On the night of the first lunar eclipse of the year, Leah Beartooth's child was born with exactly eight eyes.
"They're adorable," I said, turning little Solomon over to check for any other imperfections. He seemed an otherwise normal, vigorous newborn, albeit one with a tidy sequence of eyes encircling his head, all perfectly lined up, reminding me of a nest of frog’s eggs. They blinked and stared up at me as if seeing me through a watery nursery.
"He looks like a spider," observed the baby's big sisters Ariadne, Arachne, and Antiope.
"It's a little creepy," Leah said, rather cautiously, so as not to offend my skill as a midwife. "I'm not sure I'm ready to have an obviously Strange child. Can you hide the extra eyes, somehow?"
Despite her concern for me and my profession, I was a bit put off by her request. A midwife's job is to deliver a healthy, living baby without harming the mother. We have been doing so for generations. We do not overstep our boundaries into healing or magic. Our alchemy is in the deft work of our hands and walking the precarious path between offering quiet comfort and shouting words of encouragement.
"I'll call the medicine woman, if you'd like," I offered, placing her son, her first son after three daughters, into her arms. "But don’t count on her to come right away; nor should you expect her to perform what is essentially cosmetic surgery. Maybe you ought to wait a few days, to see if you get used to his appearance."
But Leah would not yield.
So I made the call to the most revered medicine woman of the pueblo. She came straightaway, before I'd even had a chance to go home and get some sleep.
"What an unusual birthmark," Eva said, a pause between the healing songs she hummed, as she made a paste of dried sagebrush and raven's vomit. "What an unusual gift to be given, the power to behold the world through eight eyes. I can only imagine the beautiful things he would have seen. Things that the rest of us could never comprehend. The ability to see behind and in front of yourself, all at once. To see where you've been and where you're going, to see your place in your own timeline, looking at both the past and the future, is a tremendous blessing. Are you sure you want me to do this?"
"Do it," Leah whispered, her fingers stroking the delicate skin of her child's five fingers. "To see all of time in one glimpse, unable to separate the past from the future, would not be a gift. It would be a burden. Please take it from him."
I und
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