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The infant's wails echo through the trailer, his cries
knives that dig deep into her skull and bury themselves there. She wishes sometimes – all the time – that she could escape it, but doesn't think there's a hole deep enough to crawl into where she won't hear his voice in her bones. Feel his small hands clutching at her. Constantly seeking a breast. Her nipples hurt so badly that she often shies away from his greedy mouth. How can something so small need so much? Motherhood is supposed to be beautiful. Sacred, even. But, last night Edward woke her up for the sixth time to eat, then threw everything back up on her. She sobbed when he latched on to nurse again, little belly empty once more.
In the dark, it is impossible to ignore the stink of acrid vomit and breast milk. Of unwashed skin. At some point, the baby pisses his diaper even as his hands paint her chest in his spit-up. Every time he touches her, she is sure his stink and filth will sink into her heart and turn her insides just as rancid as his. For a moment, her hands hover over him, fingers flexing until her skin is too tight on her bones.
Parasite.
She hisses it into his hair, staring at the open door of his nursery and imagining what would happen if she threw him to the ground and ran and ran and just kept running. So far away that she can't feel her bones any longer, let alone the infant wails that seem to live within them now instead of marrow.
Hollowed out.
She is hollowed out.
She is hollowed out, but he is hungry.
He is hungry.
So, he feeds, and she is scraped raw, and 'Ain't that a bitch' as her granny used to say? Ain't that just a son of a bitch?
And it is. It really, really, is. But God forbid she cry. God forbid she rip her hair out from the scalp. It's a woman's job to raise the children, ya know? A woman's job to clean the house and cook the food, and silence the screaming because if hubby is mad, then fists fly and where will she go with a broken nose and a busted lip and a newborn that's always crying loud enough to shatter what remains of his poor mamma like glass?
That was yesterday night.
Tonight…tonight Eddie's hands are small and cool against her face.
He smells like breast milk and the mashed sweet potatoes from dinner. For twenty minutes, he sits in his highchair gnawing on his little blue spoon, saliva dribbling down his chin. Whatever he doesn't finish is smeared onto the white tray where the rest of his food has migrated beyond the confines of his plate.
It is messy. His daddy doesn't much like mess. Hell, he doesn't much like Eddie. Even now, hours later (days?) she can clearly recall the look on his face as he stared across the table at their infant, his eyes glazing with every swig of his beer. It is the same look he wears when he is hunting. His fingers flexed around the bottle's neck, and without meaning to, she thinks about the way he aims his rifle with such precision you'd never guess that any other day he is just a drunk with a drunk's shaky grip.
For a moment, she can't breathe at the memory. The violence of it steals her breath, you see. But she presses her nose against the curve of Edward's small neck and little shoulder, and finds her lungs hidden there. Sometimes, she does not mind it so much. This hollowed-out feeling. This broken feeling.
There isn't much left of her anyway.
Eddie can have the rest.
….only…only, what's left exactly?
Not much.
Not enough.
Certainly nothing he will want.
She is less of a mother now and more of a snapshot of moments she doubts are real.
She is the taste of salt from the sweat on her upper lip as she races through the woods behind the trailer park. She is the tremor of her hands as she hugs his body close. Her cold palms when she presses them against her eyes and screams.
She is the scream itself.
A warning no one hears.
If they do, she is easy enough to ignore. Her memory tells her that she should have let her husband kill her. Death would be kinder than the scenes that play out over and over again in her mind. Her baby's sightless eyes. The knowing that it was all her fault. The figure in the dark, rising, horned, and hungry from the swamp. So tall the Spanish moss clings to its sides like desperate, trailing fingers. Like siren's eager to drag him back into the dark. His feet are so big that when summoned, that is all of him she sees. His upper body bleeds into the night sky. She knows him only by the stars he has extinguished, the cosmos lying dead in his wake.
But memory is not terror. Instead, memory is a grief never-ending. The only thing worth fearing. A thing without end. Memory is the dead baby lying on the edge of the swamp like an offering upon a dirty altar. Madness is the dead God who sheds his own skin to wear that of the babe, even as the ground opens up beneath a tiny corpse and pulls him beneath the muck and grime.
The darkest of embraces.
His second mother coming to claim him. Her brown arms as sweet as if she had been the one to birth him new and bloody into the world from the start. As if she had been carrying him in her womb all along, and death was simply another way of beginning. In that breath, that moment of exhaling earth and a grave newly dug, God and Boy become one. Become whole. And the child that trudges across the still mirror of the swamp is naked and unblinking, a miasma of light that burns all it touches.
All except her.
An angel.
A mistake
Like Christ re-risen from the dead!
I've made a mistake
"Who are you?"
What are you?
But she dare not speak the words aloud.
"For now, I am Edward." His eyes are not human. He has not worn the mask long enough yet to hide the truth, and the skin of his face shifts like there are worms writhing beneath. A blight upon his beauty. Or perhaps the beauty itself is the blight, the rot, the poison. She no longer knows. "But you can call me Eddie."
She shakes her head, denial ripe on her tongue.
"You're too big to be my Eddie," and before the words are fully out of her mouth, he presses close, folding into her, folding into himself, shrinking until the little boy is a baby again. Her baby. Her Eddie. Alive and well, just the way he was always meant to be. She sobs, hugging him tight, marveling at the unmarred flesh of his temple where before there had only been an echo of violence; a hole too deep to fill.
To think, just a few minutes ago he'd stunk of blood and shit, and now here he was again. All better. All better. All better. She presses a kiss against his little eyes, and Eddie gurgles, pleased, fingers tangling in her hair.
That was yesterday.
Or was it tonight?
Is it now?
She can't remember.
Not that it matters.
Eddie is alive.
Alive!
What more could a tired momma ask for?