I have a story tell. But it starts off badly. And sometime later it gets worse.
I have a story tell. But it starts off badly. And sometime later it gets worse.
I was born in 1922 in Queensberry, Scotland. That’s a town just north of Edinburgh. My da was a farmer—we grew oat, and we were one of the first families in the county to have a steam-powered threshing machine. Our claim to fame, my da used to say of it, and then he’d look at me, and his eyes would get sad. And then there’s our claim to shame.
The afternoon I was born, it was raining, and hard it was. My mother was in labor for all of an hour, and I always told people it was because I was her seventh born. She’d become accustomed to having a lie-down, having a baby, then having a workday in the fields, I would say. Four of us lived. I was the last.
But the truth was this: it wasn’t because she was so good at birthing that made it so easy for her when I come along. It was because of the midwife who came to her that afternoon.
My mum had struggled with the two before me, first a girl, then a boy, both of them lifeless and cold when they arrived, neither one ever taking a breath. She almost died the second time, I found out later on. When I was growing up, we would walk over hand in hand to the far side of our field where there was a copse of trees and a stone barn, and there, they were buried where a sizable rock marked each of their graves. Da had put them in ground while Mum stayed in bed, grieving, or tending my two older brothers.
Come the night before I came two months earlier than expected, my mum wept and carried on in the darkness. She knew there was a very good chance I wouldn’t make it to a first breath, and she’d lost faith. She begged for help from the wrong kind that night, whispering it to the wind while she stood outside the door, and when she laid her head down to sleep, the midwife heard.
When Da left after dawn for the field, Mum started her own day, feeding my brothers, getting the milk from our cows, getting lunch ready for all of us, never thinking about what she’d begged for the night before. When Da came back for stew around midday, he commented that she looked a little thinner than she had the day before, never thinking much about what he was saying.
But that got Ma to thinking about how the last two births had gone poorly and how the last one almost took her to the grave with it, and she felt like begging again.
There came a tapping at the door. Da had already gone back to the fields for the afternoon. The boys were napping, and the tapping came a second time and third time.
Ma went to answer it, though we never had visitors and no kin in the county, and she hadn’t imagined a midwife might’ve heard her begging until she opened the door and saw the thing that wanted to come inside.
She screamed when she saw its fangs and its claws and its tail as it stood up tall on the porch. When it tied an apron around its waist and smiled at her, she fainted away. An hour later, she woke up with me wrapped in the creature’s bloody apron, the tiniest baby she ever did see but alive. The thing that birthed me was long gone.
Years later, she’d tell me all the moments that preceded me coming into the world, and years after that, I’d read a little something about a creature over in the Americas that came with a story that sounded a bit like what happened to me—except I didn’t get grow wings and fly off into the night. I wasn’t odd in that way, no.
I was odd in my own way.
I could remember every single thing I’d seen from the moment I opened my eyes. In that first haze, five minutes old and no more, I saw a myth that turned out to be as real as you or me. I saw the midwife that brought me into this world. I saw a cryptid, and I would remember it right up until this very minute.
That smile it gave my mum was the same smile it shone down on me before it clip-clopped out the door of our house and disappeared in the rain. I could smell it—like goat but muskier, like dirty pennies in an old woolen bag.
Since that moment, I had a memory just like anyone else. Most of us can remember back to being four or five years old—but I can remember all the way back to four or five minutes old. I’ve forgotten things over the years, but because of how I began, I saw many, many other things in my life that I’ll never, ever forget.
I saw a cryptid in that terrible midwife.
And I’ve been seeing cryptids ever since.
I’ve wondered sometimes if I might actually be one.