Necessary Bodies

Excerpt

Management didn’t remove the glass bottles, burger wrappers, used condoms, or cigarette butts—they just dyed the water blue, a kind of golf-course aquamarine Billie had to squint and step closer to make sure of as it frothed from the fountain that ran from nine to nine. Even standing there a few minutes, she couldn’t tell if the hue was only a trick of light. The women in the front office were dreadful, a sneering bunch who had lost their charm as soon as she and Liam signed the lease, so she stopped the first maintenance guy she saw as she crossed the parking lot, one with whom she was on nodding terms. It was an easy relationship that required no names. She said, “Did y’all color the pond?”

“Looks good, right?” he said cheerfully, his white-white teeth flashing in the sun as he hauled cardboard boxes into the back of his utility vehicle. “You can’t even tell it’s not real.”

“Mmm,” Billie said, inclining her car keys towards him. About as real as those veneers, she wanted to say. Everyone knew Jacksonville water to be mostly brown. Moss swayed lightly from the oaks, suggesting breeze, but if there was one, it was a dead wind and even the sidewalk seemed to sweat. A heron ducked its gray head under the ripples, plucking something up and swallowing it—a small fish or maybe a piece of plastic, confused by its glint.

Dantiel W. Moniz

Dantiel W. Moniz is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award by the Key West Literary Seminar, and a Tin House Scholarship. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Tin House, American Short Fiction, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Milk Blood Heat, arrives February 2021.

Patrick Ryan on “Necessary Bodies”

Billie, the main character in Dantiel W. Moniz’s story “Necessary Bodies,” has a secret: she’s pregnant. This is primarily a secret she’s keeping from her mother, Colette, who’s about to turn fifty, has two grown children, and—so far—no grandchildren. To Colette’s thinking, if one can make babies, one should make babies.

But to Billie’s thinking, a prospective parent should ask herself some very important questions before bringing a child into the world, one of which is, Will I be a good parent?

That alone makes “Necessary Bodies” a bold and challenging story, because while most everyone hopes they would rise to the occasion of child-rearing if presented with it, not everyone does. (If everyone did, think of all the great novels sprung from unhappy childhoods we’d be deprived of.) Dantiel W. Moniz says in our Q&A that she’s a writer who doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable or undesirable feelings, and the result of that is writing that feels refreshingly—and comfortably—real. This story, our last in a very rocky and challenging year, is a pre-pandemic joy to read. I’m delighted to introduce you to it and to this dynamic, emerging author.