An Unkind Birth (An Excerpt)

An Unkind Birth (An Excerpt)

Posted by A Great Liar

(The following is an excerpt from the currently undergoing novel, The Liar's Lobe)

(Narrative by Martha – Danny’s Mother)

Danny was disposed off the Heaven as if treated as a mistake.

It was as if the child would break into pieces any moment. He wasn’t too well done as a creation. Came off a month early, my Danny did.  
 
But Danny did make it home. After months of labor, which Good Lord has devised in His plans for women to bear, he made it soundly. Unlike many newborns I have seen, Danny didn’t seem to have enough tears to shed. It’s as if providence do away with him in some urgency, disgusted or repelled by what it has got at its disposal.

The little child Danny was hardly complete when he was first unhooked of the meaty strings. Hardly breathin’. Looking starved, and not much stirring, puffing noiseless in the well lit room surrounded by faces indecisive of whether to rejoice or be alarmed.

I am just a mother. Now bearing a child that I could never save, knew the moment I lay eyes on him. He demanded too much work than a woman of mortal capacity could muster. Faith’s a thing plenty, but it ain’t enough to save everybody.

My suspicions were confirmed when, days later, baby Danny first opened his eyes, his dark black eyes just like his father’s and the busy brows. Those were beautiful eyes and what lurked beneath the early years of innocence was sea of lies waiting for the right moment to gush out. 

Much as I loved him back then, and did for the rest of my life, for I never stopped loving him, even when the moments when I looked at him with nothing but spite and wish nothing more than to ram the dagger down his baby chest and let him take it down to his young grave, I never stopped loving him.

But the dagger moments were too many and the love at times was forgotten in the moments of intense hatred and enmity in the air, though it continued to exist.  

But there were no surprise, because even as a young baby, my Danny had a look of a liar in his eyes. If eyes are windows to the souls as some wise mouth cracks it out to be, than my baby had a soul prone to deceit, fallen already at the time of its awakening, fallen to the touch of the devil.

I had no chance. What happened probably wasn’t fair, but who am I to complain. All I can say is that Good Lord in the sky has created angels, demons, and men, and everything in between that walks upon two or four legs in this world.

And then He goes on to do the inexplicable; He creates Danny, my boy.