A Cry So Big It Must Part the Clouds (Micro)

I'm trying my hand at some literary writing. Here's a micro (500 words or less) piece.

A Cry So Big It Must Part The Clouds

The little one’s cries rise up like a smoke signal, a strobe light, an SOS balloon blotting out the sky. They expand to fill the whole space. Her panic pumps them full of energy till the house is ringing with her full-throated, wide-mouthed, tongue-quivering wail. They vault me from my bed or chair or away from the stove. She cries high and urgent and louder by the second. 

Now.

Now, she cries eight, nine, a hundred times a day. But at first, she did not cry at all. She came to us, a foster child, at 20 months old, grossly obese and nearly silent. A lifetime spent in a crib with one sugar bottle after another.

Literally, a lifetime.

When we tentatively waded into visits with extended birth family months after she came to us they exclaimed, “She talks! We didn’t think she’d ever talk!” I hid my quick flash of anger at their acknowledged, complicit neglect by turning to straighten her ponytail or check her diaper.

I mothered her, blatantly, in front of them.

Under my care this girl lost seven pounds and grew three inches in one year. She is the only child I’ve ever known to go backwards in clothing sizes. She went from toddler size six to size five to size four. For the first time in her life, almost three years old now, she can wear pants that don’t need the legs rolled up. That silent, obese girl who could only haul her hulking body a few steps before crashing weakly to the floor is now running, tumbling, cavorting, calling over her shoulder, laughing, “Wookat me, Mama!”

It is, as if, as the weight peeled off and lightened her body so it also freed her mind. As if, back then, her weight took up all the space in the room but now that she is free of it her voice can, must, take up all the air in the room. 

No longer tethered by her weight, or that of the hulking, intimidating mother who appeared at her crib-side only to plug up her mouth so she could not speak; this girl is free, now, to rise to the sky with the cry, look at me, so loud it must part the clouds.

I feed her willful, insistent hunger for presence after a babyhood of silence with books and poems dripping and succulent with vocabulary. It’s working. Her expanding vocabulary is absorbing her fears like a puddle of thick-sticky molasses pulling crumbs under its placid, shiny surface.

She consumes books as she once consumed bottles, leafing through the pages and whisper-telling herself the story I just read to her. In the night, when I roll over, there is the thump-thump of books raining down over the side, slipping loose from where she stashed them in my bedding, the place she believes books like to sleep, tucked in like chicks beneath a broody hen.