Seeds

3. blood

Our neighbor, Abigail, heard about the accident. Three days later she is at the door insisting we come over for dinner. I tell her politely that Nick is working late. 

“Just you then!” she says. “Come on, it’s taco night!”

The tacos are hard-shell, filled with ground beef, iceberg lettuce and shredded cheese. Kid-friendly with some hot sauce available for the grown-ups. They have three; eleven, seven and the toddler, who’s age I am unsure of. It had been given to me in months, some twenty of them, and I hadn’t bothered to calculate.

“So when will we see you at church?” Josh asks. 

Josh, the husband, was a junior pastor at the church. Nick and I had learned this a week into the move, when he’d arrived at our door, a platter of snickerdoodles in hand. “Abby bakes for my small group every Tuesday,” Josh said, with a gentle smile, “and we decided to make a few extra for our new neighbors.” 

I had closed the door behind us to stop our calico, Hecate, from bolting. Nick brightly revealed that my father had been a pastor there, too.

“No kidding!” Josh said. “Would I know his name?” 

“It was a long time ago,” I said, in place of an answer.

Now, at their farm-style dinner table, Abigail and Josh wait expectantly. I haven’t even finished assembling my first taco. “Oh, you know… Nick isn’t really a church-goer.” 

The junior pastor’s head cocks, just so slightly, “Are you?” 

I wet my lips with a sip of water, “It’s been a while.”

He smiles and then falls more or less into silence for the rest of the meal. Abigail politely asks about my job as copywriter between her children’s fussing. Despite Abigail’s careful meal planning, the children were unimpressed. The oldest refuses to eat the lettuce or the cheese because he doesn’t trust its shredded form. The seven-year-old takes three bites and declares herself full. The youngest spends the meal shoving her plump fist, scrambled beef and Cheerios clenched in a vice-like grip, into her small, drooling mouth. Their golden retriever, barely out of puppy-dom, yips with delight, wolfing down the baby’s edible jetsam. 

After the meal, I excuse myself to the bathroom. It is painted a blinding white, with fake orchids on one side of the sink and matching soap and hand lotion on the other. Over the toilet hangs a wooden sign painted with the words “JOY TO THE LORD” in golden cursive. I sit on the toilet too long, huffing shallow breaths. Why are my mouth and hands so dry? I squirt some lotion into my palms after washing and grimace at the vanilla frosting scent.

“What about a glass of wine?” Abigail asks when I return. “Josh can put the kids to bed. We have a Chardonnay that’s been sitting in-” she stops. “What?” 

“It is a weeknight,” Josh raises his eyebrows. “And you know it gives you headaches.”

Abigail’s voice diminishes to a practiced whisper. “Josh, it’s just one glass.” 

“I’m just saying, Payton has practice before school…”

“I can’t, actually,” I interrupt. I don’t want to say it, but I find it rising in my throat like acid. “I just found out…” I had not told anyone. Even Nick had been informed by a careless doctor, not by me. I knew it was too early, but I had been aching to say it out loud, wanting it to feel real, finally.  The words catch but scrape past my lips, “I’m pregnant.” 

I can hear Abigail’s low hum of delight. Josh walks over and puts his hand on my shoulder, squeezes. “Congratulations. A child is the greatest gift the Lord can give us.” His thumb presses too hard into the hollow of my neck, and my back hunches instinctively. 

As I am leaving, Abigail clutches me in a hug, like some long-lost sister. Josh follows me down his driveway, where he stops, fists propped against his belt; a superman pose. “We’ll be coming for you Sunday morning. Won’t take no for an answer! I think the service will do you and the baby some good,” he winks. “It does all us sinners good, right?” 

On my couch, TV droning, Hecate curled in my lap, I catch the cloying scent of vanilla cake under my fingernails. It’s along the blue veins of my wrist, caught in my life line, love line. It turns my stomach. I call Nick’s voicemail on the way to the sink, tucking my cell between my ear and cheek. “Are you on your way home? My stomach is off… Would you pick something up?” 

