M.M. Kaufman
The itching came with the sun one morning. I had torn open my slip from scratching in my sleep. Standing naked in front of the full-length mirror, all I could see was a patch of red, raw skin stretched across my left side. I winced when I put my fingertips to it. Taking a deep breath, I pushed on it. My body gave where it shouldn’t and pushed back in unexpected places. My lower left rib felt larger and softer than bone ever should.
I wasn’t worried then. I’d lived in the country my whole life and had enough sense not to panic over one itchy spot. I slathered on calamine and threw on my loosest housedress. As it fell over my head, I saw something out of the corner of my eye and gasped.
I’d taken the mirror, tall and stark in the corner of the room, for a person. But there was no one here but myself.
As I headed downstairs to make coffee, I swayed in the doorway, off balance. A wave of nausea hit me. I shook my head and hung it between my knees.
My hands traveled back to my side. I scratched harder and harder. I pulled my hands away. Red crescents bloomed under my nails.
My parents raised me in this house I now call my own. I clean it that way, too. Four bedrooms may seem like a lot for one woman, but I think it’s right. Each room cleaned like the last. There is nothing spare about my life here.
My parents died the day of our high school graduation. They made it to the ceremony all right but got hit by a truck hauling eggs on their way back home for the party. My brother, J-boy, and I were riding with friends to guide them down the tree-lined roads that lead to our farmhouse. We found our parents crushed at the last bend—a mix of egg, blood, and dirt.
J-boy cleared out with the dust from the wake. He visited a handful of times over the next year. Showed up on the front porch with a ham or a basket of peaches—a request for casserole or cobbler disguised as a gift. After a week or so, he left to sell tires or fix toilets, whatever filled his gas tank and kept him driving back and forth across the Southeast.
I stayed behind. I was a solitary girl, and now I am a solitary woman. The house is old but paid off. I work as an online transcriptionist to cover the few bills. I never could find a reason to leave this house except for groceries and books.
As a child, I dreamed of traveling the world, but it hardly crosses my mind anymore. I experience the world fine in the stacks of the Appleby Library every Sunday at eleven. I return what books I’d gotten the week before and pick out enough books for the week ahead. My church—a visit about as long as a service and more interesting.
Once I finished hanging the linens, I threw on a pair of my mother’s overalls. The calamine lotion hadn’t done anything to quell the itching, but the spot looked less menacing. I cut off a leaf from an aloe vera plant on the kitchen windowsill, prepared it, and slathered some on. As I rode my bike into town, I let the overalls hang open on the left side so the wind could hit against the aloe patch.
At Appleby, I nodded to Nancy, the weekend librarian. She mumbled a distracted, “Morning, Marigold,” from behind her Cast Iron Cooking magazine.
I set down her coffee, the bag of donuts, and my old books and then walked into the stacks.
With my eyes closed, I took slow steps and fingered the book spines. What comfort books gave me. The solidness of them, the tight binding, the weight of them in my hands.
Fifteen minutes into my survey of Science and Civilization, pain shot across my side. I braced myself against the shelves and breathed until it passed. I unhooked my overalls and pulled them down. There was now a large, dark-pink welt where, an hour ago, there was only a scratch.
I pressed my fingertips to it, and it burned them as if it were a lit stovetop.
“Lord almighty!” I hissed.
I wiped my damp forehead with the tail of my shirt and stuffed it back into the overalls. When had I started sweating? This wasn’t like any spider bite I’d had before. Whatever it was, it felt like it was taking me for a ride.
I left the books I had pulled off the shelf on the floor and walked back to Nancy’s desk.
She dropped her gold beaded chain connected to her glasses onto her bosom.
“That was fast.” Nancy stopped when she saw I was empty handed. “Something out of place again?”
I lifted up my shirt. “No, I— it’s nothing.”
“Pretty nasty wound there.”
“Did you say womb?” I asked, louder than intended.
Nancy shh’ed me and spelled, “W-O-U-N-D.”
I nodded and tucked the shirt back in. My eyes focused and unfocused across the myriad pictures taped around Nancy’s desk. They were all pictures of her daughter with her many sticky-faced children.
“Have you seen my newest?” Nancy pulled out her phone and flicked through shot after shot. “Here’s Lolee with the twins at the trampoline park. It’s a little out of focus ‘cause Presley-Ann was taking the picture.”
Lolee, or Tupelo Lee, was Nancy’s daughter, named after Elvis Presley’s hometown. She had been in my class all through school. Nancy had another child, Aaron, but I never heard much about him. Whatever he was doing somewhere up east, it wasn’t making babies.
Lolee had been as listless as I was when we graduated. Where I locked up my listlessness in my parents’ house, she took hers out for a joyride. She tried on different boyfriends, part-time jobs, and drug habits. I remember how, a few years ago, Nancy railed against Lolee’s latest bender on a given Sunday morning. She questioned why she ever had Lolee, why she hadn’t kicked her out.
