We are excited to announce the winner of the December 2024 Chattanooga Writers’ Guild Monthly Contest is James L. Brumbaugh with the submission “How to Spot Postpartum Depression in Men: Or, Mr. Lemonhead, My First Toy” and runner-up is Cynthia Robinson Young with the submission “Marilyn – A Christmas Story.” This month’s non-fiction category was “Toy(s),” judged by Sherry Poff.
How to Spot Postpartum Depression in Men: Or, Mr. Lemonhead, My First Toy
Step One: You get a package out of the mailbox from your mother. Brown cardboard, reused from an Amazon order she’d received. Too much clear tape strapped all around it. You bring it inside and cut it open. Baby clothes, tiny socks that fit in the palm of your hand. Onesies and pajamas for the three month old your wife holds in her arms. The baby is asleep. You must be quiet when the baby is asleep. Inside the box, there are also pictures, pictures of you as a child. Baseball pictures from little league, pictures from Christmases, from your birthdays. You can’t tell how old you are in the photos. You know it’s you, but it seems alien. You don’t remember yourself looking like this, a chunky kid with a bowl cut. But that little kid has your eyes, deep blue, one a little wonky, just a little bit, you have to look closely to notice. There’s also a toy, a lemon with arms and legs and a face. Mr. Lemonhead is his name. Your first toy, or the first toy you remember.
Step Two: You show Mr. Lemonhead to your wife, explain who he is. You show her the pictures too. She tells you how much your baby looks like you. The spitting image, a mirror image, she says something like that but you’re not really listening, not listening closely enough. You’re looking at Mr. Lemonhead, imagining the boy in those photographs carrying him around. You know that you carried him everywhere but can’t remember where you’d went. But you know Mr. Lemonhead was there.
Step Three: You tell your wife that you’re sad. That these photos, this stuffed toy, makes you sad. She asks why, but you can’t explain it. Words have left you, and whenever you’re without your words you feel hollow. Your internal furniture is all built of words, and without them you’re an empty house. You leave your wife, you go to the bathroom and sit on the toilet, cradle your face in your hands and try to stifle your sobs. Remember, you must not wake the baby.
Step Four: You rock your baby to sleep in the white rocker that sits inside her room. The room is pink but in the darkness you can’t tell. Her eyes slowly close, and then they open quickly, then close slowly, then open quickly. You love to watch her fall asleep. When her eyes are closed for good you lay her in her crib and creep out into the living room. Everything is silent. Your wife, the dogs, the baby, all asleep. You must be quiet. You must not wake your family. Mr. Lemonhead sits on the dining room table and looks at you. Old friends reunited, but life has made you drift apart. You two are strangers now. Your life is a Rubik’s cube, all the colors are jumbled up. You’ve never been able to solve them, never were one much for puzzles. Your life is a secret. You don’t know the kid you were anymore. You wish Mr. Lemonhead could tell you about him.
Step Five: You go to the kitchen, to the knife block. You pull a serrated blade from its little holder and you hold it against your skin and you wonder if it would make you feel better to bleed. You wonder how your blood would look in the dark. Would it shine? You leave the knife on the counter and go to sleep.
Step Six: You blow off work. You just sit in your cubicle and hide your face, try to swallow your tears. You text your wife and tell her that you feel sorry for the kid in those photographs. You don’t feel sorry for yourself, you’re doing alright. Married, a beautiful baby, a home owner, a job that pays the bills, what’s there to feel sorry for? But you feel sorry for that kid. She asks you why and you can’t tell her. That’s as far as you’ve gotten. You sit there and let work whizz by you and you think about the knives in the kitchen and wonder how they would feel.
Step Seven: Christmas is here. Your daughter is too little to understand presents, but she understands ripping up paper. Family tramps in and out of your home. They are here to see the baby. Having a baby makes you anonymous in your own home, makes you a secondary object. You don’t mind, in these moments you appreciate your invisibility. You have a pain in your side, a pain in your bladder. Your wife tells you that it’s because you don’t drink water, you’ve been downing coffee by the gallon. You believe her, but having a solution and implementing it aren’t the same thing. The warmth of coffee iscomforts you, the bitterness. Your mother gave you a bag of coffee with chicory and it reminds you of home, of the home you had and left behind.
