I had probably twenty minutes with him. He was tiny, to be sure. Somehow, even after all the eating and the sitting and the waiting for him to get fat and plucky and perfect, on that cold autumn morning, just as the sun began to crest the distant roofs, he lay there against my chest like a feather, and about the same size. My arm completely encircled him, like I could hold him in the palm of my hand, and I strained around the general commotion to hear his ever-so-faint breathing. There was almost no movement to his bare, damp chest, and I worried that I might crush him if I dared hold him too tightly. How terribly, sickly small he was.
What had I done wrong? I thought over the last nine months, flipped through the pages of days trying to piece together where it had all gone, if not to him. There had been weeks upon weeks of insatiable hunger, constantly fighting to fill the ache of that need I felt as he…grew? Had he grown? I almost wanted to ask; to stop someone, grab them by the arm and beg, “Why is he so small?” It seemed it had all been for nothing, because I could feel the weakness in his pulse as he reclined, motionless and quiet, on my breast, and I suddenly knew that I would be leaving alone. Already I could feel him slowing, his faint heartbeat growing more and more distant, his breathing becoming even softer than I would have thought possible. I could feel the heat in my face as the tears began to well and wished, screamed inside my pounding head, “Give this to him! Take it from me and give it to him! I will never want or regret or know anything but love and gratitude if you PLEASE just let him live!”
But by now, it was too late. There was no one to bargain with; no one to persuade, or to pray to. There was nothing, now; even he would be gone in some rapidly passing moments. Things began to blur. I was blinded by that veil that grief leaves: those unending tears, the heavy pain of breathing a hundred leagues beneath the surface of an ocean, drowning and clawing and screaming at nothing while everything carried on all around. I knew someone was talking to me, but I couldn’t look away from his little face. How many minutes had I had with him? Sure, maybe twenty now; but these precious few were just the last. It had been a long stretch of months without coffee, or fish, or not having any idea that I would’ve been just as well off saving myself the trouble. How could I look away now? I burned with my unwillingness to see anything but his soft, angelic little cheeks, so pallid and not nearly round enough. I traced the side of his barely-warm face with a finger, imagined I saw him clench his fist ever so slightly, and felt the outrage and horror begin to bubble up from inside me. I never wanted to look at anything else again.
Somehow, after those last twenty minutes had passed, someone took him from me. It all runs together like paint under water now. I felt myself falling, and when I didn’t move and was still just lying there, bleeding and weeping and retching over the side of the bed, I found myself thinking about all the times I’d imagined that this would be the happiest day of my life. All those dreamed smiles, fantasies of laughter, of memories to treasure for the rest of time, all evaporated and were replaced by the image of his silent face, limp against my arm. I could feel my soul go numb, and I lay there as the room bustled around me, still rushing and pulsing and working in a frenzy of solemn, downturned eyes and suddenly much gentler hands. I wished they would end me.
I couldn’t say how much time passed before I looked up to see the doctor standing over me, his hand laid softly on my shoulder. He was saying something about photos; that it might help. I nodded. I can vaguely recall my mother ushering him away, thankfully deciding to take over, and I stared out the window at the sunrise. For a long time, I just sat there not really looking at anything, waiting to wake up or die or leap out the window; but the sun just kept rising, and I didn't move. I stared into the cruel, unfeeling face of that morning fire, furious that it had no regard at all for the terrible tragedy of life, that it continued to burn and blaze as if it hadn't a care in the world. I glared blearily until I thought I might go blind, and began to curse the morning and all of its false hope. I could feel a hatred for daylight churning like a black hole in my chest and, too exhausted to sustain it, fell asleep for a while. Later, a nurse woke me up and it was time to leave.
I was a corpse when they rolled me out onto the sidewalk. Mother responded when I wouldn’t; all the questions and the sympathy wafted over me like smoke, intangible and vague. I felt like I’d forgotten speech, somehow detached myself entirely from language. What did I care about words? Everything was empty: their pitying eyes, the gentle grasps of my hands, their kind voices, all the unending, softly-spoken words. They meant nothing to me; there was nothing in my mind except his face becoming cold and still, shriveling like the bud of a flower plucked too soon from the warm earth. And in my eyes, the Sun.
It wasn’t long before I was back home, alone, in what felt like a brick tomb. The house shone with the evening rays of autumn light, but the air was stale and tepid in my lungs. I sat in the fading ambiance and shut my eyes against the marigold beams that shot tethers through my windows like radiant anchors. My mother had said something as she held me in a goodbye, ready herself to be done with tragedy and my refusal to speak, and her words rang in my ears as shadows danced across my empty face:
“Tomorrow’s another day.”
How terribly right she was. As welcome as the night came now, there would still be tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. An unyielding progression of day upon day upon day, all burning just as brightly as if nothing in the world had ever happened at all. Throughout all of human history, that blazing wheel had meant life: creation borne upon stretching corona, balls of exuberant flame personified and thrust into the universal mind of man like seeds tossed out to root. And now I wanted nothing more than to set the field ablaze, to damn the seeds whose greedy roots had choked away my thoughts of tomorrow by contemptuously reassuring me of today. I no longer desired today, or tomorrow, or anything else that the callid Sun had promised to give. I wanted there to never be another day at all.
