I cried when he was born.

I held my wife’s hand as she became a mother. Moaning, then whimpers, and with a final last gasping scream she brought him into the world. Her cheeks were streaked with tears. Breathing, gasping, laughing, then with a final burst it was done. The hours of pain were done. She cried with the relief of it. I bent down, touched my forehead to hers. She smelled of sweat and stale breath and of a sweetness like vanilla ice cream.

We cried so we didn’t hear how quiet the room had become.

The doctor and nurses hadn’t moved, hadn’t spoken.

There was supposed to be the sound of crying. There were supposed to be things happening. Instead there was a hollowed out silence and I watched his mother’s face twist into fear.

“What’s wrong?”

No one replied. No one moved.

“I can’t,” the doctor stuttered, “I can’t move. Help me.”

That was when I first saw my son. Shimmering gold. A wriggling statue still attached by the umbilical cord to his mother. Beneath him, the doctor’s hand was pinned to the table, crushed.

With the help of two nurses, I lifted my son off the doctor’s hand. I found out later he weighed 120kilos. 120 kilos of shimmering wiggling solid gold.

Things got crazy after that. Doctors rushing in and out. Half of them just wanted to gape at him, at us. They didn’t know what tests to run. There are no tests for babies made of solid gold. No way to understand how it was possible because of course it isn’t. Newspapers announced it was “A Miracle!”: “Golden Boy Confounds Scientists!” “Rich Beyond Their Dreams!” “Family Blessed With Riches!”

Except we weren’t blessed. Everywhere we went, they pointed and stared. His mother was whisked away for test after test after test. They tried to take blood tests, but he has no blood. They bent dozens of needles finding that out. My son screamed in terror as they jabbed and poked and stared at him. Eventually, they let us all go home.

We named him Aurum.

We became rich after his first haircut. I brought the threads of pure gold to a jeweller who spun them into the most beautiful and delicate necklaces you could imagine. That paid for our medical bills, and for a new house.

We had to move quite soon in his childhood. As he grew, the weight became too much for our furniture, then the floors began to creak painfully with his every step. One afternoon, he woke especially happy and crawled into our bedroom and into our bed. He just wanted to wake us up, I suppose. Just a child being silly. He stood at the end of the bed and jumped. The frame collapsed and he fell sideways, landing on his mother’s leg. Snapped it in two places. I’ll always remember him curled in a ball in the corner of the bedroom screaming as the ambulance attendants took his mother off to the hospital.

He never got in our bed again.

Soon we realized we weren’t safe. There were people who cared more about how much he was worth than about whether he was alive. The first time, they tried to pound in our front door. I just had an old tennis racket. The police arrived before they got in, but I’d been ready. I remember Aurum begging me to hide, to run. I wasn’t going to let anyone take my son. I knew what I was supposed to do.

Aurum stopped going to school around that time. Parents had been telling their kids to bring some of his hair home, and he’d started getting bald patches. One kid tried to bite off his ear in gym class.

We had money to move away, somewhere remote and anonymous. Aurum didn’t go outside much. He loves watching TV. He’s never been able to trust many people, so the sitcom friendships probably seemed strange and wonderful.

We lived together, the three of us, alone and separate.

When his mother got sick, Aurum shaved his head for the treatments. Cut his toenails and fingernails. When it got bad, I caught him about to cut off his little toe with an axe. Some sacrifices don’t matter though. Eventually, everyone leaves.

Aurum left last night. He left me a letter. He told me he loved me and didn’t want me to be alone. He told me that if he went away, I wouldn’t need to hide any longer. He didn’t know what would happen where he was going, but he would be safe.

Every night I fall asleep wondering where he went. Sometimes I imagine him at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by beautiful fish and coral, gold shimmering amongst blues and greens, free and at peace. Sometimes, I imagine him laying deep and heavy in a beautiful lake, looking up at the boats and swimmers floating past.

I imagine him at peace. And I cry.