Sybil and the Saguaro

Abstract

Sybil and the Saguaro Casey Bell (bio) Sybil had been sleep-starved since the baby was born. For the past ten weeks, she’d had only two or three hour reprieves between the crying. In his crib, Elliot wailed in piercing, severe screams so hard that Sybil thought he’d blow his little lungs out. He was premature and colicky, born with no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes. Pale blue veins traced beneath his translucent skin. Elliot’s eyes were black like his father’s and when Sybil looked into them, no matter how hard she searched, she couldn’t connect. He wouldn’t latch to Sybil’s breast—a condition her doctor called nipple confusion. He writhed and resisted when she tried to place him in a nursing position, straining to find the muscles to turn his face away from her. If Elliot wasn’t sleeping, he was screaming. Sybil’s husband, Ted, tried to be helpful. He made oversized portions of Sybil’s favorite foods, like he’d done before Elliot was born. While she was in her third trimester, Ted did all of the cooking, and Sybil would sit under a blanket on the couch eating bowls of mashed potatoes with butter and garlic, and fat noodles smothered in tomato sauce. Ted made chocolate chip cookies and Sybil ate them hot out of the oven with big chilled glasses of milk. Careful not to wake her, he quietly collected the dishes stacked on her basketball belly. Now, though, the thought of food passing through her seemed grotesque. She was torn and needed stitches after the birth. There was blood and swelling and burning. Sybil wanted some semblance of control over her body’s mechanisms. Still, Ted cooked, and untouched foil-covered dishes filled the fridge. Sybil was frail and her cheekbones jutted. But what did it matter if she wasn’t nursing? She could not produce the milk that the baby did not want. A neat little circle of nothing, Sybil thought. Ted told her all the time that she wasn’t being patient enough, that things would get better. The baby would sleep, he insisted. Her body would mend. All of this was natural. Sybil thought about the slow death of a wide-eyed wildebeest, jerking between the clenched bloody fangs of a lion on the savannah, and how that was natural too. Ted was always trying to calm Sybil down, insisting she needed to give herself time to adjust. The last time he told her to be patient, they were in the car on the way home from one of Elliot’s check ups, and Sybil thought of driving off the road. [End Page 123] ________ It was midnight when she decided to leave. She’d just put Elliot back in his crib after giving him a bottle and swaddling him snuggly. The baby never seemed comforted or sated, only like he’d exhausted himself. Ted snored on his back with his mouth agape. Sybil moved through the dark house, her cotton nightgown skimming the floorboards. She stopped before the front door and slid on her brown leather sandals. Without thinking to close the door behind her, she stepped out into the clear cold air. Sybil walked down the driveway to the quiet street. Rows of porch lights and lampposts illuminated one manicured lawn after the next. The neighborhood hummed a hushed white noise while everyone slept in their designated spaces. She walked and walked, falling into a mindless rhythm. Sybil went for miles. Spaces between the houses grew longer, until the Catalina suburbs fell away and she was alone on the black road under the sprawling star-strewn sky. The moon was slung low in the sky like a lone pearly eyeball. Sybil walked toward it staring straight into its glow. Moonbeams stretched down and looped around her, pulling her onward. She moved away from the road, deep into The Sonoran Desert. Clumps of saltbush and junegrass peppered the gently sloping hills. Giant saguaros reached their arms to the inky sky, suspended in holy praise. It was hours before Sybil stopped. A pale sliver of golden sun peered over the mountains. Her head felt...