breathing. Thinking about Charlotte, a blush of pleasure runs through me in waves. My cheeks grow hot. My mouth waters. The coils of Sophie’s box spring creak inches above my nose.
Underneath me, on the floor, the bloodstain is wet on my back, and one of Sophie’s baby teeth digs into my shoulder.
The two of us are quiet for a long time.
“Sometimes I think my stuffed animals are staring at me,” Sophie says finally.
I whisper, “They are.”
THE CRUEL THIEF OF ROSY INFANTS
by Tom Piccirilli
THE CRIB WAS FREE OF IRON, foxglove, open scissors, or any other protective measures or charms. On the crackling hearth a pot of hog’s head stew sat cooking, almost as an invitation. It could be a trap. Sixty years ago I’d been snared by eight waiting men prepared with clubs of ash and an iron cage. It had taken me four days to escape up the chimney.
This, though, didn’t seem like a lure despite the human girl child lying beneath an open window, alone in the cool evening breeze.
A remote noise upstairs caught my attention. Snarls, grunts, mewls, and caterwauls. Murder, I thought, murder and evisceration! It took another moment to realize it was the human sound of lovemaking. Coarse but full of bounce. One could play the fiddle to it, the drums, the pan pipes. My foot tapped. My nose itched. I sneaked a ladle of the stew. Then another. I’d always had a fondness for hog’s head. The doctor warned me away from it, and my wife would surely shame me. I needed a sprig of mint to camouflage my breath.
The child in its crib grinned at me. Clear-eyed, crimson-cheeked, it gripped my index finger fiercely. I perceived no obvious weaknesses or illnesses. It had not been touched by plague. It had no fleas or worms, no ticks. Its heart rang with a solid thump within its small chest, no arrhythmia, no congestive failure. The pulse was a nice counterpoint to the cries of the mother. It would grow up able-bodied and average.
It was what it was. It could not help being what it was. Plain and blunt. Bald, smelly, and toothless. Heavy- handed, awkward-footed, easily replaceable, utterly common. A laugh escaped its bubbling lips. It sought my finger again. Its parents were already making siblings that would look just like it.
In this world, on this side of the wall, the human girl child would eventually grow to milk cows and goats, weave gray scratchy clothes, and then go on to bear its own ungainly offspring. It would know overwhelming love and great, sharp sorrow, but it would never, except perhaps at the moment of death, achieve any grace.
I drew back my coat and Livia’s child stared at me, her eyes alive with understanding and acceptance, golden-blond hair draping across her angled, intelligent features. She shined as all our kind shine, radiant and exquisite.
I said, “You’re needed here, bright one.”
She seemed to nod in understanding. She held no malice at the swapping. We do the things we do because we must do them.
It was Livia I was worried about. She was more reluctant to let go of the child than I’d anticipated. I thought I had even seen tears glimmering in her eyes before she had turned away and hastened back to her dwelling on the bluff.
We do not often shed tears, and never when doing the things we must do.
I swapped the children, as is my duty. As it was my Da’s, and his Da’s before him, back and back until the beginning of the races, so I’d been told. My family had been in charge of doing this thing for no less than fifteen hundred years, although time is playful when traveling from one side of the wall to the other. Perhaps fifteen centuries, perhaps fifty. A long time nonetheless.
Humanity has given us a name. We were known, each of us, in turn, as the Thief of Rosy Infants. It is not a title that fills me with joy. It is not a designation that compels strangers to hurl roses. It is not a name I want written in the great accounts of our people.
Upon his deathbed, my Da told me, “This is a sacred and terrible responsibility we are charged with. It will likely drive you mad if you ponder it at length.” He held my face in his hands and kissed my brow. “Traveling will leave you lost in place and time, my son. Humanity will hate you. Our own people will hate you, whether you see it in their faces or not. I’m sorry you were born to me, and that I must pass this painful commitment on to you now.”
Then he died and I buried him at the bottom of a rushing river, as was his wish, so that his great sins might be washed away. I wondered if it worked.
The parents of the human girl child would scream when they found the swapling, cry out even louder than they were doing right now, and wail, and call for the queen’s guard, and kneel in their churches, but eventually, and without as much difficulty as they might have imagined, they would adapt. The beautiful swapling child was difficult to resist, even for the barbarous human heart.
I made my way back to the wall with the girl tucked beneath my coat.
On this particular journey, the wall was a wall of river stones and mortar surrounding the eastern edge of the city of Luftvillion, which was vulnerable to attack from the savage tribes of the highlands. Sometimes the wall was a different wall. Sometimes it was a wall of brick in a small chapel devoted to strange gods, or a wall of loblolly trees in the deep forest. Once I crossed over through a wall of skulls ten feet high and a hundred yards in length, built on a battlefield where riderless, armored horses wandered with gore-soaked manes.
It was night now, and the elderly had crept from their homes to sit on their porches and smoke their pipes and knit their socks and rock in their rockers. The elderly liked to look at the evening stars. The young were making love or in the pubs drinking or planning to overthrow governments and murder those with skins and languages different from their own. The elderly had poor eyes. They waved and nodded as I passed in the glow of the gas lamps. I waved back.
Before long I stood before a cathedral, where mass was in progress. Mass was always in progress. A tempestuous sermon rattled the stained glass windows. The stone figures of their faith stared down from the steeples and belfries, stern, commanding, yet with open arms, bodies wracked in torment so that pain and torture become appealing to humanity. I couldn’t help myself and peeked in the mail slot.
In the aisles were weeping bodies, in some places three deep. Mostly middle-aged. The middle-aged were in the churches begging for more money and the cure for black lung and syphilis. The choir set to braying. They were high in the balcony dressed in red robes, hands clasped in prayer or reaching out for the symbols of divine entities that hung on chains from the rafters. Their mouths gaped, their eyes narrowed.
Struck with hysteria, two altos fell from the balcony rail, hymns issuing forth until the very instant they hit the pews. The faithful spit the names of their mortgage brokers and tax collectors. They rolled around and barked like dogs. The minister beat them about the face, shoulders, and groin with his silver staff. He puffed smoke at them. He fed them biscuits and alcohol. They dropped to their knees and flopped on their faces.
Supplication is the thing humans do better than any other thing that they do. It’s the thing they do best, besides killing.
The child was snuggled against my belly, snoring softly as I struck out again for the cobble path. It burped, sighed, and farted. Its moment of grace remained a long way off.
Finally I came to the eastern slope of the city and picked up my step over the viaduct as I neared the river- stone wall. The rapids bustled and churned. I crossed the bridge and watched a longboat making its way down the river. On board there was drunken revelry, hooting, the clashing of swords, and laughter.
I felt along the stones looking for a crack large enough to bring the human baby through the wall. It always took extra time because, small as the rosy infant was, it was still larger than me, in its own fashion, when traveling between. I held the swapling tightly and put my back to the polished stones. As I passed through I thought of something else my Da had told me. “You’ll experience mysterious and morbid happenings. Not only within the confines of the human world but within yourself. Prepare for damage.”
My wife, Harella, stood waiting for me on the other side, as she sometimes did when I went visiting. She was so beautiful that I almost had to cover my eyes for a moment. My time beyond the wall sometimes affected me for