Step Eight: On Christmas night you think about the Christ child. Everyone is asleep except for you. You’re watching your baby snooze. She has these cute little snores. You wish you never had to sleep so you could watch her snore all night, but you’re exhausted. But you can’t help but think about the Christ child. Early Christians believed he was born in a cave, not the barn that people imagine today. You’ve learned that there were probably not even barns in first century Bethlehem, that the people were too poor to have enough livestock to put inside a barn. You imagine Mary and Joseph holding their little child in a cave. All the hopes of the world pinned on this squealing little baby boy. You realize that every child, every single baby, is Christ reborn into this world. All of Mary and Joseph’s, and the world’s, hopes lived inside their baby. All your hopes, your wife’s hopes too presumably, and perhaps the world’s one day, who knows, lie in the snoozing little bean that you watch toss and turn in the night. You were once that baby, that Christ child, for your mother and your father. Perhaps that’s why you’re sad. All the hopes of the world end at the cross. The story of Christmas ends in betrayal, in Christ taking up his cross, in bleeding wounds. The little Christmas baby, good tidings of great joy, ends with a mother’s tears before the cross. People don’t get resurrected, in your experience.
Step Nine: You throw Mr. Lemonhead in the trash. You don’t want to see him anymore, you don’t want to be reminded of your past. Something happened to the boy in those photos and you don’t want to know what. People are at their best when they’re like sharks, always swimming forward.
Step Ten: You grab a knife with a serrated blade and let it sink into your arm. A great tension is released, a slackening. You didn’t know that you could feel so relieved. You try and say a little prayer. Words disappear but the feeling is there, and presumably Christ will be able to interpret it.
Step Eleven: You start wearing long sleeve shirts, and you never take them off.
James Brumbaugh is a local author. He can squat 315 pounds and loves the New Orleans Saints.
MARILYN: A Christmas Story
I hope I never forget the night I met Marilyn. It was Christmas evening, and late when my father arrived, long after Santa Claus had come and gone, and all the presents had been opened earlier that morning, in what already seemed long ago. But like the gospel song says, “God may not come when you want him, but He’s right on time!”
That’s how my father was…like a god to me– perfect in every way. Dark accounts that conflicted with that image washed over my mind like the summer waves at Coney Island, replaced by peaceful memories, like me standing in the water with him as he lifted me up and over the big waves. Nothing could knock him over.
Marilyn arrived that Christmas night in a long cardboard box. When my father came into the house with it, my mother glared at him as she led him to the dining room table—the only place a box that large would fit if he wasn’t going to put it on the floor. My father showing up was already an event in itself. Bringing me a gift this big (and probably too expensive for him to afford) was worth the household gathering into the dining room to witness what was contained in this huge box. That meant my mother, my sister, my grandmother, who moved in with us after my parents separated, my uncle and his family who lived in the duplex upstairs, along with his wife’s sister’s family of four. Everyone gathered from all corners of the house. My father coming through in such an extravagant way was something the adults wanted to see.
There was a hush as I approached the huge box with a plastic window that revealed what was inside. It looked like a person lying in a casket, her eyes shut tight. I just wanted to stare at her perfect face, to leave her on the table boxed up and perfect. But my mother said “Open up the box! Don’t just stare at it! It’s yours! You can open up the box!” It was not what I wanted to do, but since it was what everyone else wanted, I lifted the lid carefully, so as not to disturb her. I don’t remember how she got out, but somehow she was suddenly standing next to me, a little brown doll, three feet tall.
