GABY'S CHILD

Excerpted from my novel:

24

Gaby’s Child

April, 2004

 

It took Earl a long time to fall asleep that night, and when he did finally drift off, he had a terrible dream.

He was with a group of successful and important men, and he too was successful and important.  They were all elegantly dressed in tuxedos and black ties.  They were sitting around an elegant table in a huge elegant ballroom, sipping champagne, chattering profoundly, being very impressed with themselves.

He happened to glance across the ballroom into the foyer and saw the quick movement of a shadowy figure.  The figure drifted into the ballroom, and he saw that it was a woman, an ominously familiar woman.  An icy block of fear bloated his stomach as he realized it was Gaby.  She looked exactly as she had decades ago.  Her long, jet-black hair framed her pudgy face, and her beautiful brown eyes sparkled like diamonds.  She was grasping the hand of a small, ugly child, and the two of them strode into the ballroom and towards his table.  Soon they were close enough for him to realize that the child was a girl and that she was severely deformed.

He screeched his chair away from the table, but before he could get up, Gaby swung in front of him and tugged the little girl closer to herself, deliberately blocking his view of his friends.

“Stop here,” Gaby told the child, smiling meanly as her eyes drilled into his.

He gaped at the child, horrified to realize that she was not human; she was a monster.  A tiny, monkey-like monster with bulging black eyes and huge flabby ears.  Her skin was olive-colored and wrinkled and scaly, and tufts of gray hair swept out of her ears and nose.

All the elegant men at his table stood up and formed a circle around him and Gaby and the monster.  They murmured and whispered, and he knew that it was not Gaby and her monster that interested them.  It was him. His snotty friends wanted to watch his reaction to this hideous confrontation. 

          “Sit on the nice man’s lap, dear,” Gaby said to the monster.

The horrid creature leaped into his lap and giggled and tugged at the buttons on his shirt.  She stank of grime and urine, and he snapped his head away and breathed through his mouth.  Then, fearful that his friends would condemn him if he rebuked the poor creature, he forced himself to look at her again.

The monster was gone.  Instead, now snuggling in his lap was a sweet-scented, strikingly beautiful little girl.  Her bronze skin was smooth and soft, and she had Gaby’s long black hair and sparkly eyes.

And then suddenly the little girl was gone.  He looked down at his empty lap, and an icy grief overwhelmed him.

Gaby squeezed his hand.  Her meanness vanished and she smiled sadly. “I would have given you a wonderful love that you’ll never be able to find again.” she said.  “Because you didn’t even know how to see it when it was there.  You threw away our moment, Charlie.”