t began with a young married man who had two daughters. He was not a man with great intellect or great talent. He was not a man of any particular kind of greatness. He was basically a normal man. He was a farmer by profession. He worked with his hands. He was a Christian man, and he went to church with his wife and daughters every Sunday, as a family before God. He had lived his life in the way he was supposed to, and his neighbors would call him an upright man. He would call himself an upright man.
He didn’t think about things much. The land was his livelihood. It gave him power. As a man, by the will of God, he controlled the animals and the growth of the plants. He generated food from the waste of soil.
When he was a boy, his father had power. His father ran the farm and controlled the food. His father owned the family and the land. Still, with a little boy’s memory, he could picture his father: a big man, a towering shadow with the strength to move mountains. His father’s face was lost to his memory. Somehow, he could never bring it to mind. The image that floated in front of his mind’s eye was his father’s hands.
They were rough and callused hands. Their massive redness made them seem to pulse with blood flowing through them. The father had a habit of standing with his hands held out in front of him when he talked. These hands would hang in the air at the level of the father’s thighs. The fingers were broad and puffy. The wrists were lean and insubstantial in comparison to the hands, mere strings that held them. The square palms protruded outward, angularly, bulging.
The calluses added a dimension of white hardness to the hands, and a texture of constantly peeling skin.
The fingers would slowly clench in upon these hands, like a deep inhalation of breath, hold their pose, and then release. In this relaxed position, his father’s fingers would tremble.
When watching his father’s hands go through this repetitive motion, the boy (now a man) would be fascinated. In his memory, this action was always accompanied by a vivid roar, a lion’s roar. Then, inevitably, it would end with a snake’s hiss, as his father disengaged the belt from his waist.
Hsss. It flew out like a whip.
“What kind of a boy are you?”
Crack.
“You’re not a man. You’re not even a boy.”
Crack!
“I’ve got cows with more guts than you, boy.”
CRACK!
“I’ve got cats that work harder on this farm.”
Crack, crack, crack.
That was the world of a boy. He learned his lessons this way. Discipline is what made you a man.
Once in a while, now that he was grown, the man would look down while he was talking. He would see his own hands hovering in front of his thighs, clenching and unclenching. A strange dislocation in time would happen to him then. It wasn’t that he was reminded of his father. There was just a wave of dizzy unreality that would come over him.
With a hiss, his own belt would fly out of its place.
This man had no son, but he saw to it that his wife and daughters lacked no discipline.
He was a good man. He loved his family. He did what he thought was best for them. He was a good provider. He was a moral man. He taught his family to be upright before God.
His eldest daughter was still very young when the odd thing happened.
It had been a bad day. There was some sort of sickness affecting the livestock. It was not something he had seen before. Six cows had died, and three more were sick. He had to keep them separate from the other animals. His time with the cows was interfering with the crops, and there was an early frost. Under the circumstances, his wife was understandably irritating to him. The potatoes at dinner were cold, and the roast was dried out with overcooking. He wished the woman would learn how to cook. Wasn’t that the point of a wife? All day, a headache was troubling him. Even when it seemed to go away, he could tell it was just waiting, back behind his temples, waiting to come out.
His wife could tell that the man’s temper was boiling over this evening. She plead that she needed to churn butter. Churning butter was a never-ending task that conveniently took her away for long periods of time. She disappeared out the back of the house, taking the baby along with her, as was her habit.
The man did not mind being left alone with his oldest daughter. He loved his daughters. The small one wasn’t much yet, but the elder one was big enough to be a miniature person. She was like a magical wind-up toy, a miniaturized woman to dance and smile for him. She was full of life and vitality.
He loved to watch his daughters sleep. They had the smoothest skin, the roundest faces. They were completely lacking in self-consciousness. This was true beauty, something that he did not see in his wife anymore. She was getting wrinkles in her skin, around the corners of her mouth, at the corners of her eyes.
His daughters were tiny and delicate and innocent and perfect.
His eldest daughter smiled at him, coyly touching the waist of her dress with her hands, wringing her skirt, as she told him something incomprehensible about her experience of the day.
He felt an immediate and overwhelming desire for her.
Only his child could bring him joy.
“Come, sit on Daddy’s lap, honey,” he said.
It was just a thing that happened, something that came over him. It was an oddity, an unusual blending of circumstances.
He swore to himself afterward that it was just that once.
It wouldn’t happen again, not with his daughter.
After a while, his memory of remorse faded, but his feelings and desires did not fade. Something that you want cannot seem wrong. He loved his daughter. He would never do anything to hurt her. Just look at her. She’s perfectly fine. She’s beautiful. There’s nothing wrong with her. Nothing has hurt her.
It didn’t happen just that once.
The little girl repressed the memories of her childhood experiences deep inside her unconscious mind, where they settled uncomfortably just below the surface, hiding out in a corner of her brain that she wasn’t using at the moment.
