The Midwife

They say my mother gave birth to me too early. By the time the Midwife had arrived, I had already been brought into the world. In my small village of Bhavishnu, it is unheard of to give birth before the Midwife arrives. Mothers are expected to hold on until she arrives, no matter how long it is. You see, the Midwife is a very strange creature; vengeful and easily angered. If she feels any form of disrespect, she is said to obsess over revenge until she finds the perfect solution. Disrespect comes in many forms, from mild to severe. However, to the Midwife, nothing is more discourteous than refusing her the job she was assigned.

When I enter town, the people don’t hesitate to stare at me and whisper as I search the shops for groceries and supplies, but I don’t blame them. The purple scars running diagonally across my eyes aren’t easy to overlook. “Cursed Child,” they whisper. Though, not quiet enough to evade my ears. In some ways, I am angry. I am bitter at society for believing in superstitions that could never be possible. Other times, it is easy to see why they act the way they do. My scars still appear fresh, despite having healed 17 years ago. They are still an angry color, raised high on my skin. Miraculously, I am still able to see, which only adds to the superstition. I am the village reject, the outcast. I’ve heard the story of how I acquired the scars about a million times and I know the details by heart, but I don’t remember it happening. However, the villagers’ vivid description of the incident doesn’t disappoint.

After my birth, the Midwife went into isolation for forty-two days. There was no punishment cruel enough for me, the demon who had clawed his way into the world too soon. My mother abandoned me sometime after my birth, not wanting to suffer for my disobedient actions. After the forty-second day, the Midwife found me in a warm cottage towards the edge of town. A merciful couple had taken me in, fed me, and clothed me. During that forty-second night, the Midwife entered my cottage and killed the couple watching over me. She didn’t want anyone to stop her when she punished me. She had to succeed or she’d die a disrespected woman. She found me in my room, sound asleep. I’m told she uttered unspeakable words over me, causing three gashes to simultaneously appear on my newly-formed face. After wounding me, she continued her punishment. One that had been carefully planned for multiple weeks. The Midwife then proceeded to take drops of my blood into a vial and brandish a piece of parchment. The Midwife then drank the vial’s components as though she was a pen being filled with ink. Hurriedly, she wrote on the parchment using my blood which now flowed freely from her fingertips. The Midwife then left me alone in the cottage, but a young babe left for dead. I wouldn’t have survived if the mail carrier hadn’t heard my cry. The mail carrier entered the cottage, looking for the source of the wailing and found me in my room next to a piece of parchment with smeared black lettering. The mail carrier picked up the parchment and read the words that forever sealed my fate. “Disobedient birth leads to punishment. Punishment leads to defiance. Defiance leads to societal scorn. Societal scorn leads to loneliness. Loneliness leads to paranoia. Paranoia leads to insanity. Insanity leads to aggression. Aggression leads to violence. Violence leads to death.”

To the villagers, this paper was a prophecy. To me, it is insanity. People say I will soon experience the fifth stage; paranoia. I was disobedient and left my mother too soon, they say. I was punished by the Midwife, defiant in my survival. It is no secret the village hates me. I live a life of loneliness. No mother, no father, no siblings. They tell each other it is only a matter of time until my loneliness drives me to that fifth stage. Of course, all of these things are true of me, but I do not believe they foretell of my death. I have gone 17 years without conflict and I’m quite sure I can continue that. No one will even get close enough for me to inflict harm, so I know the ‘prophecy’ is a lie. It is no prophecy and it is most certainly not my future.

Every day is a repeat of the previous one, a foreshadowing of the next, but my never-ending cycle of life is comforting somehow. Everything is how I know it will be. I wake up around 4 in the morning, the sun not yet risen and the air not yet warm. I am not someone who needs a lot of sleep, for my body won’t allow it. After waking, I shower off, trying hard not to look in the mirror at the scars that run across my face. They trigger hurt associated with my mother’s abandonment, confusion as to why I had to be born early, and most of all, anger for the villagers who could never understand what it’s like to be a throwaway. I don’t like feeling these emotions because they govern my actions. Anger makes me aggressive, hurt makes me easily frightened, and confusion makes me act foolish. When I feel emotions as strong as these, my mind disappears and my body takes control. I will not allow myself to give the villagers another reason to hate me or believe in that stupid ‘prophecy’. For these reasons, I try to never look at the thick, purple lines running across my upper face. After showering and getting dressed in whatever I can dig around my bare house and find (because I live sparingly and can hardly afford a shower), I go outside and look at the sky until I feel serene and can carry on with my day. After that, my day quiets down, even though the morning wasn’t very busy at all to begin with. I go inside and draw pictures of vast seas and bare deserts, trying to fill the time with the only thing I’m exceptional at.

