Emerald Eyes

“Baba!” I told it to shut up. Despite the creature being my child, I didn’t shy away from profanity. His endearing glass eyes reminded me of my own. Although his were framed with a face of continuous asymmetry of his burnt skin, and fur like that of a cactus. Fluffy to the eye but miserable upon touch. I learned to live with the animal, call it beautiful even, only because the glass was painted across with his mother’s emeralds.

“Baba! Baba!” It caught up to me, entwining its scaly fin with the bare skin of mine. The contact of its perverted body made every inch of mine squirm. I could feel my guts turning.

“Look at me Baba.” And so, I did. My father’s verses came back to me in this moment of confusion and fright. They do not create that which must not exist, if it shall not exist, they did not create it.

“Will you see me for who I am?” I will not. This can be fixed and it will be. They created it, it shall exist. Although, to keep his heart at steady rhythm, I can pretend to do whatever it is it wants me to. I held its gaze, felt the warmth radiating from him. It is not a him, but it can become him.

“I see you.” I reassured it, or pretended to. He smiled. It smiled. The Luntember night tickled the hairs on parts of mine which were exposed, it tickled and waved away the leaves on the forest mud and the decaying tree-like formations. Loona, that demjin, was observing closely from her place upon the sky. She had a weird shape to her, she was odd in all aspects of abnormality. Unlike normal beings, she was a white ball in the sea of stars, and her eyes followed you wherever you went, like that painting of Dad Vinnie’s, the old doodle-ist of the Consonance times. I despised Loona. She knew and still knows of every man’s deeds and yet keeps quiet. You never know when the demjin will decide to finally speak. If she ever does.

“Son.” I say.

“Baba.” It replied, I felt its warmth glow warmer. My heat faded with every time I used the nickname for the child.

“You know there is another way, Baba.” No. I turned my spine towards the creature and followed the steps laid by the horse leading us. It shall exist. It has her eyes. He has her eyes.

“You can keep the gems.” I halted, my back still towards him. “You can keep both the gems.”

I pivoted to see him. To see her in him. The demjin inside of me awoke, I put it back to sleep. “She chose for you to live and for her to leave. Let me keep her wish.” He was what was left of her. I despised the voice inside which told me to listen to the child, to take the emeralds. I had to keep her promise. I also kept wary for Loona’s ears, listening into our criminal conversation. The child looked at me with admiration for the Baba that I was to him. I felt the warmth surround us.

“Thank you, Baba.” His eyes twinkled, and I pierced my fingernails into the sockets and took the gems. Turns out the demjin pretended to be asleep. It is a part of me after all, pretense that is. I couldn’t keep my wife’s promise but I followed the verses of my father. They did not create it. It shall not live. For something that shouldn’t have been, it made the most being-like noises in this moment of betrayal. Sleep tight my child. I closed its empty sockets with its cactus lids.