muttbaby

short story

It should’ve never been born.

It looked like a baby: that startled innocence and sweet inside huge doe eyes and soft pink flesh. Its wails were high-pitched, its mouth toothless. Ma cooed into her neck soft and slow, whispering its name, drawing out each syllable into its ears. The smell of blood and discharge and disinfectant hung in the white walled room, and I remember peaking into the crib, feeling a new tight sensation: like my heart was growing too large for my body. A happiness that hurts just a little in its intensity. I was going to love the little baby so very much.

It laughed and lived and loved with other kids: it sat in the kitchen wasting wax crayons on good paper, sketching fantastical things. Frogs with tiny wings, bees with google eyes. Ma with wings on her back, me with a halo above my head. It ate too much chocolate and laughed much too loud. It was growing up with the tinny dimple like Ma’s, a copy of her rose-pink mouth.

When did she begin to become it ? The creature I am speaking of is not the baby I sang my lullabies for, this is something strange and alien and entirely not her. I mull over the timeline, over everything my memories hold, anything to find the moment she went. To find if there is something terribly wrong inside her little hummingbird heart and to gently cut open and take it all out, stitch her back up and find it gone. Feel again the crushing happiness I did all those years ago, now it just throbs incessantly against my ribs, fast and numb, all pain pain pain pain.

The first sign was so late, so very late. It began in the eyes: dulling into something resembling oblivion. Like life was leaking out of it- everything that could’ve been good and beautiful deadened till they were pricks of darkness. Then began the long hours locked, never coming out. Lying sweating red bloody eyes, limbs all scrawled onto itself, room reeking of neglect. The rooms used to be papered with drawings, soon all bare, papers overflowing out the dustbin. Next came torn up clothes, all sliced up in such rage, they were but scraps when it was done with it. Ma first spoke to it in low hushed tones, gentleness in her words. Then came negotiations, then raging and fighting and yelling yet it never raised its voice. Once Ma hit her, a backhanded slap that left deep red marks, and it said nothing at all. Ma never yelled after that: she returned to her low gentle voice, ragged with exhaustion. She would whisper I love you, baby, I love you. It would say it back, without a single note of emotion and I could see Ma hold back her dam. I knew those were the nights she sobbed hard enough to leave her teeth marks on the knuckle she stuffed inside, to not wake us up.

The day it happened, I was the one to stumble onto the pool of red. Stark against the white. Just lying inside it swimming, swimming slow, almost a smile back on that pale dull face. We weren’t supposed to talk about it, but it cleaved life into two parts: after and before. In this after, Ma lost her sleep, she kept guard all day, popping pills for her rising heart. She blunted the knives, hid the scissors, threw the forks. She would pop in every hour, and she got the lock of the room removed. I would watch all of this happen. I would dream of cold eyes and warm blood.

Ma would hold it tight and sob when she thought we were all asleep, and I could feel her choked back coughs racking through her frailing body. I’d closed my eyes when she looked over and in the morning we’d pretend nothing had happened, while Mutt-baby lay like the dead breathing deep.That’s what a nurse had whispered half under her breath as she looked into its unblinking eyes. Huge and unsettling and something mutated in those irises. It was a week after it, and the doctors had to sign the discharge sheet: all vitals were back to normal, a blood transfusion was done, and the nurse had been trying to ask it questions, trying to be kind and gentle to this creature who was not the same baby I had held in my arms so very long ago. It answered in a monotonous flat tone, every word short and cryptic. The name Ma’d picked with love lay dead at her tongue, ill-fitting to our Muttbaby. She’d sob it out when the night was young, the syllables laced with something guttural, the word still sounding unnatural to the abomination beside her.

Once Ma and I took it to a doctor, again, an expert for cases like Muttbaby’s, a pHD and all sorts to her name. The doctor was a stern but kind-faced woman and she spoke in a soft cooing voice, asking questions, sliding looks across her spectacles. She showed pictures of splattered ink, asking it what it saw, and words came out sounding slightly twisted and warbled and low. She wrote things inside her notepad and asked us to wait outside. We waited patiently, silence thick and comforting, the bland white of the walls and anti-septic in our noses. Soon she called us back and gave us a list of pills and when to take them, shook her head all sad, gave it a candy bar. It seemed to look almost normal, holding the candy bar with silly delight. It changed after that: a look of glassy-eyed oblivion seemed to coat the eyes, yet the words came out more normal. More solidly packed, more like thoughts given meaning. Smiles less artificially plastered, more like genuine muscles stretching on their own. Things were easier, nights where Ma slept with her hand thrown across our bodies, content and breathing. The rickety white noise of the fan above is all I heard above my own breathing.