On a good day, I get to eat a few pieces of bread and a small number of wild roots from the back of my house. On a bad day, I go to sleep shivering and trying desperately to ignore the sharp pains in my stomach. Regardless, I won’t let my poverty discourage me. I have stacks of paper to satisfy my ever growing imagination, I have a bed that is much softer than the ground, and I don’t have to worry about neighbors whispering to their children about me. I am alone, but I am not lonely. Or so I’d like to think. Life is hard for me, no matter how much I like to pretend it is not. It’s only natural to crave companionship, only natural to wish for happiness and success, despite knowing you will never achieve it.

And on the cold and hungry nights, despite my positive attitude, the doubts and negative thoughts still creep in. I am only human, after all. Some days my mind won’t allow me to draw and instead chooses to blame me for all of my hardships. It’s hard to get out of the cycle of self-deprecation, and some days my mind and the weight of the world won’t let me get out of bed. I want to sleep for an eternity, but my body won’t let me. I want to stop being. I don’t crave death, but it’s hard to live. If everything would just slow down, I think it would be easier. Unfortunately, I know time doesn’t slow down even when my mind does. Focusing on existing takes so much of my energy that I don’t have time to think about the Midwife or my title of the “town reject.” It all becomes far away in a corner of my mind which I know exists, but forget to use. Considering I am alone, I have no one to constantly remind me of the failure that is my life. Instead, my body constantly reminds me that I need to eat while my mind won’t give me the encouragement to do it. I know I have to change something in my life before I crumble into nothing, but I can’t remember what it is anymore.

Sometime close to the start of winter, the harshest season for me, I hear a knock at my door and try to think about any importance today may have that would bring someone to me. My birthday is in the winter, but surely I would know if it had happened already. I don’t ever get knocks on my door, so it’s quite startling. Who could it be coming to see me and what do they hope to gain? I don’t have the energy to go to the door and to be frank, my strength has dissipated ever since I sunk further into my depression. I haven’t been to town in months and I know no one would willingly seek my company. I tell my mind to quiet down. “It doesn’t matter who’s knocking. They will go away eventually, just like everyone else. Just like my mother, just like my well-being.” I start to close my eyes, hoping to obtain at least an hour of sleep. I am close to the welcoming void when I hear another knock, this time more urgent and resounding. I start to get upset, mentally wishing the person away. I was about to gain the sleep I couldn’t last night, but I was interrupted. How bothersome. Sighing, I close my eyes again, still feeling the remnants of sleep. Heavy eyelids and slowed heart rate. I breathe deeply, trying to get back to the place I was so close too. My mind finally quiets and my subconscious takes over, painting vivid colors of red and yellow to the back of my eyelids. Knock Knock. I open my eyes, suddenly awake. I couldn’t remember what I was dreaming about, but I knew it was important. Looking around, I discovered the room around me was dark. I must’ve slept longer than I thought. I was still tired, so why was I awake? The answer came to me around thirty seconds later. Two knocks, with an increment of five seconds between each. Without warning, my heart clenched at the sound. There was someone out there and they had been knocking for what appeared to be several hours. This was not normal at all. Why were they still out there? Stomach turning at the thought of a stranger watching me sleep, I slowly raised my head and turned around toward my door. Focusing my attention on the front door, I tried to calculate how long it had been since the last round of knocks had occurred. I looked at the door closely, trying to figure out how long it had been, when I heard a loud succession of knocking.

