but babies are just so cute!

The doorbell rang during the commercial break just before 10 p.m. I’d peeled myself out of my recliner already. I was halfway down the hall to our bedroom where we would watch the local news. With any luck at all, I’d be asleep before the sports guy came on.

I looked forward to being prone. What a long and tiring day. Words had clunked around in my head like cement dried too soon and in the wrong place, stiff and unmaleable and with dirt chunks attached. I’d had to think about them, and I hate that.

They’re only tools, words, and minor tools at that. Words to a professional writer are like nails to a carpenter. They’re necessary and they’re certainly important, but they aren’t anything to think about consciously.

Well, most of the time.

I regularly pound out three or four thousand words per day, but not today. Today, when I really needed a big push, I managed to put only a few hundred words on the page.

I kept returning to the typewriter all day. Each time I was certain that when I sat down and placed my fingers on the keyboard, my subconscious, creative mind would kick in and the words would flow. Man, there’s no feeling in the world better than that. And yes, that includes the activity that just flashed through your mind.

So I returned to the typewriter all day, and in those five sessions, during which I normally would turn out five thousand words or so on a good day and three thousand on a mediocre day, I managed less than an hour’s normal output. Ugh.

Today was also my first full day in the past forty-some years without a cigarette. So I was really looking forward to sleep. No more clunky words, no more cravings until tomorrow. I was on my way to rest, maybe even full rejuvenation.

And then the doorbell rang.

My wife’s voice filtered out of the master suite, probably the bathroom. “Who in the world could that be?”

I didn’t really hear her, but I was able to make out the edges of the words. “No idea. I’ll get it.”

Doorbells late at night must be another nicotine trigger. As a craving trembled through me, I peered through the peephole.

Nothing there.

Well, I was already a tad grouchy. This was not humorous. Not in the slightest. Little jerks. They probably rang the bell, then stepped off the side of the porch so I couldn’t see them through the peephole.

Either that or ran off. Probably just stepped off the side. It was probably one of those Renick boys from down the street again. The whole situation pissed me off. Ten p.m. is no time to be running loose in the neighborhood playing pranks on people. Especially nicotine infused people who are jonesing for a fix.

Sorry little worms.

I fumbled with the latch on the deadbolt, then swung the door wide. Cold air rushed over me, the faint sound of a distant siren streaming through it. I looked down and left, expecting to see one of the Renick boys. “Now see here! You boys can’t be running around this late at— Oh! Good lord! I mean— Oh!”

A child was staring up at me, a small child, her mouth a wide oval in her moon face. A face covered with pitfalls and traps.

“I’m... I’m sorry. I didn’t know— I mean....”

Her hair was black, plastered to her little head like the top of a helmet. I couldn’t tell how long it was or whether it continued down the back.

I backed up a half-step.

Her shoulders and torso were bare. Pale and smooth, like the skin of a baby.

Well, that’s because she was a baby.

There was something around her waist, something like a diaper, but it wasn’t. I automatically looked for the broad tops of safety pins—they should be pink—but there were none.

So it wasn’t a diaper. Some sort of short garment.

And the front of her little feet sticking straight out from beneath her little round tummy. Five toes on each foot.

Well, did you ever see a baby’s foot without counting the toes? Baby toes. Nothing better in the world.

Then things got strange.

Well, I mean stranger than a baby standing on my porch at 10 p.m.

Her brow was wrinkled, not softly, but in harsh, rough diamonds that were stretched side to side and approximated scales. Scales? I had the feeling it wasn’t like that just because she was peering up at me. It was like that all the time. I’d bet on it. Weird.

My wife’s voice wandered down the hallway again. “George, are you all right out there? Who is it?” It was a little clearer. She was out of the bathroom, or at least she had the door open.

I had no time to respond, and I had no response anyway. Not yet.

The girl’s eyebrows were bristly, the thick hairs black and curled tightly at the tips like the hook side of Velcro. Tips? Each hair was split at the end into two hooks.

Just below her eyebrows, her eyes seemed to be waiting. I mean, not that they were just there, inert and waiting to be noticed. They seemed self-aware and actively expecting... something.

They were spectacular, those eyes. Despite the cliché in every romantic thought about eyes, they truly were filled with magic. True magic. Not the heart strings and butterflies dropping flowers fake magic.

But that was the surreal aspect. The physical features were just as striking.

In place of the usual round irises were squares. The corners roughed in, with points at top and bottom, left and right. And they were gold.

And the pupils were not the black of a void, but deep, dark blue. Incredible.

At first I thought the pupils were a mimicry of those elongated, stretched scales on her forehead, but turned ninety degrees, vertical instead of horizontal. But they weren’t quite the same. Although they were vertically elongated and with a point at each end, there were no points on the sides. They looked more like an oval stood on end and stretched thin, then pinched at the top and bottom.

Cat eyes? No. Much more, somehow.

Between those pupils and irises and the scales on her forehead, well, those alone made me wish I were a scientist. You know, of whatever kind studies such phenomena. 

Just glancing at those eyes gave me the eerie sensation that they were much deeper than the child’s head, perhaps as endless as space itself. I became aware of leaning forward, being pulled into those eyes, and I tore my gaze away at what felt like the last second.

“George? George, are you in there?”

Not wanting to be interrupted by my wife’s sudden presence, and not wanting to interrupt my current interactive inspection of this beautiful child, I grunted. I think it came out an approximation of “I’m fine.”

As I was saying, I tore my gaze away from those eyes, but I didn’t get far.

