got back to us the following morning, along with proof of the transfer she’d made for two months’ rent, plus another as a deposit. The weekend after that, she moved in. 

She soon proved herself an unobtrusive housemate, shy to the point of being functionally mute, who mostly hung out in her room or scurried past us in the hallway, always with a worried smile on her face. Leaving early most mornings for work as she did, and coming back late, we could go days at a time without exchanging more than a few words. We had a little extra money each month and the kitchen was tidier than usual. Apart from those details, it sometimes felt as if Maria wasn’t living with us at all.  

By the time we heard the noise, we’d begun to consider her part of the fabric. Leila woke me one night, asking if I could hear what she was hearing. Sure enough, I could—a humming, pitched deep and strangely resonant, not unlike a phone vibrating on a hard surface.  

It was a new one for me, as far as apartment-noises went. Maria wasn’t home. Her work, as a freelance journalist for a Christian news organisation, had required her to spend the night elsewhere. 

We went hunting, following the sound past the kitchen and through the hallway until we tracked it down to Maria’s room. Now it sounded more like a moan, but it wasn’t constant, it would periodically drop off only to restart again a moment later. We stared blearily at each other, listening. Half-asleep, I was struggling to keep track of time passing. 

“It sounds like a person,” Leila said at some point. 

A person, maybe, or an animal. Something alive. Whatever it was, it sounded like it was in pain.  

Leila went back to our room, reappearing with the spare key we kept in our cabinet. She unlocked the door and marched across to the ensuite. The moans crescendoed horribly—it had to have been in agony—and then they stopped. Through the abrupt quiet, she called my name.  

I joined her in the bathroom and saw it before I could choose not to. The thing had two eyes and a torso, and that was where its similarity to a human ended. It had no arms or legs, nor any hair. The head was the size of a futsal ball, the body maybe twice as big again. Instead of a mouth or ears, it had holes in its oily, stretched-out skin about half the size of what they should have been. It took up a third of the porcelain tub, which Maria had padded with blankets and sweaters, and smelled like an old, wet towel. 

“Do you think it’s a child?” Leila asked. 

It certainly looked unfinished. It gazed up at us, blinking in the fluorescent light from the bulb over the mirror. As we peered back, it widened its mouth-hole and cried. 

We were waiting at the kitchen table when Maria came home, a few hours later. We’d propped the thing up on a chair by artfully arranging some of the blankets from the tub. It was napping when she appeared, mollified by the cup of warm milk Leila had fed it by the spoonful, but at the sound of the doorbell, its pale blue eyes clicked open. 

We sat there with the bottle of gin, listening as Maria unlocked her bedroom door and made for the ensuite. A few moments later, she came charging into the kitchen, saw us, and froze. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, sounding more resigned than anything. “I’m so sorry.” 

“Do you want a drink?” I asked.  

Maria shook her head. She bustled over to the thing and planted a kiss on its unwrinkled forehead. It gurgled, squirming happily on the blankets. 

In bits and pieces over the next hour, her hand never leaving the thing’s rounded back, she told it to us. She got pregnant when she was a teenager. Her Jesus freak mother banned her from having an abortion so she instead consumed all manner of pills and potions. Nothing did the trick, the thing came out many moons too soon, and Maria and thing both were promptly exiled from the family, which, by the end of the narrative, sounded more cultish than not. That was the gist of it. 

“What?” I asked, brilliantly, at several key moments; but Maria was distraught, she was at times actively sobbing and at other times too backed-up to speak, and Leila told me not to pry, there would be time for more questions later, for now the important thing was that Maria knew we were here for her, for her and for her child.  

It came to feel like it was the two of them against me. The three of them, counting the thing. They were all on one side of our kitchen table, Leila with her arm around Maria and the thing between them like the setup to a sick joke. On the other side: James, his rapidly diminishing bottle of Hendrick’s, and his idiotic, insensitive questions.  

“How come we only heard it now?” I asked. “Where’s it been the rest of the time?” 

“I’m always with him,” Maria replied, meeting my gaze before glancing away again. “He doesn’t cry when I’m here. And I keep the door locked, of course.” 

