Michael Foody

He was born gasping and blue grey and his eyes slammed shut. The ultrasound showed only a healthy baby, ordinarily reptilian, but, freshly hatched; he was drowning in the atmosphere.

His mother was crying already. Exhausted with stray hairs plastered to her forehead with dried sweat. She looked at him and rasped for help. The father looked on and expected to feel something, love or duty, besides sadness. A weight. The nurse called for a doctor. The father squeezed his wife’s hand, a pulse, a message in a new Morse code. A lie that things would be all right. A deceitful smile. She whispered to him a word that sounded like “please” but could have been something else.

X-rays illuminated the situation. A hole. Not a complete puncture exactly. A small structural defect in the child’s heart a section of muscle so thin that blood could, with enough pressure, permeate it completely. Soak through him like a dish rag. The calipers held against the fluorescent lit monochrome map of the child’s chest said it was 22 millimeters in diameter.

For almost nine months he was kept in an incubator with rubber gloves in the walls while the doctors, the nurses, the parents, waited for him to be carried away by ghosts. His mother would reach in through those rubber gloves and tickle him with the softness of a moth’s wings. Sometimes so delicate was her touch that the rubber prevented her from realizing she wasn’t actually touching her child at all, her finger tips hovering; a tremor above his skin.

They read to the child. They told him stories. They wondered to him aloud. The child was a confessor. He would hear their sins, their fears, he would listen, turning his head toward the sound or not, listening without judgment, placid or delighted, or miserable, but detached from their monologues. He wouldn’t issue penance. Instead he was a battery for their pain. He would store it in himself for a time when it should be called upon. He would quiver sickly with its potential. He was naked but unembarrassed. He would drift in and out of sleep constantly. His arms and legs would twitch as though he was having dreams of running. Dreams of living in the world. He could scarcely lift his head upon waking.

As far as size, mass and measure, the child grew normally. And they moved him to larger and larger incubators like he was a plant in need of re-potting. During his brief transfers from jar to jar he was exposed to the air we all breathe instead of his temperamental bespoke blend and he would smile and take it in with his eyes closed. Like a poet encountering the ocean mist. He would flick his tongue at the air like a curious snake.

He didn’t die and he kept not dying. And eventually he was brought home, or something like we think of as a home and he lived and kept not dying and it was called a miracle. He kept not dying and he learned to speak on time, his first word, in a feat of uncontested diplomacy, was parents, and walk only a little later than children who never lived in jars and he was cautioned against running or jumping or rough housing. When he took his first steps his father holding his little hands above his head as though the child was a trapeze his mother wept smiling into her hands and clawed a bit at her own eyes tearing at the tears like they were a veil. She wanted to pray to god but she had grown cagey from heartbreak and felt of thanks as a preamble to this belated gift’s repossession. Still part of her sang. And she did pray in a fashion just not to god. She prayed to the boy.

As he grew and wondered and spoke his parents grew necessarily less vigilant, their worry retreating as a barrier island moves by the patient depositing and withdrawal of sand. He had already lapped his ordained life time many times over like the lyrics of a round and so all time being borrowed it was to be spent increasingly freely. That he fell in love young was not terribly surprising. 

She was a plump girl who laughed easily and called him by his first and last name in a sort of patronizing manor that was comfortingly maternal. When I say plump I don’t mean fat. Just plump. She was pink cheeked and long haired and had a nose that, while big, only looked big from the side. She was in her way lovely and his love for her was perfect and generous and untroubled by the fact that he was more handsome than she was beautiful or the fact that she was likely to be made a widow before he had the chance to memorize her.

He grew a beard for the wedding. His bride to be protested a bit but then concocted a story in her head about how the beard was somehow a proud act of defiance against the currents of destiny which were supposed to carry him from womb to grave with the alacrity of the fingers of a magician. She didn’t use those fancy words in the story. Those are just for you dear reader. Her parents paid extra for a little groom with a beard to join her daughters doll a top the cake. They danced together slowly and clumsily though no one at the wedding noticed. Her head on his shoulder and his head on hers. Sleepily swaying with their eyes closed. The scent of each other alive in their minds. They both listened for heartbeats. She was surprised how perfect his sounded. A metronome.

The guests felt something at the wedding. A peace. A calm. A stillness. It was in truth not so much a something as a nothing. An absence of noise, of light, of distraction, even of thought, so powerful was this absence that it was only after they went home that they decided it was true love, a cure to the placebo of what they thought of as love before. The magic love that turns frogs into princes and wakes sleeping princesses. The groom’s hands felt as though they were pricked by pins in his every pour he felt a tingle of a mild electric shock, the taste of copper. He felt a vacuum behind his eyes. And he smiled through it because it was best.

He had a child of his own. His wife was terrified upon discovering her pregnancy. She kept it secret and was troubled by dreams of the baby inheriting the debt that his father had successfully shirked. She woke sweating and shook him awake. She whispered in his ear that she was pregnant. She was haunted no more by the specter of her child’s fate. Not even the ordinary worries of a mother. She tapped on the stomach like it was the glass of an aquarium filled with colorful fish. Upon his waking he didn’t remember what she had said to him. It was only days later that he was again told about his impending offspring. It was a girl and she was born and she was beautiful. And he held her and he smiled at her and she felt hot to the touch, like a stove not a fever, but he didn’t drop her or look panicked, he just held on to her because he had grown used to these feelings.

It was a Thursday when he died. He had to work late and driving home he stopped to fill up his tank. It was late and he went inside to pay. The bells on the door twinkled as he entered and a man in front of the counter turned to him and fired one shot. The bullet found his chest. He sank to his knees and the crawled to his back then giggled then died. An autopsy revealed that the bullet was lodged in the dilapidated wall of his heart.

He was cremated and the smoke rose into the clouds and fell again as rain and people looked out there windows at the storm and were unwell and closed their eyes and saw pictures of snakes and spiders and smelled rot in their noses and felt a tickle in their throats and tears in their eyes and they learned things that they would rather have not known and they slept when they weren’t tired and dreamed of their children and the ghosts that would carry them off.