Mother Box and Other Tales by Sarah Blackman Page A

was fully dressed, which was something of a shock to her having never seen him in clothes, and seemed pleased to see her, though clearly quite surprised. He fussed over her, settling her in a chair, turning up the flame on an oil lamp he kept in the center of the table. His house was very dark, though all through its rooms breezes of varying temperatures floated and crossed as if about them were countless invisible passages out into the open air. Shadows, too many it seemed to her, shifted on the prettily wallpapered walls of his kitchen and she tried to remember if this was a paper she had chosen herself or something he had added. And this room, hadn't it once had a window? A window obstructed by the tangle of a forsythia bush which her first tenant, that miserable girl, was always threatening to raze? On the far side of the room something massed in a way that might suggest branches, but then it didn't seem to matter anymore. Then, she didn't care.
    Would she like an egg? She would not. Did she mind if he ate? She did not. He poured some tea for them both out of a steaming kettle and sat across from her, merry, his jaw thrusting after his eggs and toast in a ruminative fashion as he watched her drink. His clothes were very simple—blue jeans, a black tee-shirt that flattered his shoulders—but they unnerved her. They made him seem like someone else entirely, someone with a name she should, by now, know. He sopped the last of the yolk off his platewith his last bite of toast. She sipped the tea, a bitter musty tea, and shuddered as a breeze flipped suddenly up the back of her neck.
    She said, “I'm pregnant.”
    He froze. His mouth fell open, revealing a yellow smear of yolk in a way that she found very comical and she snorted with laughter. Then he reached for her across the table. His hands cast great winged shadows on the wall and the light of the oil lamp skewed the proportions of his face, making his eyes seem huge and dark, his mouth a wet hole. Oh, but he was delighted! She had never seen him happy like this. He laughed. He came around the table and knelt at her feet, reached for her stomach with one hand, gripped her thigh with the other. Laughing, his mouth was wetter, his eyes hidden. She looked down at the top of his head, his face buried now in her lap where she could feel the hot gusts of his laughter. His body seemed to hulk in its skins, in his clothing she reminded herself, and it shook and quivered, his hand pinching up her thigh, his mouth wet against her stomach, kissing her kissing her, hot and wet. A baby! A baby! A baby!
    “I will not have it,” she shouts. She stands, shakes him off. The room seems to contract around her, a ring of muscle tensing. It is dark and hot. She cannot see; she cannot. “I'm getting rid of it. I will not have it.” Because who is he, after all, to be so pleased at what she has done and what she will do next? She presses the top of her skull with her fingers and imagines her belly the same shape, with the same tensile glow. She imagines her body going on and on without her, building something, massing itself to a terrible effort and she left alone in her dark room, incidental. She drops the teacup and it breaks in half on the floor like the two sides of an egg. Scalding tea leaps up against her leg and around her in the whickering shadows something moves very fast. Inside herself, she feels a deep, irrevocable tearing.
    All that follows next happens in darkness. She wakes in his bed and he is kneeling beside her, a washcloth in his hand. She wakes on her hands and knees in a tilted hallway (her hallway? behind that distant door, her bath? her mirror? her robes?) and feels a wetness between her thighs. When she puts her hand there it seems to come away sticky and green. She wakes to his face, concerned. His face, alarmed. His wet eyes, his strange expressions. What is the sound of his voice? She wakes to a pressing pulse, on all sides a tightness as if all the space in her