Cataclysm Baby

Hali, Halle, Hamako

The day came when we could no longer hide the glistening sight of our daughter’s flippers, nor the secret of her skin, its oils and fur.

Like the other parents afflicted before us, we took her to the lonely end of the island, to the cliffs hung high above the breaking surf. There my wife kissed our daughter’s wet nose, after which I bound tight her swaddling, stilling her wide limbs to her sleek middle, and then together we let our baby tumble from our hands, through the tall air, into the swallowing sea.

Afterward, what endeavors we undertook to forget, even as our guilty bodies tried again for some more right-birthed baby, even as our bodies proved unable to produce another—even as we entered this famished sea, this season of nets cast out and collected empty, until throughout our village every stomach was as hollowed as our crib.

And now these legs, walking me back to the cliff, my guilt-path worn through the jungle.

Now these eyes, watching the ocean crash its anger-fist upon the shore, a parade of knuckles on top of knuckles on top of knuckles.

Now this hurt-drowned heart, when I see how other times the ocean is flat like so much glass, like the unwalked beach below, its sand stormed upon, lightning-fused and mirror-smooth; when sometimes I catch my own face staring back from the water beyond.

Those waveless days, I see my face or a face like my face, but not the faces of the fish that once swam in those depths.

Our fish are gone, and our daughter too, and together her mother and I pray for some rewinding of waves, some reversal of what awful ripples we have made, so that our daughter might one day find her way to the flatter side of the island, to the yellow beaches, to the path leading to our small hut, our home meant once to be her home.

And if it happens? If our pup returns? Then what?

Then how: With anger? With forgiveness? With love?

Or with what thing we deserve instead, a new mood from our new daughter, dredged deep from the dark, rising slow and sure, purposed only to take us back down.