Clarissa's Curse

TW: stillbirth

I lived and worked in downtown Savannah, Georgia a charming Southern city renowned for its many haunts and haints. Johnson Square was home for many of the homeless people during the day. One older woman named Clarissa was there every day at lunchtime. The office people would either give her leftovers or she would eat from the trash cans. Her face looked like a raisin, wrinkled and shiny, smeared with Vaseline. She talked with the spirits around her incessantly, carrying on rather heated conversations with only those she could see. We office folk just gave her wide berth when she got into the spirit.

I was excitedly waiting for the growing life in my expanding

belly, as I walked the downtown squares on lunch break with a smile of joy

plastered on my face. I started to notice that everywhere I went during lunch

or after work, the sidewalks, the downtown squares, or the department stores Clarissa

would be there at my side with her shiny Vaseline face, smiling with her

gap-toothed grin. She would reach out her dark, arthritic, wrinkled hand and

try to rub my baby bump while resting her other misshapen hand upon her concave

belly, cackling,” I’m having a baby, too!” I would nervously smile at her and

quickly flee, thinking bless her heart, she’s just plain crazy. I was young but

had been taught by my grandmother that Savannah has its share of people and

places one should avoid without making them angry.

However, Clarissa was persistent in sitting with me at lunch in the square. I would share my lunch with her, and she would tell me about the baby she was expecting. It was a boy she said, and she asked me what I was going to name my baby. I told her the two names of Ryan or Briana that I and my husband had picked out and she said that’s going to be my boy’s name too. “He’s going to be called Ryan after his daddy!” She was delusional of course, she had to be way past baby-making age. She started asking me for maternity clothes, which she didn’t need. But just to be nice I brought her a couple of shirts that someone had given me. I found that pregnant women loved to share their clothes as they got bigger and outgrew what someone else had passed on to them. Those shirts were always very ugly, voluminous plaid shirts with lace peter pan collars. It was like the maternity clothing manufacturers were trying to blend the masculine and feminine into one shirt.

I was walking one day through Johnson Square and I saw her

sitting on a park bench crying, tears tracking over the Vaseline smeared on her face, anguish drooling from her rotted mouth. She was holding a dirty plastic baby doll in her arms, rocking back and forth. I started walking towards her to find out what was wrong. Before I could open my mouth her malevolent glance

spied my ripened belly and she jumped off the bench rushing toward me, screaming in my face, poking me in the belly, “he’s gone, you just wait and see!” “He’s gone, just like my baby Ryan.” “He done suffocated and he’s now he’s dead!” I turned around ran back into the office building, scared of this crazy woman.

I never saw her again, much to my relief.  I forgot all about her and her crazy ways. The next few weeks I went about my happy days waiting for my baby to arrive. My husband painted the nursery a neutral shade of yellow. We put the crib together and started decorating the nursery with cute little animal murals. The baby shower was scheduled for the next week.

Sadly, those happy days soon turned dark and desolate.  Two weeks before the delivery due I stopped feeling the baby move and the ultrasound confirmed that my son was dead. I delivered him in stillness on my third wedding anniversary. I looked in his face after they handed him to me. It was wrinkled, the skin was sloughing off and it was shiny. He looked like a little raisin. The umbilical cord was twisted around his neck three times, there was no hope for him to have escaped that suffocating death inside my womb that was supposed to be his safe place to grow.

We had his funeral the following Saturday. There was just immediate family. We named him William Ryan as we had planned. The tombstone dates of birth and death being the same tell the story of a life never lived. I and my husband grieved in different ways and we began to grow apart. He never understood why I couldn’t get out of bed some days or why I would cry during diaper commercials on TV. I would lay under the covers or take long bike rides through Bonaventure cemetery replaying over and over in my head every conversation that I had with Clarissa in Johnson Square. I would admonish myself for not listening to my grandmother about staying away from certain people. Those people who have the spirits that hang in their auras and regular people don’t understand it, but they can feel it and are smart enough to stay away. I had been naive, and I opened the door with Clarissa and let evil in, and it cost me the life of my son.

Decades later, I can’t help but wonder, if that was Clarissa’s

curse on me? Had Clarissa once in her life been a happy person? Had she lived a loving relationship with someone, made the mistake of letting evil in and losing everything, then left her life to live on the streets communing with the spirits? Did she really curse me or was she just foretelling a sad happenstance of life? A person that has grown up in the garden of good and evil never really takes life as a coincidence, we know better and pay the price when we forget.