He was beautiful. He really was. Hair golden as the angels’ song, eyes as clear as the clearest waters. His cheeks as fat and downy as he would have imagined with her. She lived there, in his face, sometimes. In the tilt of his nose. In the question audible in his baby voice. In the way his hair wispy invaded the view of the waters peering out from inside his head. But she was gone. He knew that. Yes, her voice, as real as it sounded at times, had passed away along with her body and her love for life. The child was the only thing she left for him. But he knew that was not quite strictly true, either. He knew. He knew, he knew, Sima, please. He knew the child was naught more than a wishful balm, an imaginary salve to his broken and fissured soul, but let him have it, would you? It’s enough you’re gone, don’t take the child with you. But he had to. He knew. He had to let the boy go. It was only right, and he couldn’t move on till he accepted the real world. The baby had passed along with his mother, remember? Hadn’t he? He remembered so clearly, the panic suppressed by a calm demeanor and a warm cloth from the girl sent for to help Sima through, the blood, red, so brightly red that surely it wasn’t real, couldn’t be real, the last color he saw for so long, that false red, that unacceptable hue, but all over the place, seeping through the sheets, the mattress, soaking up the towels that he felt sure were meant to soak it up themselves, staining the steady hands, staining his wife’s screaming

And then

And then silence

And a terrible turning away

And the look in the girl’s eyes when she handed him that bloodied bundle. He had thought she meant for him to take care of them as before, rinsing out the soiled linens only to reuse them in a moment, but he realized there was a foreign weight within the stained cloth. Upon looking closer, then, a bald head, a perfect formed pair of lips, and those sutured eyelids, those terrible blank canvases upon which they had hoped to write life, breathe color and nurture love. Sealed shut to the world. It was better that way. The world was not life. The world was red and blood and the silence after the screams that although at one time hoped for, prayed for, longed for with all the heart, rent in two the dreams. The silence after the screams was worse by far than the horrid noises borne of agony.

He gave it back, he thought. Honestly the memory was shifty, like a picture frame poorly set to center. He couldn’t be sure. Perhaps he dropped it, the weight. That’s all it was. A sum of matter binding together to make weight but incapable of anything else. The child was stillborn. After all the hours of red and screams and poorly concealed concern, all Sima had to show for it was two dead bodies, one of them her own. And he had nothing. Perhaps he handed the bundle back to the girl. All he knew is he did not bring the weight with him when he stumbled out of his desolate home and into the shadowed forest surrounding. It was a long time after that before he saw anything at all.

And when he finally did open his eyes, the first things he saw were the hairs so light as to be white and the eyes so clear he felt he could see to the edge of the world and past, straight to where Sima still kept watch over him. But it could not be. He knew that. There was so much red and so much lifeless weight that it wasn’t possible. And yet here he was, the boy, the child, now surely nearing two years. What to do? He couldn’t tell the girl, the other villagers. They would send him away. People who see visions and ghosts, figments of their tortured imagination or not, were never kept around for long. Someone would be happy to inhabit this sturdy wood home, this safety he built for Sima and intended to fill with soft edges and round corners so she would never need to leave. Although in the end it wasn’t a sharp edge that ushered her away, but the bluntness ripping through her, tearing her into not, perhaps, needing to leave, but wanting to leave, which was worse.

He couldn’t breath a word. But he couldn’t keep the child, either. And so what could be done? He picked up the weight, now warm and living, though it was just a trick. He nuzzled his face into the softened flesh so as to catch some small scent of the child’s mother, though all his senses registered was that thick baby scent, the cloying sweetness of utter dependency. He carried the child to the back door, gently let him down onto the hewn rock step outside.

You and I both know the truth, he said. Go back to your mother. Go back where you came from.

Sima, take your child, he doesn’t belong here any more than you did. Any more than I do anymore.

And he closed the back door. It was really just a few planks of rough-hewn wood caught together, and closed fitfully at best. There was a latch to secure it, which he used. Through the cracks in the planks he could see straight through the waters to the other side. They looked at him reproachfully. As if they were telling him something.

You and I both know this is futile.

The next day the child was in his home and heart as if nothing had ever happened, and it was several weeks before he could work up the will to try again what he knew was right.