wildcat

Things began to go strange when the first glass-skinned child was born in New Jersey, looking for all the world like a cathedral window -- giving off the soft music of a thousand chimes with each breath. There was blood everywhere, the mother died almost immediately of internal bleeding, and one of the nurses couldn't help the scream that slipped right now. The doctor would never be able to forgive himself, but the child was slick with fluid and still quite hot, he yelped. Her surface shattered on contact with hospital floor like so many champagne flutes dumped at a party, people talking and things broke. The mother's gasping death rattle. What was underneath the child's shattered skin lay splayed out in the wet; when the last pieces settled down there was a hard silence in the delivery room. They couldn't tell anybody about this, right? That horrible thought bubbled right up in all of them, there, and then came the memory -- now quite dim -- of the father, caught in traffic, rushing to be with his wife to welcome their little one. They couldn't tell anyone. Right? Right? No one could know, only -- and time seemed to move slowly, here -- someone produced a camera phone and something invisible about the world began to change shape.