Young Writers Society

She was dying in his arms, and Jud knew it.

His little girl, with her pale, chalky face, her shut eyes swollen and purple, and the defeated way her whispery hair lay sticky across her brow. Her exhausted shivering. Her lips wet and drool creeping from the sides of her mouth. Her skinny wretchedness, her bones old and rusty, like tossed out car parts in a junkyard. The jailer of her mouth. He couldn't tease out any words. Any hope. Jud just sat there in the chair by her bed and held her in his arms. Earlier, he had sung to her. But eventually all the notes and the words had turned useless in his throat, bitter like a foul medicine. So now they sat in silence.

The doctor said it was scarlet fever, just like your wife had.

The doctor said she would probably die, just like your wife did.

His little girl, his pretty little hope.

The shadows spun and waltzed in the shuttered light of the oil lamp, like fancy ladies at a dance. His little girl shuddered along with them, and he was pretty sure that he could almost see her among the shadows, half there, half not. A broken, stuttering image. A washed face. Pliable, healthy, the curve of a full belly and the hush of a smile. But they were hallucinations. Just hopeless, wasted things.

Jud held her tighter.

A rickety cough laced her breath.

And then.

Silence.

No more labored, kissing, sucking gasping. Her body still and reverent, like a bedtime prayer. Her taxed face, luminescent almost, features disproportionate, but strikingly pretty and holy, even as the last skims of dirty life bled through her toe-tips and fingertips. Her body beautiful and silent as some carved heathen idol.

He stood up.

Empty, empty, empty.

He gently lowered her to the bed, on top of the twisted, sweaty sheets.

He smoothed the brittle hair out of her eyes with his thumb.

And then he walked out of the room, into the kitchen, where the doctor and the mortician sat in the sorrowful, pitiful lamplight that painted their faces with gullies of shadows and dugouts of light. They got up. The doctor went into the bedroom. The mortician laid his hand on his shoulder.

The heat slumbered.

**

Nothing would grow.

The land was dead. Gray and tight as a puritan. Holding some deep resentment with its bramble fingers and its blushing clay face. It crumbled between fingers, dust and shale blowing away like kisses. Seeds that had been buried in the soil were miserable little sprouts now, sucked dry and wilted. Sad rustlings, pathetic poisoned veins. It accepted the nose of the plow gracelessly, refusing to surrender any kind of virgin pride to the hands of men. Dry and sparse. In its miserly skinniness, the land seemed to expand, catching the heat and cupping it in waterless hands. Holding it like a grudge. Breeding it. Burning the rubber soles of anyone who walked with it.

And the heat. The heat blasted the simple trees in their herded stands. Wicking away the beads moisture and sweat off the land, like fingers picking lice nits out of a child's hair. Such a thirst. A croaking, chiseled thirst. Throats were rubbed and iron as pipes under the kitchen sink.

Men standing out in the sepulcher of the land, looking up at the sky, chewing on tobacco, and scuffing the ground with their boots. Reckoning with each other. Imagining that the pain in their knee bones mean that rainclouds would start populating the sky any day now. Heading home with the collars of their shirts damp and gray. Worrying themselves. Always thirsty, but guilty to drink, because of the barren, childless land. Interpreting and despairing, great collective sighs rolling through the red hills and split caverns.

The heat grimaced.

**

Her muscles shivered and whipped under skin, like lovers under the sheets. Her sunken, blue-gray skin, pulled tight over her straining, furious face. Mel thought she looked sent straight out of hell. Wild, orb eyes. Pretty mouth chiseled open and teeth exposed. The hollows of her cheeks and her hands behind her head, squeezing the ironframe of the bed, the rhythmic thrust and boil of her body. Legs spread like a little boy's slingshot, and the midwife on the other end, saying soft, useless words. The strain. The plucking of her breath and the anxious thieving of her screams and groans. The soft curvature of the neck. The plastered hair. The stench of suffering and hot blood. Gasping, choking, in the dumb, voiceless heat.

Mel stopped pacing. He sat in a chair. He crossed his legs. He tried his best to ignore the birth sounds. He didn't dare offer to hold the hand of his wife. Her delicate, uncalloused hands would crush his bones, he was sure. Crush them like seashells. He stood up. He crossed the room. He put his back up against the wall.

He could see the crown of the baby between her legs, easing through into the sticky hands of the midwife, who sat there in her folds of cloth. Coaxing it out like you would coax a little bird to eat of your hand. She clicked her tongue and cooed. The old, experienced mechanism of her fingers. And his wife pushed. Toes scrunched up at the ends of her feet. Pink-red of her cheeks. Mel couldn't stand it. His stomach twisted up and he started pacing again and the midwife told him that he should probably leave the room. But he shook his head.

The baby's head was almost out completely. Blue and slimy. Eyes bulging behind its lids. Breathless lips. Void face, like a child in prayer. Ugly and old looking. Crabby in its eviction.

The midwife went silent as she saw the baby's face. Her old, broad back straightened and her lips thinned. Mel looked at her.

“Keep pushing, hon. He's almost out,” she said.

“Anything wrong?” Mel asked.

She grunted.

His wife moaned and arched her back and thrust her jaw out, eyes scrunched and puckered. The sweat on her face glistening like dew drops clinging to spinstery spiderwebs. Mel looked at the baby again. Purple and yellowish bruising all over its body, colored and divided like a map in an atlas. He walked forward. The midwife was standing, pressing on her belly, saying soft things, checking the baby. In one hand she held a pair of scissors, spotted with mildew. His wife belted out low, guttered sounds. Mel opened his mouth to say something again, but the midwife glared at him over her shoulder and said if he didn't stay back and keep his godawful questions to himself she was going leave.

The baby's chest.

Fat, segmented forearms.

Then the stomach. Rubbery umbilical cord. Sloppy, runty hands. But somehow lifeless.

Mel frowned again. He looked at the baby's face. He looked at its hands and compressed chest. Its dusky complexion. Blue as whaleskin. Muted, smoggy face.

“What the hell is wrong with it?” he said.

“What?” screeched his wife. “What?”

“Nothing, hon,” said the midwife. “Just keep pushing. Push hard.”

The baby's crotched legs, knubbed knees, and then the little feet. The midwife expertly snipped the umbilical cord, wrapped the baby in a towel, and lifted it for inspection, her fingers playing over its skin, like the bony fingers of farmers prodding an animal for meat and fat. She sighed. Mel's wife gasped and smiled and cried all at the same time, her trembling arms held out for her baby, her baby. Let me have a look at my baby boy.

The midwife's eyes were bitter. She walked over to his wife. She laid the baby in her arms. She said to her, “I'm sorry, Fan. But he didn't make it out. Stillborn. I'm sorry. Nothing anyone coulda done. Just God's will, I guess. I'm sorry.”

Mel walked over to her repeating the midwife. Sorry, hon. So sorry. What a shame. Much sorrow. His wife was voiceless. She looked at the baby. Her fingers traced the grain and warp of the cold skin, gluey with blood and birth-sap. She whispered and cried and held the baby close. Mel put his hand on her shoulder, but she yanked away. Fan turned over on her side. Her body shuddered around the baby.

The heat rotted.

(A/N: You may have found this chapter short and somewhat...uneventful? Maybe. Its purpose was to show some strange things happening around town. I wanted to post a section that introduced the main character, too, but it would've ended up too long. Reading a novel is so different on the internet...If you did enjoy this regardless, I'm glad. Expect part 4 sometime saturday.)