Stone
Welcome back to Dead Baby Week here at Internet Czarina Publishing! Here is a short story I wrote inside a French attic during a very hot summer, 2018.
This trembling girl reminded Alta Miriam of the day, many years and waters ago, when her grandmother brought her to the mayor’s house through a back door. Her grandmother had held a finger to her lips as they crept through the kitchen, down the stairs, and into the wine cellar where a young woman was writhing on a bed of rags in the corner while her fellow maids stood near enough to breathe their hot breaths but far enough not to touch her, hold her.
The basement room smelled like the calf that Miriam’s father had delivered the winter before, remarkably wet and red and warm. Miriam’s grandmother felt for a heartbeat in the young woman’s chest, then asked Miriam to hold the patient’s mouth open as she dropped something dark from three different vials down her throat. Miriam watched as the raised bumps of liquid traveled through the young woman’s body, swirling just beneath her skin until they hit her diaphragm.
At this, she sat up straight, shrieking through clenched teeth so high and sharp that the glass bottles in the cellar broke open, drenching the dirt floor in purple wine. One of the bottles had been very poorly filtered, and a grape seed implanted into the cellar wall, growing on bloody residue until it broke through to the surface many years later and tripped, with a single gnarled branch, a member of the Resistance as he ran from soldiers.
The young woman’s body was buried in the woods. Alta Miriam wondered, feeling through her worn thoughts for loose thread, if her grandmother had meant to make the dosage that strong, as she mixed her own drink for the trembling girl before her, now. Now.
Alta Miriam added seven spoonfuls of amber honey to the dark liquids, steamed together in a cup of rosemary tea.
This girl was about sixteen, with limbs the same width as kindling. Her dark curls were matted to her skull, which Alta Miriam found to be cool as marble when she first entered the cramped bedroom, swollen with the girl’s family. The apartment echoed the dull thud of her abdomen. Her father was at shul, wisely oblivious, while her mother knew that every true holy text was somewhere clutched within her oldest child’s damp body.
The girl had leaked enough in the last week that a mold spot was growing under her bed. This was good, Alta Miriam felt, because the ice lining her stomach might melt before it reached her chest. But there was something heavier inside her that threatened to overtake her pulse.
Alta Miriam could see the rosy marks on the girl’s neck and shoulders, perspicuous after three months in the way that whoever had left them wasn’t. She added another ounce of rue to the tea, wondering if the purpose or the meaning of the small yellow flowers had come first. It was certainly easier to get ingredients in the city, and even though it was harder to bury a corpse in the city, no one cared as much if they found one in the city street as in some dry field of the countryside.
Alta Miriam gave the girl the warm cup, to drink quickly but at her own pace until it was empty. The result came like the tide. Her mother held her hair back as she drooled, and Alt Miriam placed a wood bucket under the girl’s chin, just in time for her to retch gallon after gallon of cold water, overflowing onto the blankets and Alta Miriam’s steady, wrinkled hands. The deluge stopped: something was stuck in her throat.
Alta Miriam reached down into her mouth, looking for hard in the soft, until she finally yanked out a rock the size of the girl’s fist. She spat out the last bit of water, speckled with blood like a fertilized yolk. She fell back against the bed, color flooding to her cheeks and away from her gut.
Alta Miriam told her mother directly to have her eat pickled ginger after every meal to keep her stomach calm, and breath foul enough to keep any boys from talking to her.
The girl ran her fingers over the rock, feeling. There was a message in its ridges. There had to be.