The
Christmas coming is barely closer than the Christmas past, so distant are they
both. Here, the dominant sensation is one of heat, the vast and expanding
brightness even this early, especially
this early in the morning, has every object’s shadow crawling fast around its
source, and her flesh boils upon the cotton-covered rubber blanket stretched
across the mattress. The vulnerability of her position – her pelvis only now stabilised through the pooled sweat
of her efforts, her legs cramped wide apart and the awful exhausting strain of
prolonged abdominal tension, below which she feels herself to be hanging open.
Her back teeth are fastened tight to themselves and she pulls enormous nasal
draughts of the room’s air into her head, filtering in with each of these the
thin and distant spice of her husband’s hair lotion, and the scent of oil, and
metal. She is only halfway done.
The
remaining twin’s eventual passage through her ripped vagina allows her only the
briefest of pacific relief, the midwife’s declaration of its sex cut short by
the immense volume of gunshot as the bullet contained therein silences the
firstborn and its attendant nurse both and then another that crashes into the
bed beneath her senses, a sudden bitter stink of burnt rubber erupts upon air
already hung with vaporous waste, and the awful awareness of something to which
she is mother, spilled and broken between her still-spread legs.
One
thing she sees, the rest become abstract in its horror, her retinas ignorant as
mirrors, and this now as the short
barrel rises sharply, locates her: a
pristine ring of smoke formed at the gun’s hard mouth, its lateral drift and
dissipation behind which and unfocussed her husband’s face, twisted and fixed
in its own celestial rage, the room around still full of that initial fury and
the resultant rhythmic seepage of thick liquids, in which the simple quiet
click of the misfiring handgun is the loudest single sound upon the planet.
Something
moves quick through her focus, a never-solid blur that comes clear inside her
senses as it cracks and dislocates plaster from the wall by her head, the rain
of these fragments upon the floor and the gun’s sudden surprising weight beside
her on the bed.
There
is nothing real that she cannot lay a hand to: she is not here, was never
pregnant; the midwife’s breath is not being breathed; no noises come from the
nurse’s broken body, and her husband... something, and the boy with his teacher
something too.
Mother
(in her quietism): Something.
Her
faith in the creation of this abstract allows the room to regain its sterile
dynamic, the retributive perfumes of bay rum, and blood, and gunsmoke all now
disappeared within the constancy of their inhalation, and these things borne
witness to, these also. One finger gently traces its linear path along the
barrel and back, the words “Smith &
Wesson” senseless braille, but more present, more real now and for the next
twenty plus years than any attempt at grief for the two wasted and ablated
pulses she had carried and placed here upon her God’s earth, carefully as she
was able.
