Mine, Mine, Sweet Little Eye

The clock said 3:19. Abigail had been watching the minutes change since three.

Beside the clock sat the baby monitor, doing its trick again: static, soft and steady, like someone chewing cellophane in another room.

Heather had gone down at eleven. Three-month-olds don't sleep all night. The books were smug about it. Somewhere in the static, a voice had started singing.

"Mine, mine, sweet little eye..."

A woman's voice. A rasp, the kind that comes from a lifetime of ash settling in the lungs. Rock‑a‑bye Baby, except the tune had gone off‑true, like the singer couldn’t recall what joy was meant to fix.

Abigail was up before the second verse.

Hallway. Mushroom nightlight. The childproof knob cover, which she fought and won. She hit the light.

Heather lay in the crib, awake. Her eyes weren't on her mother. They were on the corner above the rocking chair, where there was nothing but wall and shadow. Smiling at it. Gummy, delighted, the smile she saved for warm bottles and faces she trusted.

"Hey, baby. Look at Mama."

Heather looked. The smile came a half-second late, aimed a little past Abigail's shoulder.

Marc came in one-socked, hair flat on one side. Closet. Under the crib. Behind the curtain, which he lifted like a rug he knew was clean.

"Abby. There's nobody here."

"The monitor. Listen to it."

He crossed the room. Marc wired houses for a living and trusted outlets like scripture. He looked at the unit in her hands. Then at the wall.

"Abby." He crouched at the outlet. "It's unplugged."

He held up the plug. Yellow cord, dusty prongs.

She stared at it. She'd plugged the thing in after the eleven o'clock feed. Almost sure, anyway. Tired enough that almost sure was all she had.

"Battery's dying," he said, winding the cord around the unit. "They pick up garbage when they die. Truck radios, other monitors. It's noise."

"It was singing."

"Noise that sings."

"You told me my mom wasn't crazy," she said. "After Timothy."

He went quiet. Timothy, her baby brother, dead at four months. Their mother kept his monitor plugged in for two years after the funeral, hissing at nobody. She'd told Marc all of it early on, when they still traded their worst things.

"You're not her," he said.

"I'm checking on her every hour till morning."

"Okay," he said. "Okay."

The singing had stopped the second the light came on. Heather was still watching the corner, patient, like she was waiting for somebody to come back.

---

By noon she had a folder.

Printouts, highlighted yellow, ranked by how believable they were. Ten years of reading other people's insurance claims had taught her how to tell a liar from a bad day. She'd quit when Heather came. The eye for it stayed.

Marc found the pages dealt across the table like cards when he came home for lunch.

"Houston. A family heard a man cursing through their baby's monitor. Ohio, a woman's ex, talking on the same channel. It happens."

Marc looked at the pile. He got the stubby screwdriver from the junk drawer and took the unit apart by the salt. He lifted the circuit board and turned it in the light.

"No chip. No Wi-Fi. It's not on the internet, Abby, and nobody can hack a thing that isn't on the internet." He laid the board on the table. "It's a walkie-talkie. When the battery's low it catches garbage. Truckers. The weather channel."

"The weather channel doesn't sing."

"No," he said. "It doesn't."

He put it back together slow and sure, the way he spliced wire. "Take the guest room tonight. I'll sit with her."

"You climb ladders at six a.m."

"Somebody in this house should be rested around electricity," he said, and almost smiled.

---

Two o'clock. She woke with a dry mouth and the static already going.

Not singing tonight. Observing.

"Yellow sleeper," the voice rasped. "Red blanket."

She looked at the screen. The picture glowed green: Heather on her back in the yellow sleeper, red blanket over the rail where it had sat all week.

A calm part of her, the part that sounded like Marc, said: you knew that. You dressed her.

Down the hall in four steps, receiver in her fist, the voice riding along.

The childproof cover took two tries.

"Get out of my house."

"Mine," said the voice.

She swung the receiver against the floorboards. Again. The shell split. Parts skittered under the dresser. The hiss cut out mid-word.

Then she had Heather in her arms, and the light switch did nothing. Dead bulb or wrong switch, she never learned which.

Marc filled the doorway, hall light behind him.

She was backed against the crib rail, shouting at the rocking chair, at the wall above it. Heather screamed into her neck, fists wound in her mother's hair. Blood made the shell shard in her fist slippery.

"Abby. Abby. There's nobody here."

Later, neither of them could agree on whether the broken speaker got in one more word.

---

The doctor's office opened at eight. By 8:10 Marc had gone quiet behind the bedroom door. Abigail lingered in the hall with a mug she wasn’t taking a sip from.

