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> All day long, I kept thinking I gear… I dunno… snuffling sounds? Muted gurgles sometimes, and maybe… gasping? It was the weirdest thing.
. I was watching late night TV and between my own laughter at Stephen Colbert’s jokes I keep thinking I was hearing this stuff, Again and again, I hit the mute button- and the faint noises seemed to stop, so I figured it had to be something on the soundtrack. It was time for my nightly hunt for elusive sleep, so I turned off my friend the TV, took my soporific medications and tried to settle in to bed. I must have gotten to sleep a good deal earlier than usual, because before I knew it I was dreaming.
. In this dream everybody was crying. Everywhere I went, people were sobbing. My barista, the Uber driver, the teller at the bank. It was bizarre. And it seemed contagious. Soon, virtually everyone in the city seemed to be crying at once and the noise grew deafening!
. It was so frigging loud it actually woke me up! I propped myself up against he headboard and kind of chuckled to myself at the lunacy of it. But I stopped laughing when I heard some real crying- like serious, balls-out wailing coming from somewhere in my house! Why do these crazy things keep happening to me? Whoever it was, they were, like, really upset about something.
. Rubbing the sleep from my eye, I struggled to my feet. 4 AM. The nightly meds made me woozy as a drunk. Falling into my slippers I went to investigate. Following my ears, I roamed from room to room in a kind of “Marco Polo” game. Louder… louder… softer… I homed in on the utility room and flicked on the light- but there was no one there. Still the ungodly wailing was louder than ever. I began to look, incredulously in the closets and clothes dryer- anywhere possible, but nada. Until I opened the clothes hamper: There, on top of my old bedclothes, was a tiny crying baby! Wha? I don’t have kids! I got a vasectomy to ensure that I didn’t have the little bloodsuckers!Who put that little guy there? As a lifelong bachelor who has never even held a baby, I lifted the noisy thing up like I were holding an alien organism. I had no fucking idea what to do with it! Was it hungry? Angry? Did it have some kind of disease?
. I decided the safest place to keep it until I could figure out what to do with it was the bathtub. A yellow rubber duck seemed to calm it down for a moment. Maybe the little thing was just lonely. But as I sat on the toilet seat to contemplate my situation- those other noises returned- the snuffling, the gurgles, the gasping. Oh crap. The TV was certainly off. That was something else.
. So again I followed the sounds and found another baby in the pantry covered in powdered sugar! I grabbed it and put it with the other one and again: sobbing! From somewhere in the house. Somehow this seemed to set off the other two in the tub, who began wailing like they were being probed by aliens as I went to discover the worst of all possibilities!
. A bawling baby under the bed in the guest room! A howling infant in the kitchen trash can! A screeching pink monster in the hall closet! I carried the whole lot, erupting at top decibel and dumped them in the tub with the others. Altogether, it was the banshee chorus from Hell, ringing in my ears louder than any over-amped rock show I had ever heard in my youth. I had to go out to the living room to escape the ear-piercing intensity. Just then, the horn on my Honda began to sound in the garage! I dashed in to find… a baby at the wheel, playfully punching the horn with a perverse delight that was just irritating. I seized the tiny intruder to corral him with the other wild things, but at that moment, a hard, impatient knock came on my front door.
. Crap! With all this racket coming from my house at 4 AM, my meddling neighbor must have called the cops on me… again! I tripped the light switch and opened the door warily to find my meddling neighbor herself and her apologetic husband in their PJ’s on my doorstep. She demanded to know “What IS that racket ringing through the neighborhood when decent folk are trying to sleep?!” How could I explain it to her?
. I had an infestation of babies.
. She barged in and followed the incessant wailing and bellowing to the bathtub and knelt to soothe the beasts. Astonishingly, whatever she did, worked a charm. The grew as peaceful as cooing doves. I got a real earful from the woman for being a bad, unfeeling father, and what an irresponsible yadda yadda yadda. I just kind of tuned her out. It was 4 fucking AM! I was tired!
. In the end, we agreed that I would just give them all away to this childless woman. It was “a sign from God” she said, that she was meant to be a mother. Her husband? Well he looked to be more in my camp. But thank goodness she sent him for a wagon to cart them all away at once and as I shut the door behind them, the sudden all-enveloping peace and stillness was the most sublime thing I have ever experienced. Back to bed, hopefully for an uneventful night’s sleep.
. But as I threw aside the covers, there was another one curled up in my bed! A tiny, pudgy little guy who was just sleeping calmly like a little angel come to earth. Fuck. I grabbed some bedding and went out to sleep on the couch.
– But just this once, mind you. From now on, the baby sleeps on the couch and I get my bed back!
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© Kevin Paul Keelan and lastcre8iveiconoclast, 2020. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kevin Paul Keelan and lastcre8iveiconoclast with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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