First published in Quarto’s 2020 Spring Print Edition. 2020 fiction winner, selected by Jeff VanderMeer.
Illustration by Mitali Khanna Sharma
She began by forgetting things. Keys. The mailman’s name. Sentences, halfway through speaking them. There was a tile and iron-framed table by the front door where she had once stopped every morning and evening to exchange her keys, and that she now passed without even seeing, as if her eyes did not remember that it was there.
She was writing a novel about the human body and the things that happened inside of it, although she was not a doctor. At night, she stayed up for hours reading about medicine–not in medical journals, whose sesquipedalian technicalities were, to her, a foreign language, but in The New Yorker where the science was secondary to the human-interest story. Her husband reported that the light from her bedside table was keeping him up at night and so she began to read in the kitchen instead. She read with a cup of tea and, as she drank, paid special attention to the way the liquid felt sloshing around her mouth and down her throat. The way it paused for a moment at the mount of her tongue and then, midway down her chest, vanished–disappeared into a process so deep inside her body that she could not feel it or imagine what it felt like.
At the breakfast table, she told her husband about the sensation of liquid disappearing into flesh and tissue and muscle, all of which were run through and surrounded by other liquids. Her husband buttered a croissant and wondered how it was that she could remember these things in such great detail but not the day of the week.
It was summer and there was a sheen to everything. The backs of their thighs were slick with sweat. They sat on the balcony and listened to the waver and ripple of the trees. The table between them was clustered with little pots of compote and pastries and halved stone fruits beaded with juice. She sat in a slant of shade with her sunhat pulled low over her eyes. Her skin–pale, blue-veined–stretched tight over her collarbone and the knobs of her shoulders.
Her husband proffered a pastry in her direction.
Eat something. He said. His mouth was full of croissant.
The body turns everything to liquid. She said sagely.
She placed a flake of pastry on her tongue and let it dissolve there.
The body dissolves everything. She said. Pulverizes it with the teeth and the tongue, acids and enzymes. Other things too. The body lets everything pass through.
Okay. Her husband said.
He wished she would stop with all of this talk about the body. He wanted her to eat something, but she had been refusing food for weeks now. She said she could feel it moving through her at night, bubbling in her stomach and guts. She couldn’t sleep with all that mashing around.
When I lost the baby, she said, it was all liquid.
The body reduced itself, eventually. The morning sickness subsided. She stopped eating. Her belly flattened and then hollowed. Her milk came in and there was nowhere for it to go. It was a different color than she thought it would be, and thicker. She had purchased bras to accommodate her newly swollen breasts–lacy, celebratory bras with all sorts of bangles and trims–which, after everything had passed, she no longer had use for and needed to return to the store.
You don’t understand. She told the woman at the counter. I never even wore them.
We have a strict fifty-day return policy, Miss.
I have the tags and the receipts right here.
I’m sorry, Miss. But we cannot take them back.
The morning was hot and wet like the inside of a mouth. A bee, drawn to the ripe abundance, landed on the sugar-stick surface of a plum.
She watched the bee march its spindled legs without progress. Across the table, her husband dissected a cheese danish. He had wide, cow-like eyes that made him look much younger than he was. It hurt her to think of him as a child, the life he had lived and the people he had loved before her. She felt, sometimes, that she was playing catch up for the years that she had missed. She would look at him doing something ordinary, like shouting at a football game or cutting a cheese danish into even triangles, and think that she hardly knew him at all. These were behaviors he had internalized from someone else. She wondered what, if anything, she had impressed on him and when these things would begin to mark the surface of his life. The truth was, she had known him for less than half of his life, less than half of that half. Despite all of the past heaped up behind them, they had determined that they would be suitable life-partners and suitable parents to a child who was the product of both of them–their bodies and histories and the histories they carried, encoded, in their bodies. It was not sensible, she thought, studying the bee whose life would end after only 122 days, and yet people did it all the time.
All of this was to say that their baby might have had wide, cow-like eyes. On the ultrasound, it had nascent limbs and fluttering white light for a heartbeat.
Her husband rustled open the paper. When she began to speak, the words rushed out.
The human heart is capable of beating two hundred times a minute at the body’s point of maximum exertion. Three beats every second. She said. Enough to feel your whole body beat. The resting heartrate for an adult woman of twenty-nine years of age is between sixty and one hundred beats per minute. That’s over one hundred thousand beats per day. Did you know that? One hundred thousand times a day, the heart swells and empties and does not stop.
Even when you feel like you could die, she said, your heart goes on and on.
She closed her eyes and felt the sun on her eyelids, where the skin was thinnest and webbed with blood, and could imagine the pulse there. At the hospital they checked for the pulse at the neck or at the arch of the wrist, but really it was everywhere.
Blood flowed throughout the body in tributaries, a word borrowed from rivers that opened into other rivers. An endless fluid system.
Would you like a danish? Her husband asked.
Okay.
Cherry?
Okay.
He moved the pastry onto her plate and began cutting it into bite-sized pieces.
What’s that?
A cherry danish.
I’m not hungry.
You said you wanted it.
