Storage Unit

Gigi tossed the key up with her right hand and caught it with her left. She kept throwing it into the air and snatching it out of the air all the way from the car to the storage unit. The three women had to make three trips because they kept getting lost, kept needing to back track, kept needing to count their way back to their new unit, their professor's last gift to them.

Once they found it, Angela snatched the key from the air and away from Gigi, who pouted, briefly, before shifting her weight back and forth from foot to foot and sighing loudly while Angela struggled with the padlock. Finally, Joely took over and with one quick twist, the lock clicked and popped off the handle. All three women took a step back. Angela looked at Gigi. Joely looked at Angela.

"Go ahead," Joely and Angela said in unison. Gigi shook her head, and the three women stood in silence.

"Okay," Gigi said. She wrapped her fingers around the handle and pulled the garage door up. Angela took the flashlights from her pockets and gave one to each girl.

"Close the door behind us," Angela said. Gigi pulled the door back down, and the girls directed the light onto the contents of the unit.

Mostly, they saw boxes. But, in one corner, behind a collection of books stacked as tall as Joely and wide as a Buick, was a peculiar assortment of furniture. A little end table sat beside a rocking chair. Beside the rocking chair was a bassinet covered in white with a fancy, frilly ruffle adorning the canopy. An old oil lamp and an antique tin of talcum powder sat on the end table. The bassinet was filled with stuffed animals, which Gigi started to pick up and examine.

"I wonder if these were her's as a child," she said.

"You can keep them," Angela said.

"What if I don't want them?" Gigi asked.

"We'll take them to the Goodwill," Joely said. She sat down in the rocking chair and pushed back. She let herself fall into the rhythm of the rocker: back and forward, back and forward.

"I'll take the chair," she said.

"What about the bassinet?" Angela asked. Both she and Joely already had babies who were well past the baby furniture age. She didn't think Gigi would ever have children, but she might want to keep the animals in the same place their professor did. Angela studies the bassinet from behind Joely in the rocking chair. She only looked up when Gigi gasped.

Gigi dropped the animals in her hands. She stepped back into the wall of books, which collapsed immediately upon contact. She jumped. She let out a little scream.

"What the Hell?" Joely said and stepped forward to look inside the bassinet. She gasped, too, and turned to look at Angela.

Angela made her way over slowly. When she glanced down, she saw a dark figure, maybe a stuffed animal. She took a deep breath and looked down again. She thought she was looking at a rodent or a taxidermy item. It looked like it might possibly be a reptile. She shrugged and looked up at Joely and Gigi, who were standing across from her, the canopy separating them. Joely and Gigi both directed the beams of light from their flashlights onto the figure in the bassinet. When Angela looked down again, the figure became clear.

It was a dead baby.

It was a human infant, and it was mummified. It's skin was dark and dry, although no one touched at that moment to determine whether or not it was fragile and paper-like or hardy and leather-ish.

"It's a dead baby," Angela said.

"A dead baby?" Joely asked.

"A dead baby," Gigi stated.

The three women stood still, surrounded by the fallen books, silenced by the scene in front of them. Each worked hard on the explanations they were about to share. They rushed to come up with something that made sense, that sounded like something their professor would have done, that fit the behavior of the woman who left three former students a storage unit where she kept a dead baby.