for Judith
The baby would not stop crying. It would not stop lighting up the room with its eyes. It was midnight. Then it was morning. Then it was 2 am. Someone left the refrigerator door open and the milk spoiled. The baby cried until it got picked up. As soon as it was put down, it started crying again. The earth paused. There was no one in the house. The baby cried not because it was hungry but because it felt some inconsistency among the shadows of its room. The tropical fish mobile above it turned to the translucent notes of a short song. This did not stop its crying, because there was no sea to swim in. Once upon a time there was a warm ocean that did not permit the entry of light. The baby wasn’t crying then. But now it is. There are no televisions in the house, nor are there any phones. The dishes remain neatly stacked in the cabinets above the sink. In some places, the crying is muffled. In others, it feels as sharp as broken glass. It’s late fall and the trees have dropped most of their leaves. The ground is a patchwork of yellows and reds and browns. It rained yesterday. The baby cries, but every so often it stops as if encountering the sound of someone’s voice. There are footsteps on the stairs. Then there are none. The baby would sometimes look at its hands and smile. It would put its arms down by its sides and begin crying again. Its eyes sparkled in the morning, empty of tears. There was nothing of note on the ceiling to look at except for the bars of sunlight printed there by the Venetian blinds. The baby could not separate its crying from the daylight. The sun went down and it cried with the same urgency as before. Someone left a note on the foyer table. It said please pick up another carton of milk. The one in the refrigerator had expired and this was known already. There was no question. The chandelier hanging over the dining room table had a missing bulb. No one thought to turn it on. The baby cried as it looked at its toes. It wiggled its toes and continued to cry. There is something about motion which is soothing and something about it which is not. January arrived and it began to snow. The baby cried as the snow fell lending its softness to the sidewalks and roads. Everything became indistinguishable from everything else. The baby had a notion of the cold but not the kind of cold that comes with snow. The blue blanket with pawprints lay folded at its feet. That’s where it had been placed and that’s where it remained. The snow melted and spring replaced the leaves that had fallen from the trees. The baby touched its head and felt its hair and continued to cry. There were storms at night with lightning that would light up the baby’s face and thunder that would shake the floor and make the walls tremble. The baby cried louder as if the storm wanted it to, but the crying got lost in the rain and wind and thunder and so no one came to pick up the baby and rock it. The storm passed. Then it was summer and it didn’t rain for a month and the heat made the roof shingles crack and the grass turn brown. The thermostat in the room never moved from 72 degrees. The tropical fish mobile no longer turned. The room had no ceiling fan. The refrigerator held the same number of water bottles on its bottom shelf as it did the month before. The ice maker clinked every so often. No ice fell into the drawer. The sprinklers went on every morning at 9 am. The baby would not stop crying and the summer felt long. There were signs that the sun had started to shift toward the earth in a way that made people worry. The baby continued to cry in the embrace of its own awareness and it was getting older and no longer a baby and no longer crying every day or every hour. It cried without opening its mouth and without its eyes becoming wet and without the reverberation through the house. Someone opened the front door and walked into the kitchen and filled a glass with water. They drank half of it and left. The baby was quiet and so was the house. It was autumn again and the leaves had begun to deepen in their colors.
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