A Cradle Full Of Meat

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It happens, the doctor told Alice, a gray-haired man with an indifferent, bony face, too tired to be sympathetic. It happens to young women like her and older women. Sometimes the pregnancy simply aborts on its own. The reasons can be different: accidental fall, infection, hormonal failure, genetic abnormalities of the fetus— The main thing is not to believe in the scare stories about infertility — she is young, strong, with a good uterus, she will still be able to give birth.

Alice listened to all this with cold calmness, but the sensible part of her realized that it was not calmness at all, but numbness. Sometimes with an injury, the pain doesn't come immediately, but after a moment. For Alice that moment would linger, but she knew that when the numbness passed, the pain would knock her off her feet.

She was going to have a daughter. Alice learned of the pregnancy only after the miscarriage, in the hospital, but something inside her had known and told her long ago that she would have a girl with pale skin, blue eyes, and golden hair like hers.

Alice knew that her child would not resemble her father at all — only her. Somewhere deep inside lived the image of a little girl who looked like her, like a reflection in a mirror. Her body hadn't changed a bit in those fourteen weeks, not even the blood she'd mistaken for menstruation, but the strange longing, the sense of some tiny missing piece that had accompanied her all her life, was finally gone.

Her daughter, with golden hair and blue eyes, was near, but slipped away. Maybe she realized she had come at the wrong time? She and her husband planned children later, first they wanted to renovate the apartment, to buy a new car—

Now, in a hospital bed, under a thin, prickly blanket, it all seemed so petty, silly, and insignificant. How could some garbage be more important than a new life?

Alice touched her stomach through the blanket. The sticky anesthesia was slowly wearing off, and waves of dull tugging pain were slowly spreading through her body. But it hurt as if it was not her, not Alice, but someone else, and she was only stroking with her hand the womb of someone else, which had become the grave of her child.

The first thing Alice saw when she woke up was her husband's dark blue blanket shirt and the laundered, graying robe draped over his shoulders. She looked up, but did not recognize him — his features seemed to float in liquid dough, not forming into a familiar face.

Alice tried to say something, but he put his finger to his lips, leaned over her, and hugged her gently. His thick hair smelled of cigarettes and the stubble stabbed her neck, but Alice didn't push him away. She tried to say something again, but the words jumbled in her head and tears rolled down her face on their own.

Above her bed, a ray of sunlight was gently beaming on the wall. Tile blue like the sky and the bright light of the sun — Alice thought she was seeing it all from another, distant dirty-gray world.

Dmitry did not leave until evening. Alice felt a little better and wanted to leave with him, but the doctors insisted that she should stay for a few days. At that moment, something inside broke again and her heart snapped from the pain.

The room smelled ofunwashed bodiebodies, rotten fruit, alcohol and chlorine. There was only one roommate: a pregnant woman in her thirties with reddened legs and a puffy face. She was constantly eating fruit from a huge bag by the bed, talking on the phone in an unexpectedly thin and clear voice, and flipping through awful paperback books.

The smell of fruit made Alice nauseous; the sounds of slurping screwed into her skull.

Alice hardly slept at night — incoherent nightmares were interspersed with heavy and viscous as molasses, hours without sleep under the whistling breath of her neighbor, the increased stench and the endless pain in her stomach.