Dating : Cradle in the Moonlight

“You’ve lost it, it has been taken. A shadow wrapped in mystery, with mystery fangs and blood in its fingers, took the baby, and let it drown in a faraway river. It floated for days and days until its bulging corpse touched the riverbank. There it lay until I found it, I cried for hours and hours, and was helped by neighbors to put it to rest. The full moon shone on everyone of us as we said goodbye. It didn’t even have a name and it didn’t even survived. I named it after you. Would you like to hear another bedtime story?”

“It is my fault. You think it is my fault.”

“Do not lose another one. Or else…”

“You take care of it then. You watch over it.”

And so he did. The baby slept never woke up, but it was still breathing peacefully and still sucked on the breast of his mothers. He watched it every waking moment of the day, and in his dreams, with his hand wrapping his little finger. And one night, as the full moon touched his closed eyelids and burned him from inside in a blinding frenzy, the shadowy figure came, smiled, slithered into the cradle, and took the baby. It silenced its cries and the father was left alone with tears and rage of anger, sorrow, and madness.

“Now! Now! It came for him, it took him away!”

“I understand, I understand how you feel.”

“It will come for the next one and the next, just to feast upon his royal blood. The royal blood that flows in the veins of my heirs!”

But he was no king, nor was he rich, nor was he loved and respected. He had extracted every single child from each of his own teeth until there were none and given each tooth their blessing. Many women kissed each of the teeth, proudly declared their love for the father, and tucked all themselves into the same bed, in the same corner showing their mammary glands to the sky, which later turned to moonlight. Sooner, rather than later, their bodies were sucked off their fat, and the babies drank and drank from the ether, with just enough motherly warmth and touch to marvel the little creature with brains three times their size.

“Unholy! Unholy! It is I, who will kill the creature with my hands. I will never sleep again and neither will their demented mothers!”

All of the babies were put in the same cradle in a haste as the father bellowed and screamed at the heavens. All the women kissed them one last time, and also a first time, and knew that they would never see again. The man moved around the darkened room, opening windows and doors, creating holes in the wall so that the moonlight came in and enveloped the entire room.

“It moves in shadows and steals my children! It moves in shadows and eats my children! It moves in shadows and kills my children!”

The father screamed and he screamed and he screamed, the same thing over and over again, and the women cowered in the corner, as they slowly disintegrated in the light that relieved them so, and he was left alone, laughing and screaming and prancing around, as the children slept, peacefully, one on top of the other.

He waited for a hundred years as the brains of the babies only grew one centimeter per year. He laughed every twenty seconds because he swore he could see them growing. He did not sleep a wink in all this time nor did he blink. But after a century of screaming in a room enveloped by paleness, a moment of tired weakness overcame him, and the shadow suddenly sprinted towards the father’s four mouths and ripped each of the seven tongues he had stolen in a senseless massacre, broke the legs he had stolen in the ravaging of a village, skinned the head it had taken from a man, a human man, that the shadow recognized as its kin, and the father of the creatures was no more. And with no father to carefully grow his children from babies to horrors, with no bind to the teachings of evil, they were of no threat to the world at wide and beyond, and they could sleep forever passively and smiling under the slithering, shadow’s moonlight.