Brenda

I hate Thursdays. She comes on Thursdays, and something about her grates on me.

Days thread together, and I dream, simultaneously, of peace and solitude, and an end to the crowded, beeping loneliness.

Then Thursday comes, and where the plates of my heart creaked and strained, now my teeth press together and bend, threatening to snap. I feel how lank and matted my hair is, always accompanied by the prick prick prick that it shouldn't matter, only one thing matters, remember? Only he matters. The little god of me.

Stop being so shallow, Haley

I look down at the woomb(c) pod, wondering how he looks in there now. Whether his skin is still paper-thin and see-through. It hurts, thinking these things. Like gripping a knife by the wrong end. I do it anyway, because I don't know how to not.

Her voice keeps cutting through, and my eyes betray me. And him, too. Skittering over to where no one wants them. My eyebags reflected in the gloss of her lips and the sheen of her handbag. Tacky, I think, spite pulsing, for the moment, louder than love.

My son is twenty-seven weeks, three days.

If this had gone the way it should, then I should say, I.

I am twenty seven weeks three days.

I'd say it with a smile. Glowing. Smug even, and why not? It's not every day you make life.

But it didn't. Go the way it should, I mean. So now my little boy bears the burden. He is twenty seven weeks, three days.

Now my belly shrinks, flabby and empty. I am so mad at it, I could excise it from the rest of me and chuck it, screaming, off a cliff.

I'm mad aren't I? Not just angry, but really, truly, actually, mad.

It's the beeping. It will do that to anyone.

They won't say “premature” anymore. Instead, they speak in days and numbers and percentages, as though he were a maths problem. Something neat. Something you could put in a box no! I won't think of that. He's going to make it. He will.

They offered me a room. Hardly more than a cupboard really. It's normally for the sleep-in staff. I think I looked at them like they'd suggested I saw my own leg off and put it in a locker. I'm not sure any words came out of me. I just kept looking at them until they left. Then I hummed lullabies until I fell asleep curled up on the cold floor. One of the nurses brought me a mattress. Did the sheet and the blanket come the same day? I can't remember.

Every morning, I wake before the artificial sunrise. Before the technicians simulate the pinky-orange hush they think babies prefer. I hum lullabies into the mesh filter of the womb pod. I’ve been told this is “non-standard.” So is love, apparently.

She arrives late on Thursdays. The other mother. Her girl glows under the monitors, every limb defined and perfect in silhouette. The mother flicks the lights on and coos over her baby's pain. Smiles. Takes photos, and calls it bonding.

In stolen moments, I cram some pity for the little girl, imprisoned in heavy silence. I wonder if she hears my heartbeat, all the way over there. If it brings her any comfort in her eternal loneliness, broken only by weekly spikes of searing light. Sometimes I let her borrow it for a little. Whisper to her that her mother (as annoying as I find her) will be back for her soon.

She, the other mother, if you can call her that, no I mustn't think those thoughts, she thinks I’m clingy. She says to the nurse, “That one never leaves, does she?” as if I can't hear. Maybe she thinks I can't. Maybe she thinks thinks I'm so swaddled by my own baby, and the ghost of a thread between us where a juicy blue spiral is meant to be... that I can't hear anything at all outside my own gloomy echo chamber.

She speaks as if I were mildew in the corner, and I realise I am. I sprawl across the tiles and gnaw the skirting. Another round of bleach and tears and internal beepbeepbeep will wash me clean away.

She’ll come again next Thursday. She’ll bring her voice and her indignation and her light. But until then, the darkness is mine. It thrums with a million things, most of them harsh, but maybe Info prefer it after all, as unbearable as it is.

+

They wheeled her in like a stack of parcels. No flowers or family. Just signatures.

I was adjusting the speaker again, when she arrived. He's supposed to hear my heartbeat from the inside. Not like this. But it's the best I can do. It's fitting, because it's like my heart really is pulsing outside my body.

I hear them talking. They didn't trouble to keep their voices down. I am part of the furniture now.

Consider yourself at home...

I'm invisible, or as near to as makes no difference. Tongues are looser. So are doors. Funny that. I catch glimpses, and hear snippets, and these are like swallows of bitter coffee that keep me going through the longest night shift of my life.

So I watched her rattle by in noisy silence, a shroud of uncaring attentiveness being woven by the yard, and I wondered who she is. Who she was. I saw her eyes, closed as if in restful sleep, and her mouth, sagging open as if someone had pressed pause in the middle of a sentence. I didn't know her name but I thought of her as Brenda.

“She’s optimal,” one of the staff whispered. “No rejection risk. No trauma history. Good pelvic symmetry.”

My brain being like sludge, it took me a moment to really see what was being trundled past me. Once I did, I wanted to scream. The way they said it. Like she was furniture. A vessel. A cradle. A pod.

So we've come full circle, then.

She's been good for me, this dead woman who has been stolen from herself. I think. I'd hardly moved from my mattress for so long, but something pushed me to my feet and down the corridor. Why? To pay my respects? To whisper sorry like it meant anything?

She got a room to herself. I wondered about that.

I never found out her name, but I thought of her as Brenda. Everyone should have a name, and a friend to roll it round her mouth softly.

She will never wake. But a baby will grow, under her sluggish heart.

They’re going to implant someone’s embryo into her. A couple from the coast, I heard. They want “a natural gestation.” They say it’s better for bonding. They say it’s better for the baby.

Is it? To grow inside a corpse?

Maybe my little lad is better off where he is. You know, rather than...

All this fancy machinery, and they still don't have anything that can top what we can do. (Well. Most of us, anyway. Not necessarily me specifically. But. You know. In general.)

I lie back on my mattress. The floor is cold. The lights are dimmed again. I press play.

And I hum, just in case he’s listening.

+

Thank you for reading!

If you'd like to read the precursor to this story, it's here: