His Kidnapper's Shoes by Maggie James

Daniel from me as well.
    It already had, though. My fervent pleas to some unknown God who I didn’t believe in anyway went unheard.
    I slumped back on my heels, eyes unseeing through the tears, the dead body of my adored Daniel in my arms, and I screamed. Huge furious shrieks tore from my throat, filling the silence of the empty house with my rage and denial and utter devastation. There was nobody to hear them, in that house so far from town, and I screamed until I couldn’t scream anymore, my throat raw. I held Daniel with one arm while I pounded the floor with the other until the hurt in my bruised and battered fist stopped me.
    I lay on the floor, curled around the body of my baby, for the rest of the day. The room grew dark as night came and still I lay motionless on the cold carpet.
    I’d stopped crying. Tears seemed pointless. No way would they ever be capable of expressing even a tiny part of the raw emotions within me. I had died inside, along with my baby.
    I woke up on the floor the day after, cold and stiff, with my baby even colder in my arms.
    I knew I should tell someone he’d died.
    But I didn’t.
    I don't know if you can understand all this, Daniel. Grief had probably obscured my judgement. I don’t think I thought very clearly back then. Perhaps I believed if I didn’t tell anyone, if I didn’t register the death, then it hadn’t really happened and my baby hadn’t died.
    Telling somebody would have made it all real, you see, Daniel. I’d have ended up with a death certificate in my possession, as I had with Gran, a stark piece of paper making it official and turning the nightmare trapping me into stark reality. I’d have had to choose a coffin. At the thought of my baby’s body in a tiny wooden box, I broke down all over again. Misery of such savagery and depths swamped me, the likes of which I hope to God you never have to deal with, Daniel.
    On the evening of the second day, I knew I had to let go of my baby.
    I washed and dried him and dressed him in his best clothes. I wrapped him up against the night air outside and placed him gently in his baby sling. I went to the shed at the bottom of the garden, and took out a small shovel.
    I put on my coat, and left the house with my baby and the shovel, walking away from town, down the little track leading to the nearby woods, where I’d often walked with Gran. I was familiar with those oak-covered hills from my time living with her. Dog walkers came to let their dogs off the leash in parts of them. I didn’t go near those areas. My baby had to be somewhere safe, out of the way, far from keen noses and digging paws, away from the sacrilege that would be to his beloved body.
    So I carried him, held tight against me in his sling, along with the shovel, up higher, away from where the dog walkers frequented. I panted up the hill until I stood, hot and sweating, deep amongst the trees. I found one that was still young, a sapling really, and it seemed to me to be the perfect tree under which to lay my baby. The sapling would rise and thicken with age, its roots would wind around his body and that way he would never truly die. This beautiful tree would hold him safe and secure within its embrace and the lifecycle in the trunk, the branches, the thrusting roots, would give some sort of existence back to him. I’d found the tree of life.
    I started to dig. When my arms ached and my back hurt, and the hole was about as deep as I could make it, I squeezed my baby tight. I kissed him for the very last time. Then I lowered him tenderly into his grave, and laid the little teddy bear I’d bought for him after his birth on top of him. I covered him with the earth, sobs choking my throat all the time, patting the soil down and finally heaving some heavy stones on top. He was at rest now, and he’d sleep beneath those tree roots forever.
    Darkness had fallen by the time I finished. Exhaustion, both physical and mental, overwhelmed me; I stumbled down the hill,