No. She said. I didn’t.
Her husband continued to cut. His hands were trembling. The pieces got smaller and smaller.
She spent most days in the garden now. When she sat down to write, her eyes began to feel dry and alien and she had to fight the urge to scratch them out. Words came slowly and in the wrong order. Outside, she felt herself come back into her body. She weeded the flowerbeds and threaded tomatoes through their lattices. After hours bent over the hydrangeas, she could feel the ropy pull of the muscles in her shoulders and upper arms, the tingle of her hands as they cramped around the pruning shears. By night, the ache stretched in every fiber and sinew. She sat with her feet up on the kitchen table and gulped water from an old instant coffee canister.
When they moved into the house–flush with new wealth from her husband’s work in the city and the advance from a major publishing house for her second novel–they had spent weeks trying to prune the landscape of their backyard into submission. The house was on a hill and the yard dropped off steeply, so that every journey from the vegetable patch at the bottom to the zinnias that framed the patio at the top was a full-body exercise. When she was particularly exhausted, she took the hill at a crawl. It felt good to have sweat on her back, dirt on her hands and knees. It felt good to pull things from the ground so that their fragile white roots were exposed to the sun and just as good to put things back in. She could not keep track of the flower names, but referred to them by color: orange, yellow, sunbeam, tangerine.
Her agent called with an extended deadline for her novel about the body, and then again when she missed that deadline. She did not hear the phone ring at the time. She was in the garden, wrist-deep in mulch.
Under her fastidious care, the garden wilted. The earth became spongy and black, bubbling underfoot. Stems slumped under their own leafy weight. Everything was too green, oversaturated. Her husband said that she should not water the plants every day, but she could not remember having watered them at all. On Monday, when her husband went to work in the city, she filled the watering can and sloshed it over the garden. On Tuesday she did the same. She did not know how to let things lie.
Seeing the wasted flowerbeds, her husband hid the can behind a stack of plywood in the garage.
She looked for it at first, then, after a day or two, forgot to keep looking.
Without sleep, she could hear the thrum of her body in real time. In her temples and palms, behind her eyes. She could feel her body pulsing. One hundred thousand times a day.
She lay in bed until the afternoon, watching the gauzy light move across the wall. She stood in the shower and scalded her skin, then lathered herself with ointments and thick, fragrant creams. After, she lay in bed some more. One morning brown blood spotted her underwear and the sight of it made her so faint that she spent the rest of the day on the couch with her eyes closed, although she was not asleep.
She had forgotten everything else but she could not forget this. The body remembered. It tired from lugging all that absence around.
The body was, in fact, mostly absence. As tightly packed as it all was, there was still empty space in its cavities and seams. On the most basic level, that of the atom, there was more dead space than there was matter to hold her together. If all this space were to be culled and excised, what was left of the human body could be contained in a particle of dust. All human bodies reduced and pressed together took up no more space than a sugar cube.
Her body, which paraded her person around, which refused sleep and food, which stretched and pulled and exhausted itself after a day’s work, which commanded her to do things like laugh or cry or cry for days on end without repose, which let memory run through it like a sieve, which could not keep anything inside, which bled once a month, which rejected its own offspring, which produced milk without a mouth to feed, which craved the hot press of another’s skin, which recoiled under her husband’s touch, which wiggled and bent and reached and collapsed, which beat sixty to one hundred times per minute and over one hundred thousand times a day, was mostly empty space.
Easily disappeared, speck-like.
The bras were in the back of her closet, folded in tissue paper. She had miscarried at the end of her first trimester–too early to have bought baby things like bottles or diapers or sneakers in miniature, and too early to have bought elastic-topped pants or tent-like dresses to accommodate a body extended to its limit. The bras, with their bangles and trims and ambitious cup size, were the only objects she had retained of her body’s half-formed past and the half-formed life inside.
In the pre-morning, when the light was still blue and her husband still slept with a pillow over his head, she unboxed the bras, pulling them from their wrappings to examine the fine mesh and the tiny stitches that, when organized, formed the shape of roses.
In front of the bathroom mirror, she slipped the straps of a lavender bra over her shoulders.
She turned to the side and leaned forward and twisted around so that she could see herself from the
back. She watched her breasts slip around the too-big space.
In front of the mirror, she jumped around and pounded her fist against the wall and sat on the edge of the tub and heaved her shoulders up and down. She turned to the side and projected her stomach as far out as it would go and placed her palms on top of it, gently gently, and held it that way until she had to let go.
Her body was telling her to let go. Everything was heavy, except for her head, which felt like it might levitate away from her neck at any moment. It was exhaustion and it was relief, which, she realized, were the same thing. She unfastened the tiny gold hooks and unslipped the bra, one strap at a time. She nestled the bras back in the box, then enfolded them in the tissue paper until they looked newly arrived from the store, even their tags still in place.
When all of this was over, she crawled into the bed where her husband’s body was beginning to perform the first signs wakefulness, and fell asleep.
She slept all day and into the next. When she awoke, the room was filled with a bright, shifting white so clean and complete that, for a moment, it was as if none of it had ever happened.