She was bright and cheerful and always looking for her father’s good attention. She wanted to please him.
She was always looking for love.
Melissa had a doll. It had blue eyes and blonde curled hair, and it wore a bright pink checkered dress. Its lips were pink, and its cheeks were pink.
She named this doll Nanette.
Nanette lived a happy and imaginary life in Melissa’s room. Each day, Melissa would take out the doll and play quietly on the bed, mouthing to herself the words of another adventure. Each day, another chapter of Nanette’s story was told.
Nanette was an orphaned French girl. Her parents had died in a tragic accident. They were both drowned in the ocean on a boat, trying to cross the Atlantic to bring Nanette to America. Nanette survived but was left orphaned and penniless in the big city of New York.
Poor Nanette was different from all of the other girls in the orphanage. She had trouble learning English, and her French accent made her a laughing-stock for the other girls.
“You’re so dumb you can’t even speak,” they told her. “Say ‘She sells sea shells by the sea shore.’ Say it!” They would roll with laughter at her accent.
Young Nanette was beaten by unforgiving nuns at the Catholic orphanage until her knuckles were raw and bruised and bloody from the mark of a ruler. When Nanette was sixteen, her fortune changed.
Nanette was walking back to the orphanage alone after being abandoned at a shop by her fellow orphans. They were on an outing in the city, and the other girls decided that Nanette was disturbing their fun. They snuck out of a shop while Nanette was looking at a dress she could not possibly afford.
As she walked down the dark and dirty streets, a violent criminal cornered and attacked her. Luckily for Nanette, the son of a millionaire industrialist was walking by at the time. He witnessed the attack and valiantly fought off the attacker. After saving Nanette, the boy instantly fell in love with her.
He took the nearly starved girl to a restaurant, where he bought her the best foods and the most sumptuous desserts. He heard her sad story and vowed that she would never go back to the orphanage again. He swept her off of her feet and brought her to live in his huge mansion. He gave her love, devotion, clothes, food, and maids.
Nanette rose beyond all of her hardships through the power of love.
Melissa thought that the power of love would save her also.
But she knew the story about Nanette was a lie.
Melissa married a man who loved her. He was a farmer, like her father.
Melissa believed that she loved her husband and that they would live happily ever after together.
She got pregnant.
She had a child.
The child was a girl.
The girl had no name.
It was two forty-eight in the morning. Melissa’s eyes popped open, and she was very awake. She thought that she had heard the baby crying, but she hadn’t. It was only a dream. The sound still echoed in her memory.
She got up out of the bed. The floor was cold beneath her feet. John was sound asleep in the bed. He was snoring gently.
Melissa shuffled along the cold floor to the bedroom door and walked into the hallway.
In a way, she savored the feeling of the floor on the balls of her feet and her toes.
She pulled back the curtain where the nursery door was supposed to go.
There, lying asleep in her crib, was Melissa’s daughter.
The mother stood there, looking at the peaceful, sleeping child. She would need to wake the baby for her feeding, but she did not want to.
Instead, Melissa pondered baby names in her head.
Mary? It made her think of Christmas, not a real name for a real person.
Agatha? No, people would call her “Aggie.”
Sylvia? It sounded too smooth on the tongue, like oil.
Angela? Her father called her “Angel,” but Melissa just didn’t like the name.
Dorothy? The first syllable was too hard, like “door.”
The name Nanette popped into her head, and all at once Melissa remembered the story of Nanette from her girlhood.
“Nanette?” she asked the baby. “Are you Nanette?”
The thought was followed by a burst of anger. Nanette was an orphan. Her parents were dead. Melissa was overcome with the idea that the baby wanted her to die, to be out of its life forever, even if that meant poverty and cruel companions in an orphanage.
“Children hate their parents,” she thought, and this thought opened up another floodgate of memory.
She remembered her father in every small detail, a very big father from when she was very small.
She remembered the metal clink as his belt unbuckled with the finality of a jail cell clanging shut.
She remembered thinking: This is not my father. This is not a human being.
The belt slithered slowly out of its place, not zooming out in anger for a whipping but sensually, quietly, uncertainly, tentatively sneaking out for a different kind of attack.
“Come sit on Daddy’s lap, honey.”
His massive, red, callused hands sat on her tiny, smooth arms.
She imagined that a hunter came with a great knife and stabbed her father over and over and over. Blood spewed over the walls and seeped out onto the ground, making it a red room. She could see it. She would concentrate all of her mental powers on the slowly spreading pool of red, staining and coloring everything in crimson tones.
No hunter came.
She loved her father.
Her father loved her.
She stood over the crib and looked down at her baby. It was tiny and soft and defenseless. It was a mirror. She was looking back in time. She grew a tumor in her belly, and when they extracted it, they found that the tumor was her. There was her soul, lying unaware in its crib.
