My boy Tomkin just turned four. Three weeks ago he was my Tomkin, the one who hummed to the root cellar and fell asleep with his thumb in his mouth and a thimble in his fist. Then almost overnight, and I mean that near enough literally, something turned over in him and I have been living with a little stranger ever since.
He does not sleep. Not the way children do not sleep, in fits, but genuinely does not. I will wake at the black end of the night and find him sitting bolt upright in the dark, not crying, not playing, just staring at the wall with the flattest look, like something much older than four is peering out through his face. When he catches me watching he looks at me like he cannot place who I am. My own son. That is the part that has hollowed me out.
He eats and eats and is never full. He cleared the whole cellar shelf of dried mushroom in two days and then brought the burrow down because there was no more, and he is somehow thinner and sharper in the face for all of it. And that sound he makes is not a tantrum. It is a hellish scream, a thing I did not know a child’s throat could hold, and halfway through it his voice drops and climbs and doubles over itself like it is not one voice at all, like there is something older speaking underneath the boy. Nothing reaches it. And he is strong now in a way that frightens me, he wrenched the cellar latch clean off the wood and pitched the porridge pot across the room with two hands.
There is one thing I can barely make myself write. Two nights ago I came to his door and he was off the floor. Above his cot, a clear hand’s breadth of dark air beneath him, hanging there quiet as you please. I blinked and he dropped and the screaming started again. I have told myself a hundred times it was the black of the room and my own worn-out eyes. I cannot make myself believe it.
He says strange clever things too, far past his years, and yesterday he repeated something back to me word for word that he had no way of knowing. I know exactly how this sounds written out. My gran would have hung iron on the door and I would have laughed at her, and I am not saying any of that, I promise you. I am saying I do not recognize my own child, I am terrified, and I do not know the first thing about how to reach him or what I have done wrong.