Black-eyed Kids - creative nonfiction

Only a few days home from the hospital. A few nights? There was no knowing in mid-June, in Alaska. The Mother and Baby unit, and her room in it, had had a wall full of windows and never achieved complete darkness even with the blinds fully down. After a labor achieved under a magnesium drip, her stay in the hospital was an obscenely long weekend of bleeding, feeding, sweating, nurses manhandling her breasts and pelvis, exhaustion, frustration, irregular meds, and less-than-mediocre food. She had begged for discharge. To be discharged from the hospital, that is. Discharges were aplenty for her and the little mewling fireweed jelly that was now hers forever.

The bedroom in their overcrowded apartment had blackout curtains nailed over the windows, parted only perfunctorily for a narrow fan. This achieved, in contrast to the hospital, a perpetual near-nighttime. The air moved angrily, oscillated from the outside where temperatures “varied” from the sixties to the eighties. The little one refused to sleep in the bassinette adjacent to her half of the second-hand mattress. He fussed instead, kicking off his swaddle and gasping angrily before screaming his father awake.

She grabbed him before he could. Dad needed sleep. She pressed the tiny newborn close to her chest and watched him root for a few moments, and then helped him to her nipple, pulling back and retrying until he latched properly. The pain was instant and searing, but she weathered it, holding her breath, until it dulled enough for her to ignore it. His head was tiny compared to her milkful breast, but his skin was soft and his little ears pointed. Her mind during these waking hours was a blended concoction of love and despair, bitter weeping and tender, encouraging words, violent frustration (forcefully swallowed) and sleep-deprived philosophical hallucination. How was she doing? What did she need? You could have gotten a more accurate answer from a magic eight-ball.

In the timeless darkness, the infant’s sucking waned into a feathery flutter, and she tugged her breast away to encourage him to renew his concentration. She was rubbing his ear gently like a leather fidget and holding his bare, chilly feet in her other hand. She could make out little more than his ruddy outline against the sweaty bedding knotted around her legs. And then he opened his eyes.

In the hospital, they had been a deep violet, and she was certain, as always, that they would become chocolate brown like his father’s. In the night-vision camera for the baby monitoring app, his eyes glowed eerily white. In the light, though, they were a stony sapphire blue: a baffling color, considering his genetic progenitors.

This room, though, this perpetual nighttime, was neither the hospital nor the light, and he stared up at her with empty eyes black as the onyx on her engagement ring. Looking down into them, her anxious mind, always churning with worries, terrors, trepidations, and the occasional phobia, felt simple fear.

My black-eyed child, she thought. He is my black-eyed child. Creepypastas, wannabe urban legends, filled her snowy memory. They appeared when you were alone and tried to get you to let them in (into your home, your car). Sometimes there was one, and sometimes more. They appealed to you with their helplessness and innocence. And then they ate you.

He continued consuming her, wiggling out the gases as he pressed his tiny fists on her white chest. Yes, he was her black-eyed child – her bespoke cryptid. She held him tighter, pulling the cotton swaddle around him gingerly and smiling with love into his senseless black irises.