Big Bad: Stories

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ON TUESDAY, FRANKIE’S father took her two places against his better judgment. The first was to see her premature brothers at the Our Lady of Peace NICU. Three days prior, and sixty days too early, James and Jasper had slipped out of Frankie’s mother like a pair of feeble insects that doctors promptly secured under glass for observation both scientific and sacred. In the ensuing emergency, Frankie’s father, unable to locate a sitter, deposited his six-year-old daughter on the foot of his blind mother’s nursing home bed with a naked baby doll and a box of Sun-Maid raisins.

For two days, Frankie watched The Young and the Restless and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? from a vinyl recliner, eating saltines and applesauce and drinking Boost, while her grandmother’s friends leaned on walkers in the doorway, admiring her like a misplaced peacock. “She’s a prodigy,” the grandmother claimed. “She’s in first grade and can balance a checkbook. She knows all the Canadian provinces.”

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