The Baby Cried
written by: Kathy Whipple
Everything has changed upon your return. The velvet drapes covering the windows have been flung open, allowing insulting light into the room. You must have been away for some time, as dust motes hang stagnant in the air, and spiders have woven a labyrinth into the corners of the ceiling.
The rooms of the house are filled with crates and furniture covered in linen. What was familiar to you is gone, the wall darkening like a halo around where the tapestry once hung. You hated that tapestry because the eyes followed you, and yet, somehow, you miss it. The family crest, too, has disappeared. The sacrilege is unfathomable, as the crest was there even before you. You find the heirlooms flung into the cold fireplace and pick them from the ash. Even if you don’t like them, they belong.
The new tenants make the house smell of smoke and garlic, and it stings your eyes. They scurry about, placing items where they don’t belong, and you are filled with rising agitation. Their baby cries. You stuff lint in your ears, which only leaves a fiber trail on the mahogany floor. The mother picks up the lint with a puzzled crease between her eyes.
You bang on the pipes thinking that will shut the baby up, but it only wails louder until the mother finally lifts and rocks it.
In the night, when the blinding sun sleeps, you rehang the tapestries. The mother yells when she sees them in their rightful place. “Shit, Larry. That’s not funny.”
“What?” He shrugs.
You close the drapes and move the lamp. It doesn’t belong in that room. The mother gets after the man called Larry again: “If you didn’t like where it was, you could have said something.”
He says, disinterestedly, that he doesn’t care where the woman puts it.
“Then why did you move it?”
But Larry doesn’t answer, and you watch as the woman looks thoughtfully at the lamp.
Of course, you knew there would be tenants, but not that they would be so noisy or meddlesome. They fill the rooms with absurdities, ugly things with no soul, nail plastic frames to the wainscoted walls. They lock doors. Put gates in front of the stairs.
You do what you can to combat the wrongness, open windows when their cooking assaults the air with onion and egg, turn off lights left on, remove the offensive pictures from the walls. The mother says she’s losing her mind.
Still, the baby cries, but the mother seems to no longer hear. You can’t stand the pitiful sound, so you pick up the baby. But the mother screams and screams, begging, even as you try to calm her. You hand her the baby; you never wanted it. You were only trying to help.
Now they are gone. The house is settled. Everything is back in its place.
Oddly, you miss them, and so you wait for the next.
- The Baby Cried - November 2, 2025
- Her Son - April 25, 2025
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