Between the girl’s eyes was a peak, a point aiming to split her eyebrows. It took me a long moment, relatively speaking, and a trip south with my gaze to realize it was the top of her nose. Or what passed for a nose.

A nose is often called a protuberance. But this couldn’t be called a protuberance of any kind. It didn’t protrude. At all. It lay wide and flat.

From just beneath those bristly eyebrows the peak spread downward and outward, a bright pink flesh-toned patch that looked as if it had been stretched into place. Honestly, even on a child it wasn’t anything good to look at.

It put me in mind of someone in a burn unit where the nurses had run out of bandages.

The thing looked as if it had been slapped on by a bad plastic surgeon. Maybe from across the room. Poor baby.

The patch flared to the sides, the pink skin looping, stretching out around holes that passed for nostrils, completing the illusion of a nose. The nostrils—twin voids, really—were only slightly closer together than her eyes.

The child’s ears were cauliflowered, the skin and gristle gnarled into lumps that would be unrecognizable were it not for their location.

And finally, where her mouth should be was more of a simple stoma, an aperture through which nourishment might pass (or waste be expelled?). There were no discernable lips, but hairline cracks radiated outward from it. And there was no recognizable chin or throat, only a gentle slope from her mouth to a place centered between her shoulders. 

I tore my gaze away, looked at the house across the street then the streetlight on the corner down the block to the right. There must be at least a thousand winged creatures flitting about. I looked at my car parked along the curb, then up, out into open space, then back at the house across the street, then finally down again. I was certain she’d be gone.

She was still there. “Uh... is there something I can do to help you? What I mean is... what can I do for you?”

In the time it takes great civilizations to rise, prosper, decline and crumble, she blinked. An agonizing sadness flashed through her eyes.

Then the stoma shifted and a quiet wheeze poured forth as if in mourning. A string of M’s whispered out as if warming to their role. Hooked to the end of those was a soft A, then another M and another soft A. That last one stretched and stretched and stretched and faded.

Mmmamaaa? So tossing out what is unnecessary, at least on this planet, had she said mama?

Mary’s voice filtered out of the bedroom. “Who is it, George?” Then from the hallway. “Do you need any help?”

I turned my head to the left so she’d hear my response more clearly. For some reason, I didn’t want her in here. “No, we’re— I mean, I’m fine.” I grimaced. I shouldn’t have said we.

I tried again. “I’m fine. I’ll be coming to bed in a few minutes.”

I frowned. Why didn’t I want her in here? Was I trying to protect her? From what?

But yes, I was trying to protect her. That had to be it.

In the face—no pun intended—of something I didn’t understand, something unusual, my biological instinct as a male was to protect her. But it was instinct, not because I consciously thought she was incapable of protecting herself. It wasn’t politically correct, but even inconvenient facts are still facts.

But back to the girl.

I leaned over and chanced looking into those eyes. The words came out as a whisper, as if there was a blockage in my throat. “Are you all right?” I arched my eyebrows and glanced past her again, then back to her. “Where are your parents? Your mommy and daddy? Your mama”

The stoma shifted. “Mmm. Ahma.” She frowned, some of the scales combining with others, disappearing into them. “Mmmahma.”

She raised her right arm and I started.

My gaze shifted to my left as her hand came up.

It was a normal hand, with normal fingers. My relief expressed itself as an audible sigh, fear still clinging to the edges.

Her right index finger slowly uncurled, extended, aimed. “Mmmahma. Mmmahma.”

With the soft pad on the tip of that finger, the part between the crown of the fingerprint and the fingernail, she touched my forehead.

Pressed against my forehead.

Pressed into my forehead.

Her fingertip sprouted tendrils, for lack of a better word. I didn’t see them, but I felt them.

After the tip of the finger burrowed through skin and the fine layer of viscera to touch bone, the tendrils sprouted and felt the bony surface, felt for depressions, flaws, cracks, seams.

And they attached.

It didn’t hurt.

But I still pulled my head back and up.

Involuntarily, as I jerked myself back and up, first my head, then my whole body, I said, “Oh!”

Against her solar plexus.

She had come with me, apparently attached by her tiny, very weird fingertip.

My eyes were stretched wide. I could feel them.

She peered directly into my eyes, as if trying to make me understand and apologizing all at once. The stoma shifted. More gently but a little louder than before, she said, “Mmmahma.”

Then she turned her head to the right.

“George, I—”

Mary’s voice. Then a dead silence, not like she just stopped talking, but as if whatever she was about to say had dropped off a cliff.

“Mmmahma.”

Mary again. “Oh my god!”

I felt myself frown. Felt something retract and release in the center of my forehead.

Little hands grasping my shoulders lightly, my biceps, my forearms, my fingers, climbing down. All the while little feet pressing against the top of my abdomen, the big toe of one foot in my navel, the other foot on the waistband of my trousers, down to my pockets, down to—

Then the baby was jerked sideways.

Toward Mary.

“Oh my god, my baby! Oh my god!”

I heard the truth.

I wanted to run, just race out of the house.

But I couldn’t.

I closed my eyes tightly even as I turned toward her, slowly, molasses in winter.

Halfway there, I turned, turned. Raised my chin. Forced open my eyes.

Mary’s right hand under a baby bottom.

Mary’s left hand behind a baby head.

Mary peering at me, more joy on her face than I ever thought imaginable.

And her words, soft, beautiful even wrapped in the connotation.

“George, we need to talk.”

* * * * * * *