Mustard Seed

Warning: the trigger warnings contain spoilers.

TW: Mental Health, Miscarriage, Physical Trauma, Slight Gore Suicide.

In the dark, birdsong hours of the early morning in their bed, she could feel the baby blooming inside her. Sometimes, between the sleeping and the awake, her lids still listlessly shut and grasping the last gossamer tresses of dreams, she could feel him shifting inside the swollen curve of her belly, as truthful and foretold as starlight. She knew he was a boy, she read in the shadows and sunrays that he would be born in the relief of blood and that he would be great, gentle, and kingly. He was growing, figs on the stems, and he would pass through without pain, without suffering, unlike the few before him. These premonitions floated around her unconscious like clouds over grass, and she opened her eyes into the sun glossing through the old farmhouse windows and slipping onto the stained hardwood floor. Becoming aware of the still-warm linen beside her, she breathed deeply. Her husband had risen before her. She must have drifted to sleep again. She got up, slowly, and ached into the bathroom. Her image in the mirror, stomach barely the size of a cantaloupe, she let an apprehensive smile blossom. She dressed in large worn overalls and a white T-shirt, thinking about the bloodstains that had stained the bathroom floor. Walking into the joined kitchen, she began to prepare the tea as he stood at the stove for their breakfast. They ate with conviction the honeyed, spiced porridge and salted pork he had set before them. They drank the steaming black cream tea with fortitude. 

“How did y'all sleep?” he asked her. 

“Good. He moved all night.” she took a cautious sip. 

“Rambunctious?”

“No. Only settling. How about you? Did you dream?”  

“I slept restlessly. I didn’t get to dream.” 

He left for work with a kiss planted like violet seeds in her forehead and she set about doing the laundry. Barefoot on the sparse grass, she hung the sheets, the pillowcases. His jeans on the line in the backyard. They had built it together during the first, with wood screws and rope from the Lowes in town. She had taken an axe to it because of its passing, but he had stopped her before the damage was detrimental to its structural integrity. The sky was cloudy, yellow sinking like sand in veins throughout the blue and white. The sun was stretching, fresh and hungry over the dew-soaked morning. Ready to suck the life from her womb like a tick. A crowe called to her from the cotton fields. She picked up the empty laundry basket and shut the screen door so that it didn't crash against its frame. She took the vacuum from the closet and plugged it into an outlet.

Picking up the heavy rug, she began cleaning the bedroom. It had been rearranged after the second, different places for the heavy chest of drawers, hand-carved bed frame, and embroidered lounging sofa, a new set of sheets and curtains. A flash of that blood-song memory stung her chest. Waking up in soaked, sickly red floral sheets, the panic buzzing like a cracked beehive. She cried as Death had violated her.

Finished there, she started the dining room. The house had been designed compact, without hallways. Each doorway led to a room, and there was an archway that connected a small round library to the dining area. The vacuum flew over the floor like a promise. After the house was finished, she prepared the mop. This was only done every few months, but she was hungry for work and so she ran the hot water, put soap in the bucket and frothed it so that bubbles floated up. She mopped the hardwood floors first. While she waited for them to dry, she mopped the tile floors. As she mopped the bathroom, the water in the bucket turned an evil red. Turning away from the specter, she vomited. It was a sour smell, like old milk, and she gagged while she tried to breathe deeply.

What if the baby what if I gag too hard what if he leaves me what if I leave with him and my love comes home to wet hardwood floors a pile of vomit a dead child and a dead wife

Standing, she firmly closed the door to the guest bathroom and locked it, stowing the key in the front pocket of her overalls. The third had made her life like the fraying loop of a tight rope line. No one thinks to look at the anchor, just the chain. She found lemon-scented floor wax under the kitchen sink. Armed with a rag and the bottle, she waxed the floors like they were mirrors. After that was finished, she began to make lunch. Cast iron on the stove, stainless steel knives on the cutting block, vegetables washed, eggs at the ready. After she became pregnant with the third, she had paid meticulous attention to her diet. Cooking and boiling everything she ate, she inspected every potatoe, every cabbage, every vegetable, meat, bread and dairy that passed through her hands as though they harbored some bug or mold that slipped into her body executing the life she was so desperately trying to protect.

She was in the bath when it had been swept away. A drawing in hot white sand, a seashell in a tidal wave. Sitting there as the blood pooled in the water, tinging it pink among the flower petals and leaves, she stared. The pain was happening to a different person. Not her. Someone else. Far away. Not her. She was among clouds and stars. She pitied that poor woman. Her husband had come in and asked what she'd done to stain the water such a dark color and she'd looked up like a badly done sketch of herself. Colorless, white, opaque as soapy water.

They'd stopped having baby showers after the first, stopped telling people after the second.

It was too painful to open up the bags with baby clothes, baby toys, teething rings. Too painful to say "Thank you! It's just what I wanted." Too painful to navigate the strained conversations at the supermarket, Cheryl down the street asking tentatively "Are you doing another baby shower? What would people get you...don't you have a good bit of that stuff still?"

But this. This fourth. Fourth times the charm. She had charms too, just in case God felt like changing his mind. Charms could keep the Maker away. Charms could have the Maker Unmade.

She had felt the baby since he was the size of a mustard seed, smaller than a prin pick, wishful as a tremor of a voice in the wind.