The sink is stainless steel with a drain to match, linking our house to the next with a sprawling web of pipes. Our shit and scum unites us all. “Maybe you could grab some Tums on the way home… ”

It’s dark in the kitchen, and before I see it, I feel it… the water isn’t right. It’s viscous… soft. Silky between my fingers. Then I see. It’s running too dark. I slap the kitchen light on, phone slipping from my ear to the floor. A sound that is both an intake of breath and a howl escapes from me, as deep red speckles the sink, and crimson sap drips from my fingers to the floor below.

“You must have cut yourself,” Nick examines my hands once he is home. The faucet is running clear now, though for several long seconds, blood spurted from its mouth while I gaped, heart pounding in my ears. Hecate leaps to the counter and begins to lap at the falling fluid.

“I don’t think so.” 

“Maybe a paper cut? Sometimes those little cuts bleed a lot.” 

I pointed out that even if it had been a cut; it could not have left the violently splattered blood on the sink, or the dried red in my nail beds. 

“I think maybe you’re just tired.” He pats my belly. “Let’s go to bed.” I want to ask him to stay up with me, to watch a show and hold me, or whip up some late night snacks and talk. But I know he’ll just say he is too sleepy. 

It has become so normal to hold my tongue around him.

4. bites

I used to think I could feel my soul. Growing up, when my father, or any of the other men, took the podium before the hundreds of us unholy offenders, I would feel it like a stone in my stomach. Solid. Heavy. Sometimes cold, sometimes burning hot, but always present.  

I sit in the same row that I always sat in as a girl. Two back, a respectful distance, but close enough to see the sweat in the pastor’s pores, the smudge on his glasses, the communion wine clinging in crimson droplets to his mustache. It was Josh’s day to preach. Abigail had more or less sunk to her knees that morning, imploring me to come. 

I was in no mood, really. I had woken with itchy, purple-pink welts all over my body. Not bed bugs, I had known those small demons before; they had not given me these unbearable protuberances. Then I had my morning sickness. Nick was off on a work retreat for the weekend, and I felt irritable and abandoned. But I had been putting her off for weeks now, and I couldn’t say no again.

Now, if I can feel my soul, it is itchy. I am between Abigail, who brings her own leather-bound, monogramed Bible, and an octogenarian woman who brings a ziplock of yogurt-covered raisins in her purse as a sermon snack. I had worn a dress, long and modest, albeit a bit wrinkled, that would cover my breasts, my tattoos, my bug bites. The kind my father would have approved of. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you? You are not your own, Daughter, you were bought at a price, therefore honor God with your body. 

Abigail is in suede boots and an oversized beige sweater. A necklace with a pearled “A” around her neck. During praise, she lifts her hands and closes her eyes… not enough to be showy… like she really feels something. I itch now with embarrassment, maybe a tinge of envy. I used to feel something, even if I had never been the hand-waving type. 

Then comes Josh’s sermon. Eschewing the podium, he takes on the disposition of a stand-up comedian; pacing casually, grinning mysteriously to himself, and wielding the wireless microphone like an extension of his hand. This is clearly where he feels at home. 

“Today, we’re going to talk about Revelation,” Josh says. “Yes, I know no one loves to talk about Hellfire and the End Times,” he waves his hand at imaginary backlash, “but that doesn’t mean we can shy away from the truth. Jesus is coming back, and we must anticipate what that will mean.” 

It’s in my head, it must be… His voice changed, deeper, more solemn, the glitter gone from his eyes. His posture slouched, his neat beard is gone. It’s not my neighbor Josh speaking now, but my father. 

“We all remember the ten plagues of Egypt,” my father said, and  I am a small girl, itching not from bug bites, but from the tights my mother dressed me in. “But, we tell ourselves, that was the Old Testament! That was the God of fear and punishment. That is not our God of grace and love, who sent His one and only Son to us. But I tell you this… our God does not change. When the time comes, God has plagues in store for us, just like he had for the Egyptians… Revelation: ‘I heard a loud voice from the temple saying to the seven angels, “go pour out the seven bowls of God’s wrath on the Earth.”’ These bowls, as scripture calls them, bring sores, darkness, fire, blood, thunder… does that sound familiar? We know that the Lord punishes those who turn away from Him…”

I am hot. Lightheaded. Sweat filling my pores. I close my eyes and lean back in my seat. 

“Are you alright?” Abigail asks. 

When I open my eyes, it is once again Josh on the stage, with his smile, his sparkle. “I suppose you might say I mean to put the fear of God into you, and you wouldn’t be wrong… But we can take comfort in knowing we have accepted Jesus into our heart…”

“I need some air,” I mutter and nearly sprint from the auditorium and through a side door. I find a bench that overlooks the expansive parking lot and I sink into it. The avocado sized mass—my child—is making me nauseous and perhaps insane. I lay my hands over the ever-growing bulge. The doctor had said that any day now I might feel it move. If I feel it for myself, I might finally believe that a particle of a person, a bit of myself and some mystery, is expanding within me. 

My soul and body and mind are itchy and restless, but the baby stays still.

5. fire

For four hours, the cat and I can’t be in the house.

I had asked Nick to detonate a bug bomb a week ago, but he must have forgotten. He has seemed unbothered by the bugs, but I can’t manage it any longer. The infestation is unbridled; little red beetles, it turned out. A kind I have never seen. They collect by the dozens in the house’s dark corners. Every cabinet opened, every drawer pulled, a torrent of wriggling beasts. That morning in bed, I’d watched a beetle pick through the stubble of Nick’s beard toward his snoring, gaping lips, before swatting the creature away. He woke up with a start and remained irritable as he dressed for work, claiming I had slapped him for no reason. I denoted the bomb as soon as he had gone.

I thought Hecate and I might begin with a walk around the empty field. Years ago, I bought Hecate a leash, but she had never taken to it. I pick her up and carry her, while she makes anxious biscuits into my shoulder.

It has been a dry spring, and the earth is hard under my sneakers. I wish I had worn pants. The tall yellow grass and the barbed brambles cut at my shins. Foreboding clouds hang low over the church today, heavy and ripe, ready to spill.  

I stop in the middle of the field and hold Hecate to my chest. The clouds shift, roll, darken, lighten. One hand to my belly, I pray for a small fist or foot to thrust itself against its fleshy cage of my accidental making… but nothing.  The longer the baby is inside me, the more I fall in love with them, and the more it terrifies me. 

A peal of thunder. When the sky first sparks lightning, the illuminated cloud looks red from within and then I see it; a bright piece of fire falling from the center, streaking through the air. A pocket-sized comet barreling toward the earth, its fierce eye set on me. For a second or two, it doesn’t register as unusual. Then I stumble, slowly backing toward the houses, without taking my eyes from its streak through the sky, closer and closer. It burns out a few feet before hitting the ground before me, but I swear I can feel its heat.

Another spit of fire is emitted, trailing smoke in its wake, a long gray tendril from the cloud that birthed it. Below me, the ground shakes. I turn, clutching Hecate, cradling my belly. I run back to the house, eyes firmly set on my shoes slapping against the dirt, until I reach my back yard and lift my head. The sky is marbled gray and white, no smoke, no flames. Whatever tiny apocalypse had been sent to me, had stopped almost as soon as it began. 

In my empty garage, I listen to the rain that comes soon after, wondering if the impact of falling bits of fire would make the same noise as raindrops. I wanted, more than anything, a drink. A blunt. Anything poisonous enough to tame my brain and stop my hands from shaking. The doctor has said a glass of wine would be fine, so I slip into the house, leaving the door open behind me, blinking against the fumes, and take a bottle from the pantry. The dogged beetles, on their last legs, scurry from my sight. I wait there in the fog, for no more than a minute, allowing a few shallow breaths. Would it destroy me from within? Then I move back to the garage, open up a dusty camping chair and drink straight from the mouth of the bottle. 

“I’m sorry,” I say aloud, rubbing my abdomen and my eyes. Guilt, fear and fumes had brought forth tears. 

6. graves

Do you believe in God?” 

Nick looks up from his underwear drawer, a flash of a smile. “I don’t know. We’ve talked about this.” 

He is packing. Off to Tucson. A bi-annual conference, just three nights. He’ll be back on Friday, smelling faintly of hotel mints and an airport cocktail, bearing free tote bags and mouse pads with his company’s coat of arms.  

“Do you think God punishes those who don’t believe in him?” 

He sighs. He once explained to me that he puts his faith in the Present. In the Known. In the Sane, the Possible and the Visible. He doesn’t see the point in wasting energy on the Shadows and Scruples and Senselessness of life. “That’s the sort of question only those who already believe in God would think to ask, isn’t it?”

I have no response to that.

Nick dumps a wad of boxers into his suitcase. “You’ll be alright the next few days, won’t you?” 

How could I explain the shrouded feeling that something was about to go terribly wrong? I could sense it in my body like a pulse of the heart. Something hidden but vast was rolling toward me, coming for me with a deep, absurd wrath. But I can only nod.   

Nick is gone an hour later. I wonder, as the door closes behind him, if he might be having an affair. It’s not the first time I have wondered this, but it is the first time the thought has not made me cry.

I watch TV all day, eyes glazing over the stories unfolding before me. My mind was buzzing with words, verses my father would mutter to me as I fell asleep; The Lord is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life—of whom shall I be afraid? 

Dinner is a frozen Lean Cuisine and handful of goldfish. I crack open the tin of Hecate’s wet food and wait for her to come bounding from the shadows, but she doesn’t. She’s been hiding since I forced her out of the house yesterday. I empty the tin, the smell mixing with the linguine in the microwave. All strong odors make me gag these days. 

I fall asleep on the sofa, not wanting to leave the safe flicker of the TV for an empty bed, and I wake up in the early morning knowing something is wrong. 

The air feels heavy around me. I walk through the house, turning on the kitchen faucet as I pass, in case blood spouts forth again. I walk to the back door and slide it open to stare at the hint of a sunrise over the church. No fire, no brimstone. I open drawers to check for bugs—all I can find are the carcasses I have failed to sweep clean. I visit each room of the house, check every white wall and carpeted floor for signs of revelation. 

The spare room—the baby’s room—is the last room I enter. I have done so little to prepare. There are a few swabs of paint on the wall. We are shooting for gender neutral with either a cheerful tangerine or a peaceful sage. Among the boxes of crap still left to unpack from the move, there is a mobile of tiny birds that Nick’s mother sent cross-country and a crib waiting for assembly. It’s a sad but accurate tribute to my mothering so far; vivid and hopeful streaks of excitement, soon abandoned for chaos and dread. 

And then there I see Hecate, having hollowed out a place for herself in a cardboard box of my childhood toys, curled up and unmoving. When I touch her, she is stiff and cold. 

I take the cat downstairs with me, holding her body over my shoulder, against my cheek. Outside, the sky is darkening, though it is not noon yet. I take Hecate outside and perch on the porch step looking out at the field behind the church. 

A heavy scent hangs in the air like a smog, making it hard to breathe full breaths. Sin, my mind mutters to me. The air is thick with my sin and something deeper… a primordial flaw. Jesus. Do I still own a Bible? Do I still know how to pray? I am fairly sure the only remnants of my faith are deep and internal, buried in my body without epitaph or stone. 

Don’t be stupid. If this is God, if this is because of me, what have I done? Lost my faith? A million humans lose faith every day. To say this is for me is to say I’m special, and everything else in the world indicates the contrary. But the midday sky keeps getting darker. It’s so quiet. Abigail and her children, normally audible at all hours of the day, are silent. For a moment, I fear that I am alone. That all souls have been driven clear of the site, besides me. 

What would come for me next? In Exodus, after pests, pain, blood and darkness, the Pharaoh was finally broken by the death of his firstborn. I rest my hand on my stomach, feeling for a heartbeat, a fist, a kick. “Come on, baby,” I whisper. “Show me you’re here.”

In Revelation, they foretold the angels would descend to pour golden bowls of God’s wrath; sores, the seas and rivers turned to blood, the earth scorched by the Sun, darkness, rivers dried up, finally an earthquake to split the world apart. From the beginning to the end, the Old Testament to the New, the plagues remained mostly unchanged. Maybe God did not change. 

My fingers find something cold tangled in Hecate’s fur. I loosen it from the body, find myself staring at the tiny seed encased in its orb; the necklace my father had given me. The tiny glass globe is cracked, the seed still within, but it might come free with a good shake. 

I cracked it some months after my mom died, crushed deliberately between the sole of my school shoes and the kitchen floor. My father bore witness, I stared him in the eye as I brought my foot down. I left it there on the ground, but my father must have collected it. I didn’t see it again for years, until I found it wrapped in his note, “Forgive me, I failed you.” The note was in his pocket. Along with his wallet, cracked cell phone, car keys… all the things returned to me in a baggie after they finished with his body. 

I was never sure if it was for me or for God that he wrote the note, but the necklace was for me. To tell me to keep the faith or to tell me my rejection of it all had driven him to his end. I’d never know. So I had thrown it in a shoebox that would haunt me from the back of my closet for the next ten years. Now here it is in my hand, brought to me again by another dead body. 

I stand, the cat still clutched to my chest. Lightening fissures the dark sky overhead. Around me the neighborhood is still quiet. Not a face peeks from a window, not a neighbor pokes their head out the door to exclaim, “Mighty odd weather we’re having!” The darkness is just for me.

I leave through the door in our wooden fence, out into the vastness behind my house. I stumble through the dark undergrowth, hardly feeling the sticks and thorns under my bare feet, until I find a clear space where I fall to my knees and begin clawing at the hard dirt with my hands. The air is hot and muggy around me, each breath feels shallow and desperate. Before me, I can barely see my own hands, pale against the dark and the dirt as I hollow into the earth. The first drop falls, but too hot, too thick, too dark to be rain. But it softens the ground and before long I sit before a crater of my own making. 

I place Hecate in the hole, tossing the necklace, the orb and seed over the body. Lightning lights up the new grave and I see my hands, muddied, bloodied before me. 

The earth seems to rumble, growl even, as I pull it back in place, pat it down flat again. I look up at the cracking sky. “You are not my god,” I say and pull myself to my feet. That is not the god I want to believe in. It is not the god I want for my baby.

With each step I take back toward the house, the sky lightens. The thunder rumbles gently. The ground beneath my feet offers a final pulse, before steadying itself. In the growing light, I can see my dirt-stained clothes. If there is blood, from the sky or my body, the dark mud hides it. I leave a brown handprint on the back gate as I let myself in. 

“Good God, Mary!”  

Standing on their raised patio, her youngest child balanced on her hip, is Abigail, staring at me. I lift my hand to wave. 

“What happened?” She makes her way across their impeccable back lawn to lean against the fence. “You’re soaked!”

“Our cat died. I had to…” I trail off, gesturing out to the field. 

“I didn’t even notice it rained…” She looks up before adding, “I’m so sorry about your cat.”

I look up too, at the swollen clouds of pure white drifting easily though the now blue sky. 

“Are you alright?” 

I keep my eyes fixed on the clouds. “I think something might be wrong with the baby, Abigail.”

7. Revelation

The doctor says it could be a “silent” miscarriage, words I find deafening. But they will have to take some tests to know one way or another. Abigail is by my side, holding my hand. Her three children are still audible from the waiting room down the hall. Neither of us have been able to reach our husbands.  

Cold jelly on my bare stomach. The technician moves the little machine lighting me up from the inside. I watch the future come into focus on the screen; the shape of my baby, a curled cashew of potential. I wait, breath bated, for movement, a heartbeat. To allow myself to think about silence, stillness, is unbearable. I close my eyes and think about the shape of God. The God of the church has been too inflexible, too stagnant to fit the mold of my soul. My soul, I like to think, is an ever-changing shape; spitting out old ideas to ingest the new. Shrinking and expanding as it claws for truth, for goodness, for meaning. 

My faith, I know, isn’t fully dead. My father is, my mother, my cat. But, like the burning hope that my baby is healthy and humming with life, I feel a simmering belief in something beyond. I can feel it like a bruise that won’t fade. My heart is sore with it, my soul itches with it, irrational and angry, but alive. I have tried so hard to shake it, to purge it. But it sits in me, as certain as my eye sits in its socket. 

There is hope that God could be real and good, familiar and unknowable. That some force can cradle impossible juxtapositions and make sense of the senseless. That my mustard seed can creep through the cracks in the glass and grow wild in that space between the church I will never return to and a great void, even as it twists with thorns of chaos and doubt.  

I realize I had been right as a girl. God was so big. Too big for a person, for a church, for a name. Too large to understand. The overwhelming hugeness of it all is too much right now. Not with something so small, so tangible, so fragile wrapped inside my very being. I open my eyes to see my own lovely, swollen stomach. 

Is that a small kick in the bowels of my belly? I can’t tell if I imagined it or not.