She really was quite pretty, it struck me, sitting there all teared up with her skin blotchy and her eyes, the same blue as the thing’s, raw around the edges. I’ve always found women crying erotic. 

“Well,” I started, but Leila, who had never been much of a crier, cut me off. 

“This is your apartment too,” she said. “You pay rent, same as us. You’ve got a contract. If this is how you want to use your bathroom, you’re welcome to.” 

I shot her a look, which she ignored. 

“You don’t have to hide him anymore, either,” she went on earnestly. “Now that we know, you should feel at home. Both of you.” 

“Oh, Leila.” Any time Maria said her name, it sounded like she was sighing. “That means more to us than you know.” 

With some difficulty, I glanced at the thing. The viscous liquid around its mouth-hole was coalescing into drops at the corners. Maria reached over and dabbed at them with a handkerchief. When she pulled it away, I watched a gossamery strand of grey phlegm elongate until the connection broke and it snapped back, breaking into dozens of tiny droplets that peppered the thing’s mouth-hole. 

Maria took Leila at her word, and over the next few days, the thing began making more of an appearance. I’d turn the corner and find it sitting at the kitchen table, or I’d wander into the living room to discover it had been balanced precariously on the edge of the sofa while Maria curled up beside it, glued to religious television. But it never interacted with me, not directly, and neither woman made any demands as far as caring for it went. In the arguments I rehearsed in my head, the hypothetical James wound up having nothing concrete to complain about, so I never brought it up.  

It didn’t feel right, having the thing in our house—but who were we supposed to call? The police? A hospital? Some bespectacled gang of socially inept scientists? Maria had been through plenty already. For the moment, I figured, it was okay to let it all be.  

Even telling it now, I can’t get my head around it. 

One night, maybe a week after we met the thing, Leila and I were reading in bed when she set her book down and asked if I knew anything about live streaming. 

“Like, for video games?” 

“Right. Not just video games, though. There are people out there who walk around with their phones out, recording their whole lives. Eating, using public transport. Some of them even stream themselves sleeping. They can make a fortune.” 

I waited for her to go on, my own book held open with a single finger. The house was nearly silent, save for the soft, vaguely Latin burble of what had to be a televised mass coming from the living room. 

“I was thinking,” she said, turning on the old high beams and aiming them straight through my skull, “I was wondering if there might be a dollar or two in it for us. With Maria’s kid, obviously. I mean, money’s tight. And how many children have you come across like him? I bet people would pay good money to see it. Watch it eat breakfast, hang out with us. We might even be able to inspire other young women.” 

“Inspire them to do what, exactly? Get dodgy abortions?” 

She didn’t miss a beat. “Remind them that it’s not all bad. That there are people who’ll love you no matter where you’re from, no matter what you look like. She’s going away this weekend. I’ve been spending some time with him, he trusts me. I think it could be good for us,” she added, snuggling closer and resting her chin on my shoulder. “We can try it, can’t we?” 

“Let’s think about it,” I said, after a moment. “There’s no rush. Let’s take a few days and think it through.” 

We didn’t need the money; or, more precisely, if Leila needed the money, she needed it for non-financial reasons. Live streaming the thing was such a plainly grotesque idea that I could barely take her seriously. But no, that’s not true—I knew she wasn’t messing around. I knew it all along. 

Thing is, we were only still together because we’d worked out who was in charge of what. That was the truth of the situation. Inside: Leila. Outside: James. The Inside Leila: to keep the Outside James clean. The Outside James: to get grime all over the Inside Leila. In this way, we loved each other. And love—love’s funny. Love’ll come down on you like a rain. It’ll mist you good and hard, drown you if you let it. 

Maria was going to visit her aunt the following weekend. She spent all Saturday morning in the living room with Leila, presumably obsessing over the finer details of caring for the thing. I’d been in our bedroom, trying to work, but found the thought of them in there unsettling and stole away to sneak a few beers at a nearby kiosk. I came back to find Maria waiting by the door with her duffel bag. 

“If anything comes up, please don’t hesitate to call,” she said when she saw me, which was one of the longest uninterrupted sentences I’d ever heard leave her mouth. “But he’s a good kid. He doesn’t need much.” 

