No Anything (2006)

I forgot to tell you about the day your systems began immediately working. Right in front of me, you smiled and you cried. You were awake and you were asleep. Your organs began moving. Your heart became a tiny fist. And you bled—like a real person before personhood, some kind of pre-human. You passed through the veil, a wriggling ball of flesh.

I was on a bus to a reenactment of the London Blitz, when the Nazis bombed the entire city. Then my teacher told me, quietly, and only me, that I may not see the destruction or the rubble, the blood flooding down the cobblestone streets, or the mothers wailing and the fathers far, far away. My teacher said there is no time for that now. I didn’t choose to be here and it wasn’t my fault. I wasn’t going to be present when a person is ripped in half and, from the ruins of that person, against all reason, against the whole world plotting against it too, a new person would be born from within.

The bus stopped on the side of the road and a car picked me up, leaving behind the rest of my class as they waved and set forth toward the end of the world. I was taken back home to a collection of people I hardly knew. They put their hands on my shoulders and told me something amazing had happened. I went upstairs and I saw you in water so clean I did not register it as water, but as some ephemeral aura that had carried you here.

I cried. I said I was angry that this had happened. Then I put my hand on your head and looked into your eyes, which had opened long before they should have ever opened. Like a magic 8-ball, your eyes told me everything in words I couldn’t read. Somewhere far away, I felt a dollhouse smash to smithereens. I saw a despondent sparrow in the grass. There was a DUI and rehab. There was a wedding on a pebble beach. The invention of new colors. Flying cars. World War 3.

I put my face close to yours and I saw your nostrils flare in microscopic movements to let air into your body—one with no asthma or eczema or chemical imbalances, no faith or doom, no ideas, no preconceptions, no anything. But you knew everything there is to know. Your miraculous systems moved toward death like a flower moves toward life, which is also death. Without anyone telling you this, you carried out your functions with beautiful purity. Then the water carried you away.

When the other children came home from the school trip, they rang me on the telephone. They told me that despite everything, we had won the war. I asked them how. They told me: you’ll just have to see for yourself.

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Casper Kelly lives in the United Kingdom.