Joy Disarrayed by Sorrow

Mice scampered through the tall grass prairie gathering seeds in their cheeks. A rabbit nibbled on a root; its ears twitched toward the hushed kisses amidst the rustling grass. Moon beams dripped down tall stocks of big blue stem and pooled on a plaid blanket revealing entangled legs and the curled toes of adolescent bliss.

The landscape was still and silent, but the prairie at ground level was warm and full of life. Madelaine melted into the warmth of Lucas’s skin. The swish of grasses and wildflowers covered the muffled sounds of their movements. Madelaine imagined the dance of a bumblebee pollinating in the heat of midday. Right now, the bumblebees lay in their flowerbeds legs entangled with another as they sleep. She kissed Lucas on the nose as he hummed. He called her his marigold, his sunflower, his poppy. He knew the name of every wildflower in the prairie.

Madelaine grasped a handful of grass with one hand twisting the blanket with the other. Her engagement ring glittered in the moonlight. The world seemed to spin with the dizziness of spring. She sneezed and two deer flipped tail and bolted through the grass. She felt the seeds in the soil growing beneath them as if what they were doing now wasn’t just passion’s pleasure for themselves. She felt the stars above holding a million possibilities and the fate of their future. Her palm itched on the shaft of the blue stems as Lucas moaned.

They had known each other for five years, but this past year had been the longest with Lucas away at college and Madelaine helping her father around the farmhouse. Her sister had just married and moved out, leaving the cleaning and mending and baking and thousand other chores to Madelaine alone. She felt like she was becoming her mother. The thought of her mother brought tears to her eyes every time she smelled a lemon or broke a clothes pin or started a mending at the seam where her mother had left off.

The only escape she could find was wandering the prairie with Lucas. The prairie was where they had met, where he had proposed, where built walls did not define them and the sunlight was not shrouded.

A scream split through the night.

Lucas froze. Madelaine looked up and saw a shadow drift across the stars. “It was just a barn owl,” she said softly. But, the barn owl had been watching them peacefully from her perch on a black locust tree. At the scream, she had taken flight on silent wing.

Madelaine sighed and relaxed once more. They lay as one beneath the stars. Lucas rubbed Madelaine’s belly, and she wrapped her hands around his. Her eyes rested on the buds about to blossom around them. She had a tingling feeling deep inside her.

In the morning, the dew woke them before the sun rose. Groggily, they kissed goodbye and slipped through the tall grasses back to their parent’s houses.

Her sister’s pick-up truck was parked jaggedly in Madelaine’s driveway. The barn door was open and in the early rays of morning, she could see a black shroud covering a long wooden box. Her stomach plummeted. Her heart raced as she ran in through the front door. The house was quieter than the prairie.

Her father’s face was wet with tears as he held a baby boy in his hands still purple from birthing and covered in crusted slime. Jasper, her sister’s husband, was pacing the room. No one said anything. No one even looked at her as she took the sleeping babe from her father and warmed a basin of water to bathe it.

In the kitchen alone, she dampened a towel and dabbed the birthing membrane off the newborn. He awoke, and his cries were more piercing than the owl’s in the prairie, which she realized now had not been the owl. Madelaine swaddled the babe, gave him a cloth of goat’s milk to suckle, and rocked him in the rocking chair until he fell asleep again.

Jasper and her father went out to the barn as the sun rose. A bit later, she heard the truck door slam as Jasper drove off. Her father came inside and looked at her and the baby. With a half-broken smile, he said, “Good, he likes you.” Then, he went back outside to the barn.

Alone once more, Madelaine looked down at the babe cradled in her arms and felt her stomach twist as tears poured from her eyes. Her moments in the prairie with Lucas seemed so long ago. The moments with her sister, growing up, planning her wedding, now planning Madelaine’s wedding were lost behind the black shroud.

She wasn’t ready to be her mother yet.