Pieces came through. "Three nights, four hours a night." A pause. Then, softer: "Her mother. After her brother."

He came out holding the phone. "Dr. Okafor can see you Thursday. She called something in for sleep. It's at the pharmacy, and..."

"Say the word she used."

He studied the floor. "Postpartum psychosis. Then, and I quote, 'which is treatable.'"

She'd read the medical sites at five a.m. Her whole week sat itemized under Symptoms. Funny, the things a web page can know about you. "The voice knew her sleeper was yellow," she said, and heard how it sounded. "I dressed her."

"I know." He took her hand. "Tonight you sleep. Real, pill-assisted sleep. Everything looks different after."

Then he carried the monitor pieces out in a grocery bag. From the kitchen window she watched him drop them in the recycling and press them flat. In her line of sight. On purpose. Kindness, or a man getting rid of evidence.

---

Four o’clock, and the daylight sagged into a dull, washed‑out gray. Marc stood in the doorway too long, keys in his fist. "Twenty minutes."

"Go. I want ten minutes of my house back."

Heather slept in the crib, fists by her ears. The room smelled of baby and clean laundry. Ordinary, right up until it wasn't.

The last shard of the monitor had skated under the dresser. She fished it out and stood, eye level with the crib rail.

A streak lay across the wood, long and wet-looking, like a finger dragged and lifted. She touched it. Cold. The room was warm as fresh bread. The wood stayed cold.

Beside the streak, a smudge. Five fingers, spread thin. Marc's hand would have covered it twice over, and one finger was longer than Heather's whole fist.

Something had stood at that rail. Looking down at her sleeping daughter. Close enough to lean.

Ten years of pipe-flood claims rose in her: document everything. She got out her phone.

Flash.

Clean wood. Pale grain. Nothing else. She shot it twice more with her elbow braced. Every picture came back dry.

She looked up. The streak was still there. Still shining.

Down the hall, the garage door rattled up. Then Marc, with his stapled paper bag and his gentle, unanswerable logic.

She didn't call out. If he saw clean wood, she was down to her eyes against the world. She stayed between the crib and the corner.

Heather smiled in her sleep.

---

The pill was small and peach-colored. She took half, because half was a compromise and a whole one was surrender. That was at nine.

The house had no static in it anymore. Just the furnace ticking and the wind trying the gutters. Marc slept the sleep of a man who had done everything right. She lay listening to him breathe and thought about the quilt in the closet, half-bound, her grandmother's tailoring shears still folded in the batting. Then the pill took her under.

She woke at 3:07.

No static. No speaker left anywhere in the house. The singing was coming from down the hall, thin through the nursery door. Live.

"Mine, mine, sweet little eye..."

Unamplified. A real mouth, thirty feet away, singing over her daughter.

She was moving before she was all the way awake. Closet. Batting. The shears, heavy as a prayer book, cold from the dark. The hallway ran long and blue under the mushroom light. The voice never paused, never drew breath.

The childproof cover gave on the first try.

The rocking chair sat by the window. Above it, in the corner where Heather's eyes went every night, the dark had opened a seam. Wall behind the wall, showing through.

"Get away from her."

The voice kept singing. Rock-a-bye, wrong in the same three places.

She raised the shears.

---

Marc woke to screaming and hit the hallway running, bare feet finding one toy after another in the dark.

He got the light on. His wife stood over the crib with the shears above her head, both hands on the handles, aimed at the empty corner. Heather lay beneath the blades, laughing up at the ceiling. Not crying. Laughing, delighted, at something up there.

He caught a wrist, then both. The shears hit the floor and slid. He swept them under the rocking chair with the flat of his hand, and the metal bit like a wrench left in the truck bed overnight. The wind worked at the window over the chair. Single pane. He held on to that.

"There's nobody here." He said it four times. "Abby. Look at me."

She was saying the baby's name. Only the baby's name.

Somewhere in the back of his head, her mother's monitor hissed on.

Later there would be the doctor, and the drive, and the deciding. That night he just held his wife while she shook, and looked again at the corner. Plain wall, plain paper, and one new gouge, four inches long, at the height of a full swing. He hadn't seen her swing. He hadn't seen the room before the light, and before that, asleep. Almost sure, it turned out, was all anybody had.

The shears lay under the rocking chair. If there was paper on the points, she had made the gouge herself.

If there wasn't.

He left them where they lay.

In the crib, Heather watched the dark ceiling and smiled, and would not look at either of them.