Young Writers Society

My son is three years old now, and I still can’t really fathom it.“Did he really come from me?” I ask my husband as we watch him play in the garden, tumbling unsteady on the grass. The garden is humid, congested with red roses, and smells almost intoxicating. It has been trimmed somewhat during the last few years, so that I and my husband can walk through it on pleasant days with our son, his nursemaid at his heels. “Of course, my love,” my husband assures me. “I was there when he came to you.” I wonder if he meant to phrase it that way; when he came to you.

When he came into me. When you came in me.

I was not personally there for this advent. For either of theirs’, though I was in person. I don’t remember it; I remember waking up and the smell of roses, suffocating, and then I remember the pain, still vivid. For hours, the pain, and my husband, who wasn’t yet, who was only a prince with not even a full beard to his face, over me, whispering, “you’re awake, you’re awake, you’re alive. Oh God.” He looked so afraid, shocked. He was not prepared to be a father. He had a fat rolling childhood, sucked on strangers’ tits as a babe, had not so much as scabbed a knee in his life. Those years ago, the girl he’d found laying in the old, abandoned castle garden was something to play with on long summer’s days. She was pretty, he supposed, almost like a real girl.

Useful, he could have thought as he stood poised over me, a summer day like this one. Wait—it must have been earlier than that, if the little prince was born in the summer.

The air was foggy, crystalline, only thorns adorning rampant vines entangling vines; he’d brought a scarf with him to the garden, perhaps, perhaps that more-red-than-green tartan.

Because of the child, who even at birth was the spitting image of him, the prognosis was obvious. The old queen and king would not stand for a bastard. Fortunately I was in name a princess, albeit of a forgotten province fallen on hard times. Not so much of a stretch, and whatever doubt that may have been was dispelled the girl’s lovely figure, her charming innocence that was comely on the wife of a prince. Innocent indeed. My husband jokes that the first time I encountered him completely exposed on our wedding night on a cavernous canopied bed, I rivaled Mary lying bewildered under Joseph. I laugh hesitantly at this to him and hide my face in his chest and he chuckles. How silly I was, embarrassed at my naiveté. How it had hurt that night, in more ways than one, and was this was it how it was supposed to feel, a man and a woman? I thought, as I listened to my ear slide against silken sheets, my white dress hitched up to my waist, back and forth. Well, I didn’t think I wanted to be married. Only a moment ago my dreams were full of fir trees and honeysuckle and the glimmer of butterfly wings behind the next tree, and I was a young maiden who’d never seen a spindle, never seen a man. Never even seen a child besides myself, and suddenly in a room down the hallway crying for its mother was a creature who apparently was this impossible creature: a minute person who I didn’t recognize but that I was told was my son. Somehow I still don’t understand it, not fully. I don’t understand how I was part of any of it.

My husband, dropping to his knee, reminds the little boy to be careful not to get too close to the roses; they’re very pretty to look at, but he wouldn’t like to prick his finger, would he?