“We’re on top of it,” I told her. “Don’t worry about a thing.” 

She flung her arms around my neck. Her damp cheek smushed into the stubble under my jaw and her waist ground into my hip. I got hard. Pulling away, she smiled snottily and set off down the stairs.  

I was trying to work out whether she’d felt the erection when I made it into the kitchen, where the thing was propped up on what had almost immediately become its chair. Leila was fiddling with the laptop she’d splayed open in front of it.  

She glanced up as I came in and said, “She agrees, totally, with all of it. We talked it all through.” 

“Uh-huh,” I said. “She does.” 

“As long as we split whatever we make with her, she says, it’s kosher.” 

I popped the tab on a beer from the fridge and watched as she buzzed between the laptop and the thing, now turning it so it caught the light better, now jamming her charger into the wall. The thing didn’t like looking at me. It kept its watery gaze trained on Leila, from time to time stretching its mouth-hole and emitting a soft coo that brought pigeons to mind. I took a swallow and noticed from the dull warmth in the back of my head that I was drunk. I was still hard. 

“There,” Leila said presently. She beamed at me, her face flushed. 

“You’re going to broadcast it just sitting there?” 

“For the first one, I thought it made sense if I sit here beside him and explain.” 

“Explain what?” 

“The whole situation. How he’s a child like any other, basically. Why don’t you come over here, behind us?” 

The thing swivelled its perfectly round head to gawp at me. To my despair, I found I couldn’t break eye contact, and so it was as if I was talking to the thing instead of Leila when I said, “I’ll pass, thanks.” 

She cocked her head. “You don’t want to join in?” 

“Let’s see how it goes,” was all I could manage. 

“Alright,” she said. “Suit yourself.” 

She rearranged her hair, adjusted how she was sitting, and leaned forward to click the trackpad. Her frazzled expression made way for a Hollywood smile I didn’t recognise from her repertoire. I sat there, can in hand, as she explained to the supposed viewers what it was they were looking at. If you weren’t listening to the words, you could be forgiven for thinking she was relating a particularly optimistic weather forecast. After a while, a question must’ve come in, because she paused to squint at the screen. 

“Thanks so much for asking, Highway Bandit,” she responded, sounding genuinely pleased Highway Bandit had asked. “No, he doesn’t eat much. Applesauce in the morning and sometimes a drop of warm milk before bed.” 

As the afternoon wore on, the light bent from honey through amber to a rich purple that fuzzed every edge. The thing, having taken on a halogen tint from the laptop screen, twitched rhythmically and made various distressed-sounding noises. Leila talked nonstop, monologuing about the ins and outs of caring for it or responding to specific points that must’ve been brought up by the viewers. I couldn’t move. When it got too dark to see, she thanked everybody for their time, kissed the thing above its right ear-hole, and closed the computer.  

“I’ll just put him down,” she said, because the thing was, in fairness, fighting drowsiness, its mouth-hole a tight line, its eyes drooping even more than usual. She swept it into her arms and carried it off to the bathtub bed. 

“Leila, that was bizarre,” I said when she came back. I could still smell it. 

She slid her phone across the table. On the screen, a graph explained we’d just made almost three hundred dollars. Some eighty users had seen fit to subscribe to our channel full-time, which Leila had aggressively priced at twenty bucks a month, fifteen if billed annually. I looked up and she was looking back at me. 

“You should see the comments.” 

“I don’t want to see the comments, honey. That was wrong, what we just did. What you did and what I sat and watched you do.” 

“We didn’t hurt anybody. His own mother agreed, for Christ’s sake.” Leila had an artist’s touch when it came to keeping control of her voice. “You’re the only one with an issue.” 

I got up and checked the fridge. No more beer. Not much of anything, really. Half a dozen squat pots of applesauce. 

“Let’s go out,” I said, closing the door and facing her. “Like we used to.” 

Her expression never wavered, but I saw the corners of her eyes soften. “We’d need to get a sitter.” 

The thing was incapable of leaving the bathtub. At worst, it would whine. But if she needed to believe we needed a sitter—well, if this wasn’t love, what was? 

