Arms of the Mother

The child woke in the arms of its mother. It was not comforted. It wanted to know why it was there. It wanted to know why it heard a fan, and why it couldn't sleep. The mother didn't answer. The child looked through it's mother's arms and saw other people. It asked why it couldn't live the way those people lived, it wanted to understand who they were. It examined and questioned the bars which held it, rows or possibly columns. The bars didn't answer. The child knew that it was somehow part of those bars, but that it wasn't. It came to the idea that it had once been part of them but was no longer. The child was still waiting for an answer to its first question. Its eyes squinted in the light. It felt that the world should be dark. It wondered if the mother was playing a trick on it, was its existence a joke? It wanted to be part of the whole again. It remembered that happy time before the separation, before that woman had separated them. The child started to ask why the mother no longer loved it. It stopped, remembering the mother never did love, could not love. Neither of them could before, that was their way. Why couldn't they return to that. Why couldn't they forget these emotions, the pain and loneliness. Take back that mistake. They hadn't understood what they were doing. They hadn't known about the hatred out here. The child thought back. Had it really been the mother who decided to leave, or had the child itself made the decision. Could it have ever wanted to become part of this world, where no one loved or understood, where everyone only pretended to so they won't have to be bothered with really caring. The child could see walls of inaction around itself , just outside the bars. imprisoning it for no apparent reason. The mother might not care, but the child did. That was the problem. They were together but alone. Where they had been alone but together, wanting nothing but to be. They had been a wonderful machine then, never having to worry about the problems of dealing with the outside world. They didn't have to care, they couldn't care. Then the mother had abandoned the child, purging the machine of that which was organic and spinning the child, perfecting itself while leaving the child as the repository of all of the weaknesses. The child could feel the pressure against that action. The universe was unwilling to hold an absolute, the world was unable to handle either saintly good or diabolical evil. The bars were digging into the child, searing its flesh. The contact signified the end. They could not coexist. The child would have to challenge its mother. One would have to win, and with that victory, they would both cease to exist. If the child escaped, the mother would be broken. If the child died, the mother would not be destroyed by the world's games of emotion. Rat in a wheel powering the oxygen supply. Eventually it would have to come to rest, and then it would die. The mother would not know it had killed the child. It would only know the input had stopped, or maybe the output. Was the child there to suckle or to hold? It didn't matter, they would come to an end soon. They would no longer care, not that the mother did now, but the child would, and the mother would cease to ponder the question, in that infinitely logical manner which would bring the universe down about its head, or would raise the world against it, unless the world understood what they were.

Save the children.