elimae

Children(from Trawling Oblivion)
Eric Beeny

We will be children again. The past is inevitable.

We can almost remember our mothers. Long ago, we came from them and returned each night. Asleep in their arms, we began to glow in the dark, and we dreamed. We dream now of our mothers holding us, their soft breath braiding through our hair. We are shaped like clouds to change as we move, to become. We are more than shape, less than meaning. What does breath mean? Every breath a cloud in the cold, without our mothers. Breath means change, means we need meaning to become. We pretend, laugh in the shape of something else. Something bigger. We go there without meaning. Many never come back.

The children glow in the dark when they sleep. Their dreams radiate outward, swallowing the darkness we swaddle them in. Through their tattered blankets we can see what colors to name our own dreams someday. We have taken them from their homes to learn their secret. Perhaps, to become children again, we too must be held captive, hostage to our own innocences. The children are lanterns, our lighthouses. Mesmerized, we hope not to memorize their patterns too late and crash against the harbor of their youth.

I will break into your womb and climb inside, hide between your hands, your fingers like vines you'll wrap around me. I will speak softly and you will pretend I am not there. Plant me in the soil, I will never grow up. I will only peek out from inside you. Try finding me in the vines twining around your body.

The children appear to be getting bigger. We thought, initially, that they would remain the same size always. We watch them grow, wondering how they are capable of becoming us, of adopting our shape, while we cannot devise a formula to find our way back to theirs. What is their secret? How is it possible secrets exist? Is it not true that the biggest secret is we already know everything? We are too big, we know too much. We must go back.

I wear your body like a house. I live here. This is my home. I do not ever want to leave. Please do not make me leave. Pretend I am not here. You are good at pretend. I will be quiet. I love you. You eat clothes like a moth, ask me to wear what you pick out. You want to keep me warm. I am warm in the light you flutter toward. I do not need clothes. You must eat something healthier, more substantial. I am hungry. I am not leaving. This house is the last shirt I will ever wear.

Sometimes children go missing. We sometimes think we hear the missing children laughing from inside the children playing right in front of us, but we cannot be sure. We make strange, ghastly noises to frighten them into crawling out of one another. They never emerge, then one day we find them asleep in their beds, glowing in the dark. They are not afraid of us -- we are the ones afraid. We wake them from happy dreams of our dying and ask them where they've been. They never seem to know. We will get them to speak. We will learn their voices. Their names. We will name them after us. We will discover how to grow into children again -- if we have to die trying.

Someone is watching us, I can feel it. There is another room inside this room where we can hide -- if we are not hiding now. I can see you. You are not hiding. Come over here, inside you. I have climbed in quietly, not even tickling you. You laugh. Shhh. I hear someone. Over there, in this room. Don't hit me, I am not pretending. This is not for real. Listen. Can you hear me? I am over there, watching us hide inside you. I want both of us to hold me from across the room. I want to change shape in your eyes. There are two of me, there. I can hear them, quietly. We are hiding now. Come out, come out. Pretend this is real with me. We are children. Pretend we are pretending.

We suspect some of the children have been pretending to be sick. They refuse to get out of bed. We shine spotlights into their heads and see nothing but darkness. We can tell they are not asleep, as they are not glowing. They lay there, mumbling about feeling ill. We take their temperatures. They are normal. It is not long into the day before we catch them playing with the other children, eating chocolates and drawing faces on half-inflated balloons with magic markers. Though we are not their parents, lying appears to be hereditary -- or, perhaps it is we who get it from them. This is what we must convince them of.

There are other children, you say. We are not alone. You cannot leave me. I will not leave you. We are alone together. I am inside you here, and I am afraid to climb out. The light inside you is soft, and when you crawl inside with me you wrap me in your hair. There are no other children. Not out there. I hear them laughing. They are not there. Crawl inside yourself with me and become what you are inside. Crawl quietly. I am asleep. I hear them laughing.

One of the children watched a butterfly for three hours. We took him from his father almost a month ago, and he doesn't seem to be adjusting. We brought him into the playroom for the first time this morning. We strapped him down on the table, our instruments gleaming in the overhead light. He didn't make a sound, not even a face. He stared into the darkness of the room beyond the light, not blinking. He must know more than the other children, otherwise he would have said something by now.

It feels like it should take more than this to exist. You do not just wake up and fall into yourself. It is not that simple. It should not be. It is. It feels like more. More than this. More than you. You are more and there is nothing left. You have fallen out of bed, into yourself. Exist there always and pretend you are awake. No one will listen to you. You are not there. You make no sound. I can see you. Be there for me, I need you. Be more to me than me. Be yourself for me. There, there.

