The Infinite Matrix | Michael Swanwick & Francisco Goya | The Sleep Of

Reason 5

04.15.02

the sleep of reason

by Michael Swanwick

with illustrations by

Francisco JosÉ de Goya y Lucientes

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Digital image © copyright

Davison Art Center,

Wesleyan University

DAC permission required

for any other use.

5. [Plate 3]

The Child-Buyer

It's not easy being a mother. The little brats want this, and they break

that, and all the time they cry. Only a saint could put up with it. Yet

so few mothers are saints! Most are only human women, doing the best they

can and trying to remember just how they got into this fix in the first

place.

So when the Child-Buyer came to make his offer, Katie was ready to listen.

Oh, what a day that had been. Mathilda had been teething, and Bruno had

been drawing on the walls with jam. They each fought with the other from

dawn to dusk. Katie had no sooner rescued the cat from Mathilda than she

had to snatch away the matches from Bruno. Bruno threw his lunch, plate

and all, through a closed window because the crusts on the sandwiches

hadn't been trimmed to his liking. Inspired by this, Mathilda decided to

flush her doll down the toilet. It clogged, and water poured into the

hallway and down the stairs and stained the brand-new carpets.

Outrageous! And the afternoon was even worse.

Katie was trying to put her struggling offspring to bed when the air

dimmed, and a sulphurous stench seeped into the room. She turned, and

there it was: The Child-Buyer, wrapped in shroud-like sheets with a

darkness where he should have a face. There was no way he could have

entered the room without her seeing him. And yet there he was.

Anybody else would have been terrified. But Katie was a mother. She'd

seen worse things that very day.

"Well?" she said.

A corpse-pale hand emerged from the cloths, with silver coins in its

palm. "I wish to buy your children," rasped a hollow voice. "To take them

to the Twilight Lands, there to toil forever in the fields of lost souls."

Katie hesitated. "Will they be tormented by demons?"

"No," the specter replied. "They are needed as laborers, nothing more."

"Well," she said, accepting his money, "one can't have everything."

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This is the fifth of 80 stories by Michael Swanwick written to accompany

Francisco Goya's Los Caprichos. For a listing of the most recently

available stories, go to The Sleep of Reason.

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