When the doctors came out,
they looked like they had been sick.
Their coats were spattered,
their eyes wouldn’t meet mine.
One of them said, “We did all we could.”
The words hung in the air like smoke.

They told me the child had lived.
They didn’t use the word “congratulations.”

The room was cold when I went in.
She lay still, her lips colourless,
the sheets pulled to her chin.
The baby was in a cot beside her.
It was making noises,
low and wet,
its tiny hands twitching in its sleep.

I didn’t touch it.
I stood there and tried to feel something.
Grief, love, hate. Anything.
But it was just noise,
and the sound of machines being turned off.

At home, I fed it because I had to.
I spoke to it because silence became unbearable.
Its eyes never left mine when I did.
Even before it could talk,
it seemed to know when I wanted to be alone.

It grew.
It broke things.
It threw tantrums that didn’t sound like crying
more like laughter,
low and cruel,
as though it found something funny that I couldn’t see.

When it bit me,
it didn’t let go straight away.
When it killed the cat,
it looked disappointed when I buried it.
After that, it started bringing me dead birds.
It would drop them at my feet,
watching for a reaction.
I stopped giving one.

Sometimes at night I’d wake
to find it standing in the doorway,
its face half in shadow,
saying nothing.
Just watching.
I’d tell myself it was a phase.
Children do strange things.

I stopped leaving the house much.
The neighbours asked after us,
but I didn’t like them seeing him.
He’d stare at people in the street
never waving, never smiling
just staring until they looked away.

I caught him once,
sitting by her old photograph,
touching her face with his fingertips.
He looked up at me and said,
“She talks to me when you’re asleep.”
Then he smiled.
It was the first time I’d seen her expression
on his face.
And I wanted to be sick.

I started sleeping with the door locked.
I told myself it was because of burglars.
But I kept the knife under my pillow,
and I didn’t know why.

One night, I woke to the sound of breathing.
Not my own.
It was slow, steady,
coming from the other side of the door.
I didn’t move.
I waited.
After a while, the breathing stopped.
But the next morning,
I found muddy footprints
beside my bed.

He never said anything about it.
Neither did I.

Now he’s older.
He barely speaks.
He eats little.
But sometimes, when he looks at me,
I get the feeling he’s waiting for something.
Like he knows a secret
I’ve already forgotten.

Some nights I wake and swear
I can hear two voices whispering in the dark
one small, one familiar.
And when I check his room,
he’s always asleep.

Or pretending to be.