Marilyn’s hair was in a hair net, like the ones my grandmother put on the women after she did their hair in her beauty salon. Her eyes weren’t blue like the other dolls I owned. And they weren’t brown like mine. They were orange. Her lips weren’t big like mine, they were small and equal on the top and bottom, red, not pink or brown. Days and months later, I would spend hours and hours running my fingers over her entire body, noting the fine detail, from her curved fingers and muscled arms to the dimples in her lower back. But right then, with everyone watching, I just stared at her, not quite believing she was mine.
“Merry Christmas, baby!” my father said. “Do you like her?” He looked so proud of his gift. My mother asked me the same question, though it felt like it was for a different reason. I knew I wasn’t responding the way they wanted me to. I was never good at expressing my emotions, but I think both of them knew how much I loved this doll. “Her name is Marilyn,” Daddy said. “That’s what the box says.” So “Marilyn” is what I called her from that moment on.
~
Marilyn was my Christmas gift when I was eight years old. In February, I turned nine. In March, my father died, his death, tragic and unexpectant. It was the only gift I remember ever receiving from him. Even then I could tell that the gift of this doll was a sacrifice. I don’t remember knowing anyone else who had a Patti Playpal doll, never mind a Black one. I received her during a time that not many Black dolls were being produced. African American girls didn’t want dolls that looked like them. They wanted white dolls with blonde hair cascading down their backs and blue eyes. So what I received for my birthday was a rare gift in so many ways.
Marilyn stood in the corner of my bedroom until I said good bye to her and went away to college ten years later. She was there when I returned for breaks. She was there when I got married and left her in the overheated apartment in New Jersey that made her body crack and her arms fall out of their sockets and caused her head hang to the side as the plastic reacted to the high heat my grandmother needed to ease her arthritis. We were reunited when my mother flew her out to California to finally live with me again.
Marilyn was there throughout my growing up years. I didn’t have a problem with talking to dolls that didn’t talk back audibly. She was a great listener, and always had the same encouraging, gentle smile on her face. I believed that if I looked deeply into her orange eyes, I could hear her thoughts. And even though I had a vivid imagination and was afraid of many things like ghosts, boogey men, vampires, and clowns, I was never afraid of Marilyn (even though there were times that I had to turn her around to face the wall when I was particularly freaked out after a scary movie!).
But, because of Marilyn, my children grew up with a fear of dolls. They said she stared at them when they came into my room, and swore she followed them with her orange eyes. They claimed she stood at the top of the stairs waiting for them. It doesn’t help their belief in her supernatural powers that Marilyn has aged alongside me. As my body started aching, hers started falling apart—literally! When my hair started thinning, her hair started thinning and falling out in the exact same places! I think it’s rude to tell a woman’s age, but Marilyn could join AARP. She will never be eligible for social security, but I’ll take care of her until I die. She’s been in the doll hospital, and she came out looking great for a while until she started falling apart again. At her age, hospitals can only do so much!
My grandkids have never seen a doll the same size as them, so some think she’s real and won’t go near her, while the others want to see if they can poke her eyes out. I protect Marilyn. At her, she would not be able to handle their pokes, or their attempt to swing the arms that will fall off into their hands.
So, Marilyn just stands in the corner of my office. She waits for me to dust her face off, or pick her arm up from the floor and put it back in the socket. She still wears that winning Mona Lisa smile, and reminds me that, of all the people in my life right now, she’s the only one who remembers my father and the love he had for his baby girl. So much love that he spent his time and money to get me a rare gift that reflects me. She’s a lasting reminder to me that loving what I look like, and who I am really is the best gift I could ever receive.
Cynthia Robinson Young lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in journals and magazines including The Writer’s Chronicle, Freedom Fiction, and Rigorous. An excerpt from her novel in progress entitled “Why Mama Mae Believed in Magic” is included in the anthology, Dreams for a Broken World (Essential Dreams Press, 2022). To see more about her, visit her author website: cynthiarobinsonyoung.com
The Monthly Contests rotate through a pattern of Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction throughout the year, with a new theme each month. Go to the 2024 Monthly Contest Series Info page to view the genre and theme for each month.
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