It got bad again. It would come back from school, the deadeyes deepening, the pills doubling, the quietness back again. There were no pools of red, there was only spit foaming outside the once rose-bud mouth purpling, empty pill bottle in hand. It had been a year since it. Ma sat next to the hospital bed for days, the nurses familiar with us, her eyes almost as empty as Muttbaby’s. “She wasn’t like this” she told no one in particular. She held a drawing in her hand. It was too bright inside this cesspool of medicine and misery, clumsy crayon stick-figures under a very yellow sun. Muttbaby’s entry for a drawing competition long ago; I wondered if she knew about the sketchbook under the bed, graphite lines and something red in its pages. I wondered if I should tell her.

We took it out of school. We had it admitted into a ward, and the doctor looked at her with a sort of sadness I couldn’t bear to look at. It screamed loss, it seemed to line itself with grief– the sort where you knew something was forever beyond repair. I knew she’d been long gone, the husk lying before me was hollowed out of whatever kept things alive. Whatever made them get up in the morning with hopes and dreams: mine used to be clear, Ma and her with me always, happy and laughing, and now it seemed to tear and break and shatter. I wish I’d do the job myself, take a pillow and put it over Muttbaby’s purple lips. I suddenly felt so tired, I could barely stand. I looked at it again, hatred rising into my eyes, burning at the back of my eyelids. I swear it almost blinked back.

It was not long before they had let it out again. Model behaviour, they said. Always helpful, always responsive. The reports almost made me hopeful before I looked into those familiar deadeyes. Muttbaby gave a small smile, and it looked like her, and I wanted to rip out its eyes. I pushed it into the car, and there was a silence till, to my surprise: “Is Ma okay?”. What do you think, I reply, unable to keep the bite out of my voice. Muttbaby shifted in its seat. “Do you ever wish I’d not been born?” it asked, a blunt edge in its voice. I looked at deadeyes in the mirror, I remembered a pair of sparkle from before. Yes, I told it, yes. I wish you would die and leave me with her memories, untainted. Whoever you are, you are not her. I couldn’t say that out loud; it seemed to get it. It didn’t speak a word the rest of the ride.

Something had changed: Muttbaby was talking again. Its throat seemed ragged with disuse, its syllables ill-pronounced. Ma was overjoyed, holding conversations with hours on end at the little kitchen table. I heard laughter too: not from Ma, but from Muttbaby. I held my distance, scared to break whatever had built itself with fragility, this sudden shift to times I only remember from before. Soon I thawed: Muttbaby had been leaving offerings of peace, torn out pages from its sketchbook. Drawings of rainbow-infected sunshine skies, us rolling in angel clouds, a likeness of Ma before it all. Was she back? Muttbaby’s voice now sounded low and sweet, much like hers had. The tinny dimple showed more often but it was the eyes that began to show colour. Eyes that were hers.

She went back to school: and it came back. I could feel the air charge and change, the tides crashing on rocks, the skies turning dark. The night was still young and there was little laughter. Muttbaby picks at its food, replies monosyllabic and dull. Ma sat next to her. Gently laid her spoon down. What happens at school, she asks so softly in her way, holding Muttbaby’s scrawny wrists. Muttbaby is trembling. Slowly words come out: “Do you ever get the feeling, you’ve got this wrongness inside? That is sucking whatever it is that gets people going, that repels everyone, that it makes you all wrong, like some sort of mutt”. Tears fall. Her voice breaks on the word mutt. She knows. She knows she knows she knows. Ma listens and she knows and I look at my Muttbaby, and I know I failed her. I kneel, hold her hand. Rosemary, I say. The word has not left my lips in so long, the sound unfamiliar. Rosemary, muttbaby, looks at me. I’m sorry she said. I bowed my head and all I remember is the baby I was supposed to love very much.