Night Owl Vigil

I kick open the back door like a UFC fighter, discharging my rage into the inanimate and unfeeling, instead of her. The thud and clatter echoes off the 3rd floor fire-escape, across the back alley, reverberating off of dumpsters and broken bottles, scattering the rats. The door to the apartment building slams shut behind me and the few constellations, not choked or clouded by street lights and Christmas displays, reflect off the still River. Silence slinks back into the slumbering void of beyond 3 AM. If there is a moon out tonight, she’s hiding.

Crisp, cold, cutting, out without my jacket. Steaming in a short sleeve, sweating off the hot air and the friction I left inside with her crying slumped on the kitchen floor. A war-drum beat still thumps in my head, my heart bleeds out with every pump. I catch the blinking red-eye of my landlord’s security camera recording me thermonuclear on the infrared. I go to the railing and try to restore my breath. Sighs and exasperations crystallize into frost.

It’s been 9 months since she she wanted to, 6 months since we’ve been clean, 2 months since it became apparent, with the swelling and the sickness that the seed took and we made a new thing. Now, I catch her creeping back into the apartment, reeking of the Camel Krush she just huffed when she thought I was sleeping. I confronted her at the sink and barked so loud that it looked like her soul jumped from her skin. She broke down for a minute but then got cold and in the monotone of the emotionally spent, confessed to smoking and drinking since the ultrasound a few weeks ago. When I cried about the health of the Us living in her, she told me she already has an appointment set at the clinic when the Holidays end. I unleashed my tongue, primal and vindictive, a blur of the vitriol about the shit person she is. I howled for my lost whelp for who knows how long before she started balling again.

I pull a cigarette from the pack I ripped from her pocket and immediately lip the mouthwash tasting cancer juice in the filter, candy-cane flavored poison for the unwanted baby inside. Since the consensus is death tonight, I too say fuck it or flush it to this 6 months of sobriety, of cleansing, nesting, of a healthy future with offspring and things other than lies and dissolution. It was a pleasant delusion, an unreal dream for us hungry ghosts. Her mind is made up. Three weeks of damage done to early development, boozing when I was snoozing, chain-smoking while I was at work. Dismayed my say doesn’t go beyond the contribution of my DNA. Knowing the child I was ready to live for will not be alive much longer. I give up on giving up smoking.

I light it and take a drag. The nicotine hits and makes me dizzy. I sway on the landing and look down at the street. The rats resume their dinner of a busted trash bag buffet and I feel that familiar warm wash buzz of calm that comes with another puff. I exhale and the anger starts to slip off me, the menthol stings my lungs. I didn’t know I had this paternal drive until I saw that tadpole-looking embryo lighting up the darkness in the picture I keep in my pocket. But there it is, that ancestral fire to survive and thrive, the visceral drive to foster the next of kin, that fueled my forefathers to keep the line going that got me here. Rancor and rationale clash within. My caveman wiring of the “to be and breed” instinct dashed by the fact that it is her body, her choice. And she made it without me.

I take another drag and catch a faint glint reflect in my periphery, the light of a blossoming ember bouncing off a blurred moon. But the moon has been hiding and would be high in the sky at this time of night. So I hold the lighter lit and see a white faced owl looking back at me, solemn and still as stone, perched undisturbed on an upper landing. Its eyes refract the fire, its face an alabaster death mask cowled in feathers, expressionless, observing me. I stare back, the flame wavers in the breeze, and the last bit of fight flees from me as the gravity of finality fills in. In my mind, I know a baby is no balm for a toxic relationship, no fix for a fatally wounded We. It would be inhumane to bring another creature into the fallout of our failed partnership. A living hell for all parties involved, especially for the kid. I let the lighter go out, but those unblinking orbs stay lit.

I know I have to give up and give in. I’ll do what I can to make the end easy for all of us. Do the honorable thing. I pull the picture out of my pocket and open it in the dark; my mind filling in the monochrome outline of that little fetus in the dim. Snapshot memorabilia of what will never be. With a final puff of that Kamel Crush, I torch the edge and the paper goes up quick. Shadows of the Owl’s vigil dance against the wall as ashy smoke returns to the wind. I let it go before my fingers burn and it sputters down to the street. I feel the whoosh before I hear the squeal. I can taste the feathers in the air. The moon creeps out from behind the clouds and bares light on the empty handrail my stoic visitor had just been. That silent specter of death lost to the night, flying off with its fresh kill.

The December cold creeps back up on me and I return to the apartment, more composed than when I left kicking and seething. Resolved to deal with this as harmoniously as can be, I call for her as I enter the kitchen. I find it empty except for a puddle of blood pooled where she was laying. Frantic, I yell for her again and follow the anemic response through the bedroom into the brightly lit bathroom.

She’s doubled over on the toilet, hugging herself as she rocks through the cramping, bloody clothes strewn on the floor. She looks up when I enter, her shaking face blanched like the Owl’s blank visage. Her voice quivers between a laugh and a sob, "No," when I ask if she’s okay.