“Of course we can get a sitter,” I said. “Do you know any?” 

“I’ve got this list. I made it a while ago.” 

She said this softly. 

We used to be excellent drinkers. That was part of what made it all work to begin with. The night we met, we had cocktails, then a bottle of wine, then we went out to a club, then we drank tequila in her kitchen until we passed out. I’m just telling it like it was. We’d drink ourselves romantic. It was our thing. Lately, of course, we hadn’t been drinking together. To my way of thinking, we were overdue.  

Once the girl Leila found turned up, we called a taxi to a nearby bar, ordered whiskey sours and peanuts, and found a table down the back. The soft naphtha lights turned her into a painting, blurring the charcoal smudges of her eyes, her hair. We killed the first round, the second, and a third in the space of forty minutes. I was so far gone the drinks were beginning to sober me up. 

“The sitter’s not going to call,” I told her when she checked her phone for the fourth time. 

She just stared, her pupils shrinking as they adjusted to the light. She was gone too.  

“It was so wrong. It was, like, absurdly wrong. That’s probably one of the wrongest things I’ve ever done, come to think of it. For, what. For three hundred dollars.” I leaned across the table, took her hands in mine. Cold and spiny. “Leila, honey. Tell me you’re seeing things clear. Tell me that much and I’ll let it go. We need to be able to talk. Inside, yes. Outside, yes. But if we can’t talk, it doesn’t matter where we are.” 

She wasn’t looking at me anymore. She gestured to the waiter for another round. We’d eaten a grand total of seven peanuts between us. We were drinking the way we used to drink, before everything. Slouching towards oblivion. It felt better back then.  

I didn’t say anything else until the glasses reappeared, and then I took her hands again and kissed them and said, “I fucked her, you know. Maria. More than once. Been waiting for the right time to tell you.” 

It was a lie, but admit it—there are times when you, too, shoot to maim. It didn’t work, though, she just glanced at her watch and told me it was getting close to midnight, hadn’t we better get home and let Sara go, we told her eleven, or had I forgotten that as well? 

“Sara’s fine,” I said. “She’s making overtime. She’s probably chuffed.” 

“I’d rather check on him,” Leila said. “You’re drunk, I’m drunk. Let’s go now, please.” 

In the gloom, she was a strange bird, sitting there all stiff and precise. Like she was perched on a branch, judging the wind. Waiting for the right moment to jump. 

We paid our tab and called a taxi. When we got back, we found the indeterminately teenaged Sara waiting up in the kitchen. We hadn’t told her about the thing, we’d only said if she heard any noises not to worry, that the apartment was still settling. I slipped her an extra fifty and saw her out while Leila went to check on the thing. 

“He’s fine,” she told me when she came back. “Sleeping. Normal.” 

Normal, I thought. I was on the couch, watching the muted television. Maria had left the religious channel on. The Pope was expected to disembark in Buenos Aires at any moment. 

“I’m going to bed,” she said. “Drink some water before you come, won’t you?” 

“We need to talk,” I told the Pope’s private jet. “We really, really need to talk.” 

I heard her pad down the hall and close our door. The papal devotees at the airstrip were working themselves into a frenzy. Waving their arms in the air, clawing at the barriers. I saw tears.  

Tongues go soft when they’re not being used. What we needed was hardness. Once I realised that, it all became very clear, very quickly. The quiet had gone to my head, doubling up on the drinks. When I stood, I listed to one side until I collided with the wall. I took a moment there to regroup before continuing around the corner to Maria’s room. 

I hadn’t been back in since that first night. I eased the door open, went into the bathroom, and turned on the light. The thing was wrapped up in its blankets, its eyes screwed closed. The stench of rot made my temples throb.  

I picked it up gingerly, swaddled it against my chest. I’d never held it before and was surprised by its lightness, how insubstantial it felt in my crooked arms. Like if I let go it would barely make a sound when it hit the floor. The eyes opened, noticed me, closed again. It murmured something that sounded like words, only they were too low to make out. I held it close as I retraced my steps out of the ensuite and into what used to be the nursery. 

