Kenneth Calhoun - Black Moon

THEN Jorie found the baby on the floor, between the sofa and the armchair, alive with battery-operated movement and a clear plastic mask on its face.

THEN she went into the nursery to check on the baby. The nightlight projected an aquatic glow over the walls. She peered into the crib, careful not to wake her sleeping son. She did not know if other newborns could sleep at this point, nor would she let it be known that their baby was still doing it several times a day. The insomnia epidemic had made people hungry for sleep and, in their starved state, capable of anything. They were always standing in the corner of her eye, until she looked at them directly and they vanished. She believed they would consume any vessel in which sleep was found, hoping to absorb the ability. Yes, she believed they would eat her baby.

The baby heard her think this and started to cry.

THEN Adam came out of the bathroom empty-handed, with the toilet gurgling behind him. She asked him, “Is the baby something you have?” He went back in and came out with the baby wriggling and squawking in his hands. “Oh my god, Adam,” she shouted. “That you cannot be doing!”

He wept and said, “Forgive this from me because my deficit is red.”

THEN sometimes she had the baby or knew where the baby was and sometimes he had the baby or knew where the baby was. Then the baby was sometimes perched on them, driving them like oxen, using a hard yoke of emotion. Then, sometimes, more and more often, neither of them had the baby or knew where the baby was.

THEN the baby turned up in Adam’s sock drawer. It had learned how to meow. Adam closed the drawer, but not all the way. It occurred to him that it was better to hide the baby from the two of them, since he now realized he would trade the baby for sleep without much hesitation.

Would he trade the baby for a year of sleep? Yes. Would he trade it for a week? Yes. Would he trade it for a day? Maybe, after all, he did not know the baby all that well. They had only met a few weeks ago. It’s not like they went way back. And babies didn’t have the value they did before. Just a month ago, they were so treasured. People would go to great lengths to get one. Look at Matt and Carolyn. They were desperate. Poor Carolyn. A complicated person, Jorie once said about her.

Something must be complicated about her because the way to get a baby was not at all complicated since all he and Jorie did was fuck a few times and they got one. Carolyn’s insides must be a labyrinth. Put two bodies next to each other and it practically happens on its own. Cock rises and plunges. Stuff comes out. They could make another one anytime they wanted, even in the shower or the car or the kitchen. “We could give the baby to Matt and Carolyn and live off the ground six floors up for a trade,” he said to Jorie when she may or may not have been in the room. Some shadow was there.

The city is where help will come, they believed. And it was less dangerous because the law dries up away from cities first like a puddle evaporating along its edges. The law was almost vapor just a few miles out at this point.

But Matt had said no, it’s too dangerous.

“It’s because the baby will upset Carolyn,” Jorie had said sadly, when Adam got off the phone with his brother. “And when this ends and our lives come loping back like a lost dog we tried to ditch in the woods she won’t talk to us.”

THEN Jorie wanted to know what the officers had brought that would turn off their heads for a while, knock them out and let the aching in their bones move one way or another off an unreachable place.

The police couple was sorry but they had brought nothing. “That’s because there is nothing,” they said.

Adam stood up, the chair falling back behind him, and snapped into a rage. He fell to the ground and bit at the table legs. “You have sleeping in you, the way you talk and your eyes are telling me so fucking obviously so!”

THEN the baby told Adam a bedtime story into his chest. The words went through the sieve of skin and bone, leaving behind a pool of drool. The baby said, “Even though you had heard reports of the giant sparrow, you brought me to a certain park in the carriage. You and mother had a picnic when the bird came down from the black trees and landed on the handlebar of the stroller. Its weight—because it was the size of a dodo—caused the stroller to spill forward and I flew into the bird’s beak. I was wailing into the sparrow’s dry tongue, which smelled like fresh mud. The beak was locked down on me, solid as furniture, and in a tumble and roll, with flapping like an umbrella opening again and again, we were aloft. Your shouts and Mother’s screams were muffled and growing distant but not gone. It took me up into the trees where it perched and tipped back its head, working me into the tight suitcase of its gullet. It was like being born into darkness. You and Mother hunted for us in the trees with your eyes, but the bird had roosted in the girding under a bridge, tucking its head under a wing. I was inside, refusing to be digested. I knew what to do since the bird, on the inside, was not unlike Mother. I introduced a maddening nursery rhyme into the bird’s tiny brain, preventing it from sleeping. Deprived of food and sleep, the bird became very susceptible and it was then that I began a campaign of unreasonable suggestions. When the bird was weakened and the belts and tethers of its dark interior had gone slack, I assumed the role of pilot and puppeteer. I pulled sinews from the weave of the fleshy fabric and, using nubs of bone from digested animals as spools, built an array of pulleys that controlled the bird’s every move, even after it had died. At the time, you knew nothing of this. The police couple that came to investigate were outraged by your claims. You were alternately persons of interest, then suspects. They separated you and lied about what the other had said. But you and Mother held firm, when not quaking with grief. You were with the police in the park with their cadaver dogs when the bird appeared above you, flying with the jerky movement of a marionette. I landed it in the grass with a tumble. The skin, which was now as dry as paper, tore upon impact and I tumbled out, little fists curled around the bone handles and levers I had devised. Mother scooped me up and attacked the remains of the bird with her boots, until I made it clear to her that the animal had died a long time ago.”

THEN the police came to the door. It had been four days since Jorie and Adam had reported the baby missing. The police that came were a couple. They knocked at the backdoor with a flashlight and Jorie thought they were shadow people. She looked at them directly, through the window in the door, and they did not disappear. She went right up to the glass and stared at them for a long time. They stared back, a man and woman in uniform, holding light in their hands. “Open the door,” the man was saying. “We’re here about a missing baby.”

THEN Jorie cleared dishes out of the sink with the intention of giving the baby a bath and was startled to see the drain at the bottom of the basin. Of course it made sense that it would be there, but she found its existence oddly surprising and novel. She recalled a time when she and her brother, only four and five years of age, would wander around their home and point out things that were always there—light switches, door stoppers, vents in the floor—saying, Remember this? Remember this? It was as though they had already lived a thousand years and had forgotten the basic, utilitarian details of their surroundings after initially learning their purpose, marveling at them, then moving on to other discoveries.