I’m typing this in the corner of our bedroom where our daughter was born four days ago. I’m strapped into the blue swivel armchair with the Boppy pillow we bought for her older brother. Seventy-six years ago, Ray Bradbury wrote about the day our daughter was born. He predicted that her birthday would be silent yet so full of non-human noise. Alarm clocks tick-tocking in a futile attempt to wake an extinct species. The garage door opens for a driverless car already and forever sleeping within. No more cake. No more candles. No more presents. We are no more. The white outlines of a family are stilled against an exterior wall of their home like a monochrome sunburn. On our daughter’s birthday, the earth moves on without us. The mechanical mice clean the house as a disembodied voice recites poetry. The voice posits aloud to long-gone ears that “Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, / If mankind perished utterly.” Chewed-through electrical wires wait like wicks ready to combust and burn the whole house right down to the foundation until there’s nothing left. Soft rains might fall upon the smoldering heap. And the earth moves on; the clocks keep ticking.
Our daughter rests on the Boppy wrapped around my waist swaddled in deep dreams of light and shade and blurred and blobbed shapes, and a soft golden gleam blooms from the mid-century lamp on the thrifted roll top desk we got when her older brother was born. I never thought I’d have two kids born in Arkansas where the summer sticks to you like the flies in the adhesive traps we tried hanging in the kitchen our first full July in the house. It was too hot to play outside today. My son and I played Uno in the dining room for almost an hour while the cicadas screamed in the smoke wood against our back fence. I’m teaching him how to count in Tagalog. He can count to seven now. It might seem pointless, frivolous even, but he likes it and I like that he likes it. Outside, animals search for shade. It was 101 degrees today. Record-breaking heat today and tomorrow and tomorrow. I got a headache from the heat and had to sit in the bath to cool down. Did you know that newborns can’t regulate the heat of their bodies? My son sits on the toilet for one minute before he can hop off. He can count down from sixty now. He speeds up when he gets to twenty. There’s a playful urgency in his voice like a bomb full of bubbles, chocolate chips, chicken nuggets, and BBQ Pringles is about to go off. He smiles at me when zero comes and says again please daddy as if I had the power to rewind the clock.
At three in the morning, our room is quiet save for the rhythmic tick of the chain on the ceiling fan dancing in tandem with our daughter’s measured breathing. To my left, my wife rests on our bed unconsciously matching the cadence of our daughter’s exhalations. Our son is asleep on the other side of the house. The sun is still hours away. After I put our son down for bed, I went out to buy a new phone charger for my wife and also to get out of the house for a second. I insisted because her charger had started to fray, and the last thing any of us wants is for the charger to spontaneously combust. For the house to burn down in all this hellish heat. It was dark, and clouds were rolling, curling in from Oklahoma. In the Walmart parking lot, I saw lightning pulse behind the clouds. Soft rains might come, I hoped, but would it be enough? How many tomorrows do we have left? How many good mornings do my children have before their mouths are too dry to speak? How long before the bomb goes off and we are only afterimages, bone-white shadows plastered against the wall?
