Keeping Her

KEEPING HER

by Sheila Massie

(Content Warnings: story mentions child death and infant harm)

Witch

I knew she was there the moment I crossed the threshold. The house smelled of new paint and of a child who lingered. Her presence was both soft and insistent. She wasn’t the kind of ghost who rattled doors or flicked lights on and off or left the kitchen tap running. She followed me around the house, watching me, curious.

I gave her some time to get used to me as I rattled my belongings into the cupboards and closets, unpacked my boxes of books into heaps on the floor when I ran out of shelves, and moved my furniture around repeatedly and indecisively. I lived there for nearly a month before I began to look for her remains. She didn’t know where she was.

I walked the floorboards first, listening for the telltale creak of a loosened nail, a joint which didn’t quite fit, or a hollow space beneath. Then I rapped on the old plaster walls and inspected the cement of the basement for discolorations or dust. When I finally found her, she was tucked between the rafters in the attic behind strips of bare lath, which had been cracked all along one end like wishbones.

She was a tiny thing wrapped in newspaper. I unfolded the fragile, frail leaves of yellowed paper, peeling them back one by one. Beneath lay a bundle swathed in a pale pink blanket. The color had faded over time. One impossibly small hand peeked out, as weightless as ash. The fingers curled into a fist and the bones showed through like a seashell exposed in sand. I cradled her with one hand, using the other to uncover her. She was naked, curled up in a fetal position. Her skin was shrunken around her bones, dry and brittle, and the color of walnuts. Her nose was sunken into her face and her eyes were abnormally large, wide and round. Dark ringlets of hair curled at her ears, brow, and nape. Her mouth was open in a small, round o. She smelled of dust, the sunlit heat of the old attic, stale milk, and iron blood crusted on thighs.

Her spirit was curious to see, eager even. I beckoned her closer, feeling a soft breeze across my fingers and then on my cheek. Baby’s breath. Sweet and milky. “This is you,” I told her. I held up the shriveled corpse, one palm cupping her buttocks and the other cradling her head.

All I wanted to do was give her a chance to know what it felt like to live.

I didn’t intend to keep her.

Mother

I didn’t intend to keep her.

I had meant to leave her at the church as soon as she was born, but she was so frail and sickly. I thought she needed my milk. I needed her too, as a way of holding on to him just a little bit longer.

I couldn’t hide the pregnancy from my mother. She knew nearly from the start. Women know. She caught me smoothing my dress over my belly long before it began to swell and pinned me with a cold, penetrating gaze as though I was a mouse caught under the steel of a trap, until, reluctantly, I nodded. She pressed a fist to her chest and drew in a deep breath. She lay her hands on my shoulders, briefly, before shutting herself in her room. When she emerged some time later, cheeks flushed, eyes swollen from crying, she only nodded once to me, her face set and determined. Each morning after, she presented me with an extra ration of milk and a spoonful of cod liver oil. At night, she would sometimes rub my aching feet. 

The pregnancy was easy enough to hide from everyone else. I stayed at home. My mother, tight-lipped, held the door open a crack and told visitors I was ill. She offered them short, sharp explanations, calling my condition hysteria or melancholy or distress, depending on her mood, and waved them away. 

With my father, it was difficult. He had begun to chide me for sleeping in too late and eyed my stomach nastily when my clothes became too tight. Once he realized, he was bent on ignoring me, as if his unmarried daughter, spoilt by her indiscretions, simply ceased to exist.

We tried to hide the baby. The baby screamed. Day and night. For hours at a time. She wasn’t well. My mother urged me to send for a doctor. My father refused to allow it. “No one is to know,” he said. He banished me to the attic, saying I could come down when the problem was taken care of, and he turned up the volume on the radio.

She wanted to nurse. She always wanted to nurse. I cringed each time she latched on. My nipples were sore, raw and abraded by her constant sucking. At least it gave me relief from her incessant cries. I felt emptied and gnawed at, both inside and out. My days and nights were encased in the warm, dry heat of the attic and marked by the play of light and shadow from the single window. I was stubbornly waiting for her to get better, for the milk in my hollow breasts to heal her, so that I could feel as though I had done something for her before I let her go.

My mother’s sister was especially insistent. As spring bled into summer and the attic became stifling with heat, she presented herself at the back door nearly every day to demand my mother let her in to see me. Through the attic window, cracked open to catch the breeze, I could hear them arguing. “We are family,” my aunt admonished. “I can help.”

I crouched beneath the open window, trembling, with the baby’s face pressed between my breasts, lest she begin screaming again for my aunt and all the neighborhood to hear. My mother finally closed the door, sending her sister away. I pulled the baby out from beneath my blouse, and she was blue and silent. I shook her to wake her, gently at first, then harder. She finally opened her mouth in a tiny, round o and breathed in a gulping, sputtering breath. My heart pounded with relief as I held her in my lap, brushing her soft curls from her forehead.

She didn’t scream much for the rest of the day. She became listless, soft and limp. She would stare at me with her large blue eyes. Once she grasped my finger when I put it in her fist, but she didn’t wiggle when I changed her diaper. She just lay there like a doll made of cloth and stitched together with embroidery thread.

I slept late the next morning, exhausted. So did she. She never woke up after that. Never opened her eyes for me again. An hour or two later, she was cold and stiff and tinged with blue.

Witch

I began by plucking a length of wool from the blanket in which the babe had been wrapped. I twisted this with a plucked strand of my own long hair, and a length of fine, dark scarlet silk thread, the color of birth blood, and wound them together into a single plait. I stripped naked. It wasn’t strictly necessary for the kind of magic I wished to perform, but it was conducive to the magic I wanted. Birth; rebirth.

It wasn’t a lightly made decision. Reuniting a body with a spirit was dark magic, unpredictable and sometimes costly. Maybe I was reckless, but it was only a child, a babe no more than a few days old, and I was confident I could assuage  her. She deserved a chance to know what it was like to live. 

I sat, cross-legged on the floor of the attic, setting the body of the child in my naked lap. Her skin was dry and leathery against my thighs. She was as light as a dried corn husk.

I threaded my embroidery needle with the plait. I invited her ghost near me, gathered her in, asked her consent. I reassured her that I wasn’t going to hurt her. That I was trying to help. That it might feel a bit strange.

I set my needle to the tiny chest, just at the sternum—the strong, flat wedge of bone which protected her heart. I pushed the needle down through the tough, taut skin and plucked it up again. I drew the thread through, leaving a length of it dangling across her breast, then guided the spirit closer, and gathered her with one hand while inserting the needle again for a second stitch. I took her into me, into the core of my magic, using the rhythm of the embroidery to draw her through me, infusing her into the thread and then expelling her. After the first few stitches, she seemed to understand what I was trying to do. I felt her allowing herself to be drawn through me and the thread, down into what had been her.

When I finished, a red circle now lay between her throat and navel. The stitches were clumsy and uneven, guided as they were by the will of a child, but the magic was strong and sure. It reverberated through my body like a lingering touch. As I tied a knot between the first stitch and the last, she shivered. She didn’t move, exactly. The body was still stiff, stuck in its fetal position, but I had the sense that she wriggled in her new space, which had been her old one. 

She was no longer a presence in the house. She was there in the sunlight-warmed corpse that lay in my lap. Skin-to-skin. Still a mummified body, but she lived. I wrapped her in her blanket again.

“It scratches,” she told me.

She didn’t communicate with me in words, but in senses, impressions, and vague blurry images. It was my own mind which translated these into language.

“It’s wool, sweetie,” I answered. “Of course, it scratches. Let’s find you something softer.”

We settled on my old silk kimono. She liked both the scent and the feel of it against her skin. I wrapped her in it.

Mother

I wrapped her in a piece of pink wool I cut from the thin, worn blanket I had been using for my bed. I set her on the hard, wooden floor, and settled myself beside her. The attic was hot and dry, the air so still that motes of dust hung in the light, refusing to settle. The silence was an unexpected weight. My breasts, heavy and full after the long, restful sleep, dripped milk, which soaked into my nightdress. She had never been so calm and peaceful.  For the first time, her delicate face reminded me of him—the curve of his cheekbone, the wide, round eyes. I watched her through the morning, reaching out now and then to stroke a finger against her cheek. I thought that I might have loved her. It was hard to know.

My mother found us there just after noon, when she brought my lunch. The tray rattled as she set it down. She stood for a moment, staring down at us, before saying quietly, “Well, then.” 

We undressed her and washed her, formed her sweet little curls into ringlets. We wrapped her first in the blanket and then in yesterday’s newspaper. We pried the lath from the walls, tucked her into the frame of the house, and nailed the wood slats back into place. She was gone. No one would know she had ever been.

My father was sitting at the kitchen table when I came down for dinner for the first time in weeks. My mother had cooked a roast of beef, with creamed potatoes and milk biscuits and gravy, and she had made the first cherry pie of the summer. It was a meal for celebration, or one for mourning, there wasn’t much difference. My father smiled at me and offered me a glass of wine with my dinner.

In the morning, I stepped out onto the front porch, hearing it close behind me with a small snick. I was hollow and empty, nothing more than a doll of corn husk and silk.  

As I walked away, I looked back at the house, at the window of the attic, at the roofline and the rafters, where the body of my babe lay withering and drying.

Witch

I carried her around the house, letting her feel the warmth of the afternoon sunlight through the windows, and the cool air coming from the refrigerator; letting her listen to the clink of dishes as I made myself dinner, and the music of water running into the sink. I waved a dollop of soap suds in front of her, blowing them off my palm and letting them float down to burst onto the floor.

As the light faded and the stars came out, I took her outside onto the porch, reluctantly, worried what the neighbors would think if they saw us, but the night was quiet and the streets empty. I was careful to cover her as much as I could, leaving only her tiny, brown face exposed. I moved the rocking chair from my living room and rocked her. I sang softly to her—a wordless lullaby that my grandmother had sung to me. She seemed to melt into me. She was calmer and more at peace.

I wondered if she would leave me then, if her spirit would dissipate, but she wanted to live a little longer.

She begged me to take her outside the next day. She wanted to see more of the world. I carried her wrapped in a new blanket I had bought just for her. She protested that I covered her face too much. She wanted to see. I uncovered her strange bruised, blackened features as much as I could.

It was early morning. Too early, I hoped, for the little park down the street to be busy with mothers and their living children. We walked the paths for a while. I pointed out maples and oaks, and the squirrels that darted between them. A butterfly landed on a branch, slowly beating its wings once or twice before flying off in a haphazard spiral. She was delighted by that. We sat on a park bench under the trees, so she could watch the wind stir the leaves and the sunshine and shade dance with each other. I closed my eyes briefly, enjoying the gentle weight of her in my arms. Her pleasure was a palpable thing between us.

I opened my eyes at the sound of a voice. Something was wrong. A child, maybe six years old, was leaning over us. The child’s mother stood behind her, face blanched, eyes widened in horror. She scrabbled at her daughter’s shoulders, dragging her away.

The corpse wailed. The impressions she used to communicate with me came across as waves of despair and confusion. She could feel their revulsion. She knew it was directed at her, without understanding why.

I didn’t even think about what I was doing. I began to rock her in my arms, trying to soothe her with little shushing sounds. I kissed her brow, patted her back. 

In our distress, it didn’t even register with me that her head had been exposed and uncovered, hollowed and misshapen, with its missing nose and its glassy sunken eyes.

A small group of neighbors had gathered, whispering and shaking their heads. Several of them held out phones, taking photos and videos. I took the trailing edge of the blanket and flipped it over her face. We fled home.

We went outside a few more times. None of the mothers would speak to me. They watched me with palms held over their mouths. The children were especially cruel, curious and vicious at the same time, unable to keep their taunts at bay.

Someone placed a dead bird with cracked, broken wings on my doorstep. Days later, they left a dead mouse with its back arched and neck broken, drops of blood sprinkled around its mouth like tears. I heard laughter from around the side of the house. The teenagers were bringing me other dead things to play with.

We stopped going outside after that. I didn’t have the courage for it anymore. She raged at me day and night, wanting more.

I tried to comfort her. I tried to console her. I brought her seashells, little stones of different sizes and colors, a cactus, a cat and a turtle, and a feather boa to slide across her skin. I grew sunflowers under the windowsill. I played music for her and danced with her. I put oatmeal and cream and honey and tiny wild strawberries against her lips. I swaddled her in silk and flannel. It should have been enough.

She would have none of it. She cried. She shouted at me. She rattled inside her bones.

I sang her lullabies and read stories. I rocked her and dangled sparkling beads in front of her face. I set her on top of the washing machine so she could feel the vibrations. Still, she begged for more.

I thought she would dissipate, as most ghosts do, with time and with the attention of witches to their needs. I thought she would give up wanting to live.She did not.

It was my failure. My magic, my commitment, my will were not enough. I didn’t have the strength for it any longer. I couldn’t keep her. She wouldn’t go.

She lay in my lap as she had before, but this time she was screaming, protesting, wriggling within her desiccated shell. She was a storm in my mind. She was trying to break me.

I reached for my embroidery needle and tucked it under the last of the stitches I had made, raising it up and away from her skin, which puckered under the pull of threads. With my other hand, I used my gold scissors, small and sharp, to slice through the stitch. She shrieked at me. Her spirit tugged so hard against me that her body lurched sideways, tumbling from my lap. I held her down as I plucked the stitches out, one by one. She screeched. She raged. I cried. The tears fell unhindered onto her face. My breath caught as my fingers stalled on the remaining stitch, the only thing still holding her to this life. Retching, unable to breathe, choking on her pain and on mine, I drew out the last stitch.

•••

The front door closed behind me with a small snick. I stood on the porch, hesitant, anxious. The loss was heavy. It was a sharp, pointed thing embedded under the flat, hard bone which protected my heart, like a long embroidery needle that pricked me each time I breathed in. Behind me, in the house, the child lingered.