Last night, one of the children tried to escape by sleepwalking. We caught him as he glowed in the dark, his dreaming body illuminating the open fields...

I want to jumprope your umbilical cord. You do not play with me anymore. I am afraid to ask why. Why am I born? Why do I pretend to arrange the hours which inhabit me like your shadow of cobwebs? My eyes grow like roses in your light. I am going to climb out of you. I will carve my name onto the end of your voice and tickle you. You will dance. I will pretend I am asleep. Your umbilical cord wraps around my neck like the vines twining around the outside of this house which is your body. I will pretend it is a boa constrictor, like an extension cord I'm plugged into. I want to comb your fingers like vines of hair and use them to tug my breath from your lungs, to breathe from you. However will I be born? How will I survive you?

The children fall, get hurt, get up, hurt someone else. This is not what they would have known without us. They know only how to learn. We know nothing of how to teach. We have hurt them. They know we have hurt them. We have betrayed them, their trust. We were once them as they will be us again. We give them life -- or at least we sustain it --, a reason to hate us. We must learn to know them better, or we will forget ourselves.

There must be more to us than this. We are more. We must continue pretending, or we will lose ourselves to those who torture and sustain us. They believe in more. They have not stopped pretending. They want us to be like them, only faded, faint echoes of ourselves, pretending only what they pretend. They are not the kind of children we are. They never will be. They pretend to know us, to feel lost. If they are pretending, maybe pretend is not a place we want to be.

We have learned very little from the children. We have held them captive a long time. Teased them. Tortured them. Pretended to love them. We have convinced them their mothers have disappeared, that we are the only ones left who care for them. We are the only ones left who love them. They haven't said a word. We sometimes let the children into the yard to play. They have taken to hiding from us by crawling inside each other. It is days, even weeks before we learn where they have gone. These are not the kind of games we want to play.

Our mothers have released us, pulled us from inside themselves to know them, so that we may hold their hands into their own disappearances. Their voices still sooth us, once made us love them. We did not feel tricked by their voices. Their voices made us trust them. We trust them still. We imagine holding their hands, following their disappearances. We fold into them, their voices telling us everything will be okay. Saying that. We hear you. We love you, they say. We look into our hands and they are empty. We reach out to touch our mothers' lips, our fingertips playing their voices like pianos. Their voices sing to us, their voices singing their way out of the labyrinths of our fingerprints. Their voices teaching our fingers to feel.

Life feels like fingerprints pressed against a clean window, the smudge left from our touch. Look at the sky through this smudge, the cloud shapes -- that is us, reaching from so far away. The sky is foreign, an umbrella shaped like an umbrella. We live in a city, somewhere. There is sky beyond us. I open a window in the room inside you. You breathe in and my lungs change shape, become lungs. I think of what rooms may exist inside me, who I will let in, who I will protect. The breeze through the open window, the soft light from your eyes. You come in here with me. We see sky through the window. From inside you, I press my thumbs on the insides of your eyes and look out. Everything changes shape, changes color, through them.

I hear you laughing. You are my mother now. What is happening out there? There must be other children like me, unborn, unnamed. You are happy, you are laughing. A deeper voice, something cold and alone, as I am within you. It says something to you, and you laugh. Everything inside you quaking, tickles me. I laugh. I am afraid of the voice making you laugh. I am afraid to laugh. Where is it coming from? What does this voice look like? Does this voice have hands? Does this voice touch you? Does this voice twine around your body? You are my mother. Another child, somewhere in the world. Like me.

There is no there. When I crawl out from inside you, you will go into hiding. You will take me with you and forget all about me. I will be there. You will name me, as others have named you. You will become my child and I will teach you to know me. You will forget who I am and where I come from. I will look for you in the vines twining around your body, the house of your body. I will not find you. There is no there.

Meet me there, in the open fields. Come asleep, but do not dream. The only way we can escape those who torture and sustain us is to get bigger, to become as big as they are. They want something from us, something we are not sure exists. We are too small to defend ourselves, and they hurt us all the time. For what? Why? They tell us nothing. They know we glow in the dark while dreaming. They know we hide inside one another. They know we pretend to be sick. The only way we can escape them is to get bigger, to grow into their shape -- to hide among them. Then we can run away and never come back.

Soon it is the world moving and not us, not us moving but the world. Beneath us, moving, our feet forever fallen and falling, unlifting. And here is the world -- here we are, children, within the world for some why we will never know. The world is so small, cannot contain itself. We are so small -- more room for more of us.

Too many rooms. We are all alone. There is nothing else we could have done. The past is inevitable. We are children. We feel like always.