it

Kitty entered the nursery noiselessly as she always did; only wondering for a moment why it wasn’t screaming as it usually was by 5:30 in the morning. After turning on the weak light of the Pooh bear lamp, she surveyed the room for a moment before turning to retrieve it from the crib.

She remembered the months before it’s arrival, when she and Penny, her only child, had scavenged yard sales and thrift stores to find everything they would need to make a warm and loving home for their unexpected blessing. Penny had lovingly selected the perfect crib. She’d found an antique with hearts burned into the wood and spent hours piecing together scraps of material to make the quilt she would cover it with.

As tears sprang to her eyes Kitty quickly shook away the memories of those hours spent planning, trying to stay strong and optimistic for her daughter, and replaced them instead with thoughts of what she now had to do. Pick it up, change it, feed it and gather the strength to endure it for another day.

As she pulled back the covers she encountered something even her deepest hopes, or fears, did not anticipate. it was stiff. it was cold. it was dead.

In that moment Kitty did not know what to do. Her eyes involuntarily escaped the sight of the dead infant and wandered the silhouette of the hills outside that were just now showing themselves by the pale light of morning. There must be some mistake, she thought, it can’t be like this. If it was what it was, it would not be done away with so easily. Kitty took a step back then reached down to pick up the child and held him against her as she walked across the room to sink slowly into the white rocking chair she herself had painted. “What have I done?” she asked the air. “What have I done?”

As she began to rock the child for the first time since his birth, her mind raced around her terrible mistake. Kitty knew now, for certain, that she was wrong but she could not understand how she’d allowed herself to become so dreadful.

Kitty looked down at him finally; noticing only now that he had Penny’s lips and her own long eyelashes. She lightly touched the silky black hair that only yesterday had been proof of his evil origins. How did I ever take that as proof? What was I thinking? But even as she asked herself those questions she knew she had not really been thinking at all.

Penny had only been 14 when she tearfully confessed to her mother that she was pregnant. In Kitty’s mind, until that moment, Penny was still the innocent six year old baby she’d pushed on the swings and made dandelion necklaces with. Kitty had felt betrayed by her daughter, as if she were some alien being, and searched endlessly for any explanation of the misfortune they found themselves in.

Pastor Dennis had reminded her that girls of Penny’s age were particularly susceptible to the urgings of the devil. He counseled her to try to make the best of the awful situation and work hard at redeeming her child’s soul. Kitty found some comfort in his words and the hope they offered; it wasn’t Penny’s fault. She was only a child and children can rarely resist the temptation of evil. So Kitty put aside her misgivings and made every effort to support her daughter, to help her find her way back into the arms of Jesus, and make the best of the situation she was being tested with.

In the end, even that optimism had not diluted the dread she’d still felt about the pregnancy and coming child. Kitty knew there was something wrong; she just didn’t know what it was.

When Liza, one of the most prophetic church members, had a vision and saw that Satan was coming and would bring with him death, Kitty had not immediately connected it with her situation. Everyone already knew it was the End Times, and prophesies of this sort were common enough in her church.

But then Penny had died. No one dies giving birth anymore, but Penny had died. The doctor sadly faced her and offered reasons like her age, her delicate frame. “She was just too young, Kitty.” But she was beginning to see, even in those first minutes, that he was wrong about that.

it had killed her. She was sure of it.

“No!” she said harshly to herself. “No, he is not an it! My poor Casey. Poor, poor, baby!”

The tears finally began to sting her eyes and work their way down her cheeks. It was the first time she had said his name out loud, the first time she had even acknowledged his humanity… she had not seen him as human while he was still alive.

No, Kitty’d stood by his crib staring down at him. She’d imagined him as some monster clawing her Penny’s insides to shreds as he worked his way through the birth canal. She’d pictured him inside of the warm safe haven her baby had given him; imagined him with jackal jaws and vulture talons. Kitty had never really seen him in all of the days she’d spent taking care of him.

She would feed him, on schedule, every four hours whether or not he was hungry. She changed his diaper when he soiled himself and bathed him every night before she went to bed. She had taken him for his wellness visits and done everything she was supposed to do. She’d not wanted to do any of it but decided it was her Christian duty—even if he was the Devil’s child.

