* Author : Tina Connolly

* Narrator : Julie Hoverson

* Host : Summer Fletcher

* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh

*

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Previously published by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Sept/Oct 2017.

Rated PG-13.

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The Two-Choice Foxtrot of Chapham County

By Tina Connolly

There were two things we girls all knew that summer.

One, that Tony Latham had turned into the finest drink of water ever to strut this two-bit one-horse no-account town.

And two, that Suzie Appleby was gonna have a stone-baby.

Suzie never was one for chasing the boys, that was the funny thing. She told me later she’d been sent to get a packet of tobacco for her da at the general store. And there was Tony, sorting out the threepenny nails from the fourpenny screws, and their eyes met over the hogshead fulla metal and that was that.

There’s only two choices if you’re gonna have a stone-baby, a course.

The first one, and best one, is you get the daddy to marry you, and if you’re quick enough, you can catch most of it in time. Sure, the baby’s born with a little flint toe, or a patcha marble back of her left elbow, but that ain’t too uncommon in this town. Mildred Percy’s got a whole swatch of granite on her skull, where the hair don’t grow. She combs it over and we pretend we don’t notice. Our fathers maybe give Mildred’s mother an extra wink in the grocery store, and we pretend we don’t notice that too.

You get good at pretending things here, and we got real good that summer.

Because, thing was, Tony Latham knew he’d turned into the finest drink of water, et cetera.

And he didn’t have no interest in tying himself down to poor Suzie Appleby.

The hot summer rolled on, the air heavy and wet. The boys worked in the fields and swam in the watering hole on their days off. We girls picked the gooseberries from the thorny bushes nearby, our arms scratched through our tight sleeves, and tried not to watch the boys dive into the cold, enticing depths.

We jammed the berries and put up the plums and we watched poor Suzie get hotter and heavier day by day, weighed down by her stone-baby. And finally her da came home from the haying, and he saw it too.

There are two things a parent can do when they find out their daughter’s rocked up.

One, you go hunt down the stone-daddy and you make him marry your daughter, and that right quick.

Suzie’s father chose the other way.

I guess I’d been nicer to Suzie than I oughta be, cause when he turned her out, she came to me. It was thundering, too, lightning fit to crack the skies, and Suzie all drenched, the cotton wrap she’d let out twice clinging to her rock-hard belly.

There are two choices for a girl in my situation.

One, ask her in, and have my da turn me out, too.

Two, turn Suzie away, and go back to embroidering pillowcases that say His and Hers in real fancy writing.

But I looked at Suzie’s eyes and I listened to that rain and somehow...

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