But then Lolee got pregnant. Everything changed. The world rotated around Lolee and her precious gift to the world. The unexpected fetus, named at what I estimate was 20 minutes old, was Gracelyn Mae. The name was embroidered and hashtagged on everything. Gracelyn Mae somehow turned Lolee into the Virgin Mary.
I was jealous of the respect and admiration. I hadn’t ever planned on having children. But my mother would have loved to be a grandmother. She would have been like Nancy here, showing pictures to anyone who walked by.
It made me hate Nancy.
She broke off into giggles at the next picture. “This was when Gracelyn Mae ate some of my face cream thinking it was frosting!”
I took the phone and looked at the toddler with the pained, beet-red expression. I handed the phone back and came up with my fifth iteration of the sound, “Ahh.”
I felt another sharp pain like a crack of lightning. A wave of intense pressure across my side followed it. “Christ on a cracker!”
“Get yourself home, girl. Have a bath.”
I nodded and walked out with my empty bag slung over one shoulder and both hands pressed to my side. There was hardly traffic in town to interfere with organ music as it drifted out of the church and across the two-lane road.
I rolled my bike over and peered through one of the stained-glass windows. I couldn’t see anything but the blue-and-green marbled shapes of the people as they stood to sing. I waved goodbye knowing no one could see me. I peddled up the hill until my calves burned and the asphalt sputtered into the sandy-red dirt that led to home.
For some reason I imagined the pain would stop, or at least subside, when I got back to the house. Or that the solace I felt each time I came home would blot out any discomfort. But it didn’t. I felt the pain pulse like a racing heartbeat as I took the steps.
“Damnit all,” I cursed when I noticed I’d left my bag in the bike’s basket. I walked back down the steps, keeping pressure off my left leg. Something like an ice pick pierced my side. I sank to my knees and knocked the bike over into the bird fountain. Concrete smashed and slimy water ran down my chest.
“What in the actual fuck?”
No one but the birds answered.
The red rash had spread into a much wider circle. I called it a rash, but, it looked like a galaxy, like constellations made from blood drawn to the surface. And the mass, the wound, whatever it was, had grown so that it protruded farther than my fist. Lavender-colored veins threaded through it. It was strange and beautiful.
I can’t tell you why I didn’t call a doctor. I didn’t want to, and that had always been a good enough reason in the past.
Hours later, I woke up in bed exhausted as I had never been before. It was dark outside. I hung my legs off the wrought-iron bed frame and smiled to myself as my dream came back to me. In the dream the itch on my side had grown and grown until—
Another shooting pain rocked my body. I sat up, gasping for air.
I lifted my shirt to see that the spot had grown. As in my dream, it was the shape of a cantaloupe. I traced my finger around its edges, amazed that it seemed to be a perfect circle. It didn’t hurt when I touched it now. My touch felt like a feather. I traced the veins of deep purple.
I took off my clothes and stood naked in front of the mirror. I strained to see the spot in the moonlight through the window. I never felt so alone as I did in moonlight. I closed the curtains on the moon, put my clothes back on, and lay back down. I picked one of the blades on the slow-turning ceiling fan and watched it spin.
I hadn’t felt alone in my dream. I felt that my rib really was a something. It was growing and moving beneath the surface of my skin.
The spot itched worse than ever and burned like fire. I put socks on my hands to soften the scratching and pressed a cold rag to my side, but nothing helped. The itching wasn’t coming from the surface of my skin, but underneath it. Something was scratching back.
I made my way down the stairs. Walking was slow and painful. I don’t know what I wanted with going downstairs, but it felt like the right thing to do.
I kept walking to the front door, to the porch, to the clothesline. It was pitch black except for the moonlight. I used the scent of the tea olive tree to guide me. To what, other than the tree itself, I don’t know.
I sank down to my knees and tore my clothes off. I could feel the spot radiating heat. It grew away from my body. It grew until I could feel it pull my center of gravity. I held the mass protruding from my ribs in my hands as it grew, twisted, and took form.
The pain felt surreal and necessary. I needed this. It was tearing my body apart but fortifying my spirit. There was something guiding me, a kind of fire both in my rib and in my head. It told me to hold the spot gently but with firm hands, to lie down on my unencumbered side and take deep breaths. I inhaled so deeply I felt like I was bringing the tea olive’s small white blooms into my body. I gritted my teeth, got a strong grip on what felt like appendages, and pulled hard and fast. Whatever it was came away from my body so fast I almost let it fly.
Then I heard it: the first cry. I brought it close to my chest, pushed myself up to my feet and stumbled from the dark side of the house to the moonlight. I felt the absence at my side, felt the hollow of my missing rib. As fast as my fingertips had found the wound, the flesh had already together. My body was whole.
In the flooding moonlight, I made out that the wriggling something I held against my chest was a newborn baby. It was wet with the slime and blood of birthing. She cried to make herself known.
I was once a solitary woman. Then, there was you.