No, I did not do everything, she thought bitterly, I never gave him one moment of love, and that’s why he died. I killed my grandbaby.

Kitty thought back fifteen years to when Penny had been the same age. She remembered the hours she spent holding Penny, how she would stroke the fine baby curls on her silky forehead, sing songs to her while she suckled at her breast, and how she would kiss every inch of her at some point throughout the day. Oh, how she had loved that child. She again looked down at the baby in her arms. The mid-morning sunlight had crept across the floor and reached him as he lay in her arms. He looks peaceful, she thought, and stroked the fine hair of his brow. She tried to remember if his skin had been the same rosy color as Penny’s. She could not recall, and now it was too late to tell through the blue tinge of death that he wore.

She briefly wondered if she should call the police. She knew she would have to, there was no way around it, but decided that it could wait for a while. Kitty just held him, rocking him and singing him the songs she’d once sung to her daughter. She tried to give him everything, in the last few hours they would share, that she’d withheld in the six weeks of his life. She needed to give him all of the touch and love she had deprived him of when she’d had the chance.

Kitty found it hard to believe it had only been six weeks since the tragedy of Casey’s birth and Penny’s death. It seemed, to her, like it had been years she’d wandered around the empty and deadened corridors of the small house she’d made a home for her daughter. As though it had taken and endless time for the baby, poor Casey, to learn that his cries would get him nowhere and to then become the silent watching thing that Kitty had hated with all of her heart.

And everything had come together perfectly to convince her of his evil origins. Not just the fact that he was a terrible parasite within her daughter’s womb, something she’d resented enough, but even worse in that the first ripping pains of labor had gripped Penny as she and her mother kept vigil at the church. They’d sat waiting for the events of the Devil day, on the eve of June 6th, 2006, when Penny’s water broke, stained red with blood. The contractions had been fierce and terrible; all of the strength sapped from the girl before even half the journey was complete. Casey was born just after midnight and Penny had died a few moments later. That had been more than enough proof, even discounting all of the other signs, that he must be the antichrist. Who else would dare be born on such a day? Who else would tear apart the person who had struggled to give him life?

But Kitty had been wrong. This beautiful child, the child she used to see as having the beauty of the fallen angel Lucifer, had been the most innocent victim of them all. The one person in the whole awful thing who had most deserved to be shown the love and compassion Kitty would not spare for him. Now, she could not stop the tearing sobs that ripped forth from her or assuage the guilt that choked her until she knew she would forever drown inside of it.

Kitty rose from the rocker, and gently carried Casey to the kitchen where she kept his bathing materials. Ever so gently, she unwrapped his cold body and placed him in the soft mesh sling of the infant bathtub. She ran the water, testing carefully for the proper temperature, then gently and with her newfound love cleaned him for the last time.

She thought of all of the bath times she could have made a joy for him. How her songs and laughs would have provoked a smile from him. Her sobs started again as she began to realize that she would never know what his smile would have looked like. Kitty would never hear the sound of his voice in baby babble or see his clumsy first attempts to roll over, crawl, or take a step.

She finished washing him and carefully selected a pure white infant gown to put him in. Then, when Casey was securely dressed and swaddled in the way infants love best, she returned with him to the nursery and settled in to spend as much time with him as she could before she would have to relinquish him to death forever.

Kitty held him throughout that long sunny day. His body grew stiff from death and soggy from the unending tears she shed. As she rocked him, she told him the family stories he would have one day learned. She shared with him all of the love and dreams his mother had had for him before her death. Kitty watched the shadows move across the hills outside as she imagined and then regretted every moment she could have had with her only grandchild. She thought of how handsome he would have become, his first day in school, the childish drawings he would have made... She cried and remembered and grieved for her terrible sin and loss. Finally, after the sky approached darkness, she lifted herself out of the rocker and walked to the phone. She wondered if she would be charged with murder. Surely it is murder to not love a baby; to not love it so much that it dies of despair.

As she picked up the phone she realized two things. First that she didn’t care if they sent her to jail forever; no punishment could ever absolve her. And also that Liza had been right. Satan had come and brought with him death; Kitty had just been wrong about the person in whom Satan had gone to live.