The grey light from the streetlamps made everything look faded, worn. She hadn’t done anything with the space. Apart from a cardigan draped over the end of the bed, there was no indication anybody had been living here for the last several weeks. This was a permissible way to furnish a room, of course. I.e., sparsely. There was no law against doing so. But it left a certain impression. Brought emptiness to mind. 

I carried the thing over to the corner, where my power tools hadn’t been touched. I set it down by the window, picked up the saw, and sliced through the electric drill’s cord. Once I got past the casing, I pulled back the rubber sheath on either end and fanned out the copper wires like they were hairs on an old toothbrush. Then I plugged the drill in and sat cross-legged beside the thing, which either hadn’t woken up or was pretending to be asleep.  

Inside stuff was for Leila to handle, I knew. But no part of us had contributed to the thing’s existence. It came from the outside. I knew I had to singe it good and proper and then it would be over with, then we’d talk, Leila and I, we’d finally be able to figure out what life needed to look like if we were going to continue living it. We needed to answer that one together. I couldn’t do it on my own. 

The alcohol in the back of my throat tasted like warning-salvo pre-vomit. I ran the severed cord attached to the drill around the thing’s puny torso, looping under the arms and around the neck, across the back, over the chest. I left the frayed end protruding forwards, made an antenna of it at the mouth of the knot. Then I grabbed the other cord, the one plugged into the wall, and checked again to make sure the wires were ready. 

I flicked the switch on the socket. Felt, or maybe imagined, the wire heating up in my clenched fist. The thing awoke and blinked at me. It started to hyperventilate, its caved-in chest pulsing like a frog’s throat. I brought the copper ends closer and braced myself for the shock. 

Nothing. I flicked the switch off and on, rubbed the frayed ends together. Nothing caught. Maybe the syrupy substance coating its skin was acting like a conductor, or an anti-conductor, or whatever would prevent the current from firing. I had no idea why I thought it would work and was about to go ransack the kitchen for some gasoline and matches when I heard tyres crunching in the gravel outside. I went to the window and looked down just in time to see Maria climbing out of a cab.  

There wasn’t much in my head by then. I was all nerve endings and hydraulics. Trussed up in the electric cord, the thing was beginning to reek. Could’ve been sweat. As it watched me stride past, it made the sound of velcro continuously ripping. I pulled on my jacket and left just in time to meet her coming up the stairs. 

“Hey,” Maria said breathlessly when she saw me. “How was your night? Sorry to be so early, I just couldn’t bear to leave him.” 

Behind me, I heard Leila stirring.  

“He was great,” I told her. “I’m heading out for a drive, actually. Leila’s still up.” 

I shouldered past, hurried outside, fired up the car. Tore down the street and around the corner. I almost puked but I rolled the windows down and after a time it passed.  

I stayed away for almost a month. At first, I holed up in a motel, switched off my phone, and drank, but then I got bored of drinking and decided to get sober instead. On the fifth day, I found Leila’s Twitch channel and discovered there had been two further live streams after the first one. 

I didn’t watch them, I didn’t read the comments, but I checked back every few days. They took place regularly enough, three or four times a week, and were getting longer as the subscriber base grew exponentially. One morning, I opened the browser and found the channel had been deleted. I decided to come home.  

Leila was out and hadn’t changed the locks. I let myself in, showered, changed. Once I worked up the courage to enter it, Maria’s room turned out to be empty. There were no sheets on the bed, no blankets in the bathtub. No sign of my tools.  

Fresh spring air blowing in through the open window. The only noise was traffic. 

I was sitting at the kitchen table when she got home, much later. She came in and saw me and said, “Oh.” Instead of talking, we went to bed. 

We didn’t say anything much over the next few days. She stayed home, I went to work. No mention of Maria, the thing, the wires, the streams, where I’d been for the last three and a half weeks. One morning, I woke up and discovered she’d left. Packed her things and vanished, along with the car. I never saw her again. 

That might sound drastic, but you have to remember we weren’t married or anything, so if it was drastic, it was also easy. We were renting. The lease was in my name. So were the bills. The car was in hers. Nothing in the entire world had both of our names.