For the first time, Melissa saw the similarities between her husband and her father. They both had large, callused hands. They both had sturdy, weathered faces and square jaws. They both gave her the same feeling when they touched her, a mixture of nausea and pleasure and guilt.
Time had rewound. Tick-tick-tick. It was reenacting itself, reinventing itself.
Melissa looked down on herself with pity and remorse.
Better never born.
Better dead inside the womb, a black womb feeding only poison.
Here was this child, nestled comfortably in a blanket. The blanket was a surrogate parent, providing warmth and softness. How easily it could turn on such a vulnerable creature. Even the blanket could be an enemy.
Melissa took up the blanket and placed it over the small face. Her hand covered the other side of the blanket, completely engulfing the small face, holding the small head in place, stifling any cries.
This was the end.
She seemed to stand there forever, with the small being under her palm.
Then, she realized that everything had been still and silent for a long time.
Melissa released her hand. All continued still and silent. She tucked the blanket gently around the baby, lying so peaceful.
“Sleep well, honey,” she said.
She went back to bed.
In the morning, she did not remember what had happened.
Sometimes the memory would come back to her, and she would think that it might be a dream. At other times, she would remember it differently, like this:
Melissa woke up at two forty-eight in the morning. The baby was crying. It was loud and obnoxious and demanding.
She picked the baby up in order to silence it. It wanted to eat, with its greedy mouth. She held it to her breast, allowing it to feed, and its screeching stopped.
This ugly, needing, desiring baby. A baby was nothing more than a leech. It lived in your stomach and sucked its life out of you from the inside. It tried to kill you as it worked its way out of you. It pulled you open, like cracking a nut, to escape from you. Then, out in the world, it continued to feed off of you. It drank from your breast, and it expected you to be its slave. It took and took and continued to take.
There was a tiny crack in the wooden railing of the crib. She had never noticed it before. It ran almost the full length of the rail, but its width was less than the width of a hair. If she pulled it, Melissa thought that she could crack the rail in two halves with her bare hands.
Melissa was strong. She had always been strong. She was the center of the universe, and yet this infant was sapping her power. It was the baby that her husband would run to comfort. It was the baby her mother fussed over. The two of them would talk about it over their dinners. This thing, that did nothing but cry and vomit and eat and piss itself. It was stealing all of her love from her. All love centered around Melissa. All love must be for Melissa. The infant had no name. It deserved no name.
It was quiet now. It was satiated for the moment, but its appetites would only grow as time went on. It would feed off of her until she dried up. It would take away her husband’s love. It would expect everything in return for being.
She lay the thing down in its crib. She pulled the blanket up on top of the small squirming form. She pulled the blanket up over its head, up over its eyes and nose and mouth. With this blanket, she could cover it, blot it out, make it go away. She pressed with her own hand, covering its misshapen head, its tedious crying mouth, its running nose. She pushed it down so that it sank into the cushions beneath it. The baby sank and settled, nestled between the soft cushion and the soft blanket.
“Shut up,” she whispered. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
Sometimes Melissa thought that, while this was happening, John woke from his deep sleep and came into the hallway. Sometimes she believed that he had stood there and watched her, her palm cupped over the baby’s face until it stopped moving, until it stopped breathing, and long afterwards as it lay dead beneath her weight. He couldn’t have been there, though. When she turned to the room, it was empty.
I saw it all in my mirror, so it all is true.
Charlotte didn’t have an instance of blood in the month after her mother’s death. She was grateful to skip it. She was feeling sick, nauseated and aching. Everyone was kind to her, because her mother had died and because she was still recovering from her illness. Her head was fuzzy, and she felt like sleeping all the time.
On the day of blood, Charlotte woke. It was the middle of the afternoon, but time had ceased to have real meaning for her. The sun came in through the window, and a sharp pain cracked her temple.
There was a pain in her abdomen, too, a deep red pain. This was stronger and worse than any she remembered. She tried to get up from the bed, but she couldn’t.
Across the room, Charlotte saw a girl in the mirror.
“Help me,” said Charlotte.
The girl in the mirror shook her head and walked away. The mirror turned red.
Charlotte looked down at the blanket. A red stain was spreading out from her middle. She lay in a haze, as the stain expanded outward, too slowly to be seen by the naked eye. Charlotte’s eye was not naked. It saw the past and the present. It saw the seeping of the blood, starting from nothing, and gradually, incessantly pooling across the sheets, weeping.
In the blood, there was a clump of something. It was a slimy, red, angry, unknowable something. In the blood, there was something soft and squalid, something that should have been, something that shouldn’t have been. It was trapped between being and non-being. It was not liquid. It was not solid. It was not alive. It was not dead.
Everything was red.
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