THE BABY WITH HER EYES
638 Words
CHAPTER 9: THE BABY WITH HER EYES
The plane roared like it knew what he’d done.
Buraq sat stiff in seat 17A, Raem asleep on his chest, a warm bundle too innocent to carry the blood that tied them together. The baby’s fingers curled around a button on Buraq’s coat, and for a moment, he thought about cutting that button off. Anything to keep this child from clinging to him.
But Raem was only days old.
And he had Riya’s eyes.
Wide. Unblinking. Deep brown and endlessly searching — just like hers the night before she died, whispering one name on her bruised lips.
> "Ahyan."
Not his name. Never his.
Buraq didn’t deserve it anyway.
---
In the apartment he rented on the outskirts of Melbourne, the air was cold and smelled like disinfectant and pine. He placed Raem in a second-hand crib, beside a plant he’d already let die.
The silence was too loud.
> “You sleep just like her,” he whispered to the child. “You cry in the night… just like she did.”
Raem stirred. A small whimper. Buraq didn’t touch him.
He sat by the window and smoked. Again. And again. Smoke was the only thing that didn’t cry back.
He thought of Waleed and Arbaz, cowards who ran.
He thought of Rehan, whose blood still stained the sleeves of his mind.
And he thought of Riya, broken in that hospital bed, her baby crying, her body leaking life into linen.
> "You r***d Her."
"You took something sacred, and buried it under your hunger."
No court punished him. No bullet reached him.
But guilt lived rent-free in his spine, a crooked thing. A cancer with teeth.
---
He dreamt of her often.
Riya standing in the delivery room, not screaming — just staring. Blood leaking from her eyes instead of tears.
> "You touched me when I was screaming no," she whispered in the dream.
"Now carry my son — and see if he ever calls you father."
He always woke up gasping.
---
At the baby’s one-month mark, Buraq tried to read from a book.
His voice cracked.
> “This is… Raem. Your name means… mercy. God’s mercy. Not mine. I have none to give.”
The child gurgled.
And then—
> “Maybe,” Buraq said, “maybe you’ll forget me one day. Maybe you’ll call someone else Dad. Maybe you’ll never know who I really was.”
He paused.
Then, bitterly:
> “I hope you never do.”
---
One night, Raem cried for hours. No fever, no hunger — just grief. Buraq held him, chest to chest.
> “What do you want from me?” he asked.
“I’m not the man you need. I’m the man who let her die.”
Tears slipped down his face — the first ones in years.
> “You look just like her. Don’t do that to me.”
He didn’t sleep for two nights after that.
---
Later that week, he found one of Riya’s hair ties in the bottom of the diaper bag. It smelled like lavender. It cut through him like a knife.
He put it in a shoebox beside the crib — next to a hospital bracelet with her name, and the picture of her holding Raem, right before she slipped away.
It was the only time she smiled in months.
> “I’ll raise him,” he whispered. “Not to be like me. Not to be like any of us.”
---
That night, Raem looked up at him and smiled.
Buraq froze.
For a second, the shame drowned. For a second, love threatened to rise.
Then he turned away.
> “Don’t smile at me. I don’t deserve it.”
---
END OF CHAPTER 9
- Writer
