She carefully lifts the little baby out of the straps on her chest. He sleeps, his head squished into his shoulders. He is so dark, a deep pasty brown with black hair spread on his arms like smooth grass. She puts him slowly in my outstretched arms, his head falls into the crook between my breast and my shoulder. He is warm, his chest moves up and down in gentle flutters. I sniff his cheek, it smells powdery. I move my lips against his soft fuzzy skin.
She loses them one by one, sea foam curling into a receding wave. Sometimes she is dancing, laughing, unaware of the tears inside her, pink flesh like fresh lining in an empty open mouth. Sometimes she lays her head on the porcelain bowl, fingertips in its muddy depths, asking them not to go. She draws them in charcoal on the wall: shadow child one through five. They just need a little bit of color. She tells her husband this. She insists. He watches planes blink away in the night sky and decides that it is time to find a better life.
Liam rushes down the bank and into a clump of seagulls. They burst up the beach, their wings slice the sunlight above me. I am breathless for a moment while I fall backward in time, the birds that we hung together in his baby blue room spun our moments into memories on their paper backs. You fucked me with my swollen belly pressed to the window because I said I didn’t want to look at the crib.
