The Child (A story)

The child was dying - yes, there was no question about it! She could see it written as clearly on his face as the boldface letters on the antipyretic syrup bottle at his bedside. The bed itself was large, the bedspread blue with tiny white flowers arranged neatly in rows. There were two kinds of flowers - one, an odd, three petaled rose, and the other, some kind of tulip with berries hanging underneath. The rose also had symmetrical tendrils on its foreshortened stem. She often wondered why the artist had not the sense to add a few grape-leaves as well.
She wondered a lot - ever since she could remember. Patterns - that's what she always looked for - and symmetry. It felt so nice when things all of a sudden and without the least warning would fall in accordance with some notion she'd always had. And the child, her child - he'd caught it, too. She could see him - so young, standing at the door with a faraway look on his face. And when she'd go and ask him what was on his mind, he'd just shrug it off with a 'oh, nothing!' and resume that silly little game of his which involved hopping from one tile to the next but one, which could keep him enthralled for hours on end. And she - she'd all of a sudden feel so small, so weary, as if she'd failed him - as if it were her fault that she could not understand, could not be a part of him. And now it would soon be a thing of the past.
She looked at the bedspread - the divine blue! How wonderfully well could a thing so meagre as a bedspread elevate the mood of the entire room! Her obsession with the colour blue had often made her the butt of jokes amid the entire family in the past, but she'd made them eat their words with the way she'd decorated her little home. Yes, her tiny abode of love! This was the one thing she allowed herself to be proud of, and this was one ground on which the mother and the son were truly as one. The walls, the floor - everything was blue. Except for the ceiling, which was white - reflects light better, the masons had said.
She looked at the moon through the clear glass window. A pink moon! The child used to say so, and she'd laughed saying the moon was silver, or red at best. But now she could see it clearly, too - see what he'd meant. She rose a little, and turned off the light. Then she got up and opened all the windows one by one. Ah, the cool night breeze! The room had that musty smell that she knew so well - the smell of fever. She always formed in her mind one-one correspondences between certain odours and situations - the smell of squeaky clean plastics for birthdays, and the smell of rubber balloons for the baby. Funny, the last one, but she often would take his little hand between hers when he was sleeping and sniff at it, and the first thing that sprang to her mind was a bright, red, new balloon!
The child was sleeping - comatose, in fact. The hospital he'd been at had discharged him two days ago - said there was nothing more they could do about it. She wondered why she wasn't very, very sad - why she, who loved her baby more than any mother on earth, staunchly refused to shed tears when she knew that he'd be gone forever, that nothing she could do would bring him back. One lesson that life had taught her was that love, in her superlative form, rarely made you very sad. She remembered how, as a child her cruel brother had wrung the neck of her favourite doll and how she'd flooded her bolster with tears. But it was frivolous, superficial love, that. This was different.
She touched his hair - gently at first, as if afraid that the slightest touch could spoil the beauty of the moment and alter the picture of him that she'd formed in her mind forever. His hair - she could wonder on that for hours! It wasn't straight and it wasn't curly - it was simply funny hair. And yes, black - black as a raven. Slowly, she buried her entire face in that hair. But suddenly, as if bitten by a snake, she withdrew. What if he'd wake up? The he'd open those marvelous eyes of his! What would she not give to erase the memory of those eyes - those unbelievable coal black pinpoints of light that could see the walls behind her when they'd look at her. Often did it happen that he'd look at her, at something she'd said, and she'd felt her legs give away from beneath her. Please, whatever you do, do not open your eyes - she heard herself saying over and over again. When she'd talked to him, she'd rarely look straight at him, always trying to keep him in the profile and him looking in the distance. He rarely looked at things quite the way others did. Others' line of sight would be aimed directly at the thing in front of them and end there; his would pass right through all the way to infinity! She found that she was beginning to capitalise the 'h-s' in the 'hes' and crossed herself to overcome the feeling. She then closed her eyes.
When she opened them again a good five minutes later, she thought she could view the room from a slightly different angle, and all the more clearly - like a bird's eye view. The child was no longer the centre, other creatures had sprung up. The life support equipment, with all its twisted, serpentine coils and indicators - she wondered how she'd missed it all the while. It seemed to engulf her, close in on her from all sides. And she, a prisoner - alone, with the half-dead child. And she felt something else - joy - a gentle titillating of the skin at first that gave her the goose pimples, and then a full blown tidal wave of happiness that swept her off her chair and carried her over to the window. At that instant, she knew- knew why she was here, and why she could not lose this battle - that nothing they'd do could take the child away from her. It was because without her, the child never did have an existence. There really was no child. It was all a dream, the whole thing! She was the child and the mother, all at the same time. The sweet scent of the night - she wondered how long it would last. She gazed unto the heavens - the high heavens and looked at the moon once again. It looked bigger somehow, huge, in fact, and seemed to take up half the sky! She allowed a smile to form on her lips that quickly turned into a giggle, and very soon metamorphosed into a screaming, high pitched laughter that shook the earth. Now she was no longer the mother, but the child alone. It was as if it was not the child but the mother who'd died. She knew that instant that if she were to remain within those four walls another minute, something, somewhere would surely snap. She swung open the door and bounded down the stairs - two steps at a time, religiously placing her foot on the next but one. And she was out of the house in a flash, on the green dew-wet grass. And there she danced - danced without a care, all alone in her young body with the full moon shining bright above.

Yours sincerely
Jude