I considered how long I had until my eighteenth birthday, unsure as to why I was considering it. Somehow, a bit of the fog cleared in my mind and I thought of the Midwife. The Midwife, the ‘prophecy’! That was it! I’d blocked it from my memory, but the rest of my punishment would happen on my eighteenth birthday. The Midwife was not done with me and the mental trauma she inflicted on me as a child had caused me to forget this very essential part of my existence. I had never questioned my existence before, just simply accepted it. I tried to think, forcing myself to push past the remaining fog in my mind. Anger boiled inside of me as slowly I started to remember the events that had occurred when I was just weeks old. The Midwife was a vengeful woman, insistent on causing harm to everyone around her. My very existence angered her and before I could even talk, she turned my existence into the same misery she felt. The anger continued boiling inside of me, growing hotter and hotter like a chamber of magma. If I continued to think about this, I’d explode into a spray of fury and poisonous emotions. I felt the anger slowly rise from my stomach to my chest and finally to my throat, threatening to explode everywhere. I thought once more about the Midwife and screamed in rage. She’d left me with these scars, left me with this shattered mind and an aching heart. I thought again of the scars that painted my face and in a fit of savagery, I scratched at them over and over, insistent on getting them away from me. I wouldn’t let a cruel woman that I didn’t even bother hurt me any longer.

“Keep at it, you’re just fulfilling the prophecy,” I heard a voice behind me rasp. I turned around, still angry and insistent on releasing all of that anger somehow. I looked at the figure standing before me and tried to decipher who they were. A passing face on the street, perhaps. They reminded me of an old acquaintance who I’d long forgotten. “Who are you?” I asked, possibly too aggressive for a random stranger. “You’re very aware of who I am…after all, I’m who inflicted those wounds on you.” The Midwife. So this is where my punishment would occur. I looked at her, rage and disgust masking my features. This was the Midwife whom no one had seen since the prophecy? She didn’t look powerful at all. How could such a frail woman be as strong as the villagers claimed? She looked pitiful and weak and that very weakness made me want to destroy her. I could probably kill her with a single blow to the head. I looked around the room, searching for something within reach. Nothing heavy enough. “Oh, child, how foolish you are. I can read your thoughts, you know. We are connected, you and I. My blood carries your blood.”

That stopped me for a millisecond. I’d never looked at it like that before, just assuming all of my blood had left her when she’d written her ‘prophecy’. I chuckled, amused by the idea of a prophecy. There could be no prophecy because my life was normal. “Normal? You pretended to be normal. Society scorns you because you don’t see who you truly are. You are not good, you are not kind. You have followed almost every single step of the prophecy already. You were disobedient in your birth, you were punished by me, you defied death, you were scorned, and grew lonely. You believe this is where you departed from it? Prophecies can be interpreted in many ways, child. So far, you are correct in how the steps played out. I’ll give you that. However, you haven’t stopped here. You grew paranoid, devouring every ounce of food in your house, afraid that it would spoil before you could get more. You did not want to be wasteful. When you ran out of food, you refused to go to town because you were paranoid the people would harass you. So, you grew hungrier every day, living solely on the roots of your backyard. Hunger mixed with food you don’t know does not equal normalcy. You slowly grew insane, the hunger driving you mad and the roots speeding up the process. You see, those roots were not made for human consumption. Those roots are made for poisons. After insanity, you grew aggressive with no way to get all of your anger at me out. You deepened the scars I gave you as a way to hold onto the anger you held for me. A way to get out all of that pent up aggravation and aggression. Those scars would have been less than visible by now if it weren’t for you. Do you know what comes after aggression? Violence. You wonder often why people avoid you and why no one wishes to spend time with you? You pushed a little girl on the street who was staring at your face. You pushed her into the road where she could’ve died. Luckily she survived, but the town hated you even more after that. They considered ways to get rid of you, but were ultimately too afraid of what you would do to them. Next is death. That role hasn’t been fulfilled yet, but you won’t have to worry about that much longer.”

The Midwife smiled at me, seemingly innocent, as though she hadn’t just spewed lies to make me seem completely and utterly insane. As though she hadn’t just threatened my life. I was sure that what she said was wrong, but I couldn’t stop the back of my mind from perking up as though I vaguely remembered doing these things. She lunged forward, grabbing at my throat and pressing the air from my lungs. I tried to fill my lungs back up, but that only resulted in more choking. No one would save me, nothing could help me. I kicked and slapped at her hands, desperately trying to get her off, but her grip only tightened. Slowly, my vision blurred and eventually started slipping into blackness. When it fully enveloped me, I didn’t fight it off. Everything went dark and it was surprisingly peaceful.

“Disobedient birth leads to punishment. Punishment leads to defiance. Defiance leads to societal scorn. Societal scorn leads to loneliness. Loneliness leads to paranoia. Paranoia leads to insanity. Insanity leads to aggression. Aggression leads to violence. Violence leads to death.“