As the creeping glim of night began to trickle across my floor, I opened my eyes to the quiet, cold face of the moon and steeled my heart against the memory of daylight’s warmth. I wandered to the bare mantle and dragged an absentminded hand across the perch of solid white, thinking of the empty picture frames that had been mercifully swept away to an unknown closet not long after my return. In some hours, the horror of the morning and all its emptiness and bloodshed would be resurrected in cathedrals of sun-soaked streets and heaven-climbing weeds. But now, the cavernous room was illuminated bone beneath gleaming maria, the occasional map-lace of cloud and tree weaving a gray damask along the walls, and I suddenly recalled a word from some forgotten and uncredited passage, which had held little meaning to me until now: proemptosis.
I gripped tightly the fragile memory of his precious face – the feathery, motionless lashes, his ever-so-purple lips, the tiny suggestions of peach fuzz along his brow – and allowed every fiber of my being to stream its full and visceral rage into my aching heart. Alone there in the dim moonglow of the empty altar, I bore my complete anguish to the deepest cogs of the universe and ruptured the silence with as much furious hatred as I had ever imagined in the whole of reality. My blood was fire, the soles of my feet vibrating as my lungs emptied into a scream that shredded my throat like so many miles of razor wire, and I could feel the house quaking. I reached deep, deep down into the abyssal pits of time and space until I felt my soul clenched like a fist around the roiling face of the Sun, and as if the ether of my thoughts were muscles, I squeezed.
Like a vice around a skull, I grasped at its white-hot eye and clenched until I felt the scoria of its skin burst through my fingers and its spewing lava stream down my knuckles, pulsing away like a molten lode of blood. I crushed its hideous, sneering face in the palm of my hand until there was nothing but the tephra at my feet and the echo of a billion billion screaming gorgons stampeding thunder through the air. When at last I had been utterly spent, I fell to the floor and wept, welcoming the silent dark as night’s long pall came to rest upon the earth. The curtains whispered fluttering paths of moth wings through the dust as my heaving breaths drew it to and fro from my carelessly drooling mouth. The air sparked electric, cold and zapping on my skin, and the silent static on which my rasping sobs fell breathed louder than lightning. There was a commotion somewhere, a rustling of reality that rippled over me like waves, and I could feel a shift.
I might have slept.
When I blinked conscious again, it was still dark. There was a roar outside: an engine turning over. I didn't look at the clock. I continued to lay there for a time, though I can't say how long, and pondered the curve of his chin; the fragile arch of his little spine, too visible beneath paper skin. Eventually I picked myself off the floor and dazedly made my way to a seat in the living room, where the moonlight was drifting blue and silver over recently dusted shelves and child-proofed outlets. Everything was cast in gray under the milky loom of lunar shadow, the room faintly illuminated by the metallic ash of a fading reflection, and I turned on the TV without thinking. Something about the hour; it being too dark. I turned it off after some brief flipping. There seemed to be a panic, but I couldn't care.
I continued to drift in and out, tears fading into sleep and dreams melting into visions. At some point, I imagined I saw my mother, her kind voice heralding hope, and planted myself in fantasy: he lulled, restless and kicking, in my arms as the silky night washed his tiny little face in cobalt and slate, a ghost conjured by grief. The twenty minutes became forty, stretched until nearly infinite, and I came to know every soft arc of his bone and flesh, tenderly bent elbows and coiled legs. Somehow, in the burgeoning twilight, I felt him reborn: an imagined heartbeat thrumming comfortingly against my cupped hands, a steady rhythm of breath sighing faint innocence across the air like wisps of sweet honeysuckle. I floated there on the current of his memory, my head resting on his quiet back, and pretended that it had all been a dream.
When I awoke again, it was still night.
The hours waxed in darkness like water through a sieve, draining out and away faster than I cared to notice. And again, sounds bloomed outside my vented windows, occasional bursts of hysteria and muffled exclamations of confusion ricocheting out of empty corners, tumbling rocks down silent cliffs. The phone rang, and I stared at a wall as it careened through my ears. I had wandered to the back door, my restless feet carrying me aimlessly through the house, and stepped out into the ink of yawning gloom. The moon was full, but hadn't moved.
“Good,” I thought, and shut my eyes to the slowly fading glow of its reflective shine. Soon, there would be no more light. I heard the upset of some interaction, a fight perhaps, somewhere in the shrouded distance, and took comfort in its unhappiness. Eventually I was inside again, and the white noise of dread beyond my doors steadily grew louder as the earth awoke in shadow. I allowed the agonizing voices to wash powerless fear over me, hopelessness dinning desperate wails on deaf ears, and embraced the cold emptiness I'd given to the world.
And dawn did not come. As the minutes became days and the days became weeks, I strayed into a dream, the eternal night cradling me in a fantasy of sweet-smelling hands and softly kicking feet. He smiled at me, and for twenty or so minutes, we laughed there in the syrupy moonlight, his face all aglow under the soft wash of white. I live here now, with his perfect memory traipsing through billowing clouds of ambient lamplight, the moon dwindling ever so slowly into the silent background of space.
And dawn will not come.
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