November 13, 2018

PodCastle 548: Daniel

35 minutes

* Author : Ashley Blooms

* Narrator : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh

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Previously published by On Spec (under the title “Second Born”).

Content warning: Death of a child

Rated R.

Daniel

by Ashley Blooms

Ellie watches her husband from the front porch. He makes a lean shadow against the twilight, his arms outstretched, his heels lifting from the ground and dropping again. The wind rustles the branches of the trees overhead, their limbs picked clean of leaves, their roots bitten with cold. The windows rattleshake inside their panes, a thin vibration that the house carries through the walls and into the boards of the porch. The feeling trembles beneath Ellie’s bare toes as she wraps her arms around her chest, cups her elbows in her palms.

Her husband looks at her from across the yard. He holds up his hands so she can see a bright pearl of light reflected in the center of the spiderweb. The thin strands shudder, curving away from the twigs that bind it together, but the web holds on. Ellie turns and walks back into the house alone.

They tried to conceive a child for years.

They pressed themselves together in every position, every room of the house, every single day for months on end. Ellie lay with her legs flat against the wall, a pillow beneath her back to cant her hips toward the ceiling, begging gravity to work a little harder. She ate raw eggs for a girl and honey for a boy. Pete’s mother and his aunts came from the top of the mountain to pray for her. They lay hands on Ellie like it was the last night of a tent revival and there was something deep inside of her that needed to be saved.

After each visit, Mother Black would stand in the doorway and look at Ellie with deep-set, mossy eyes. She would tell Ellie that it wasn’t her fault. The mountain was hard on women. It took a certain kind of breeding to survive here. Valley folk were soft by nature. She told Ellie not to blame herself and she smiled as she said it.

When she had gone, Pete climbed on top of Ellie and thrust against her as she stared at the ceiling, imagining her womb as two hands joined at the fingers, a cradle she built inside herself. All she’d ever wanted was someone who would love her back for as long and as much as she loved them. Someone who would never leave her, never forget her, never, never.

Ellie thinks of the trying as she kneels on the end of the casket and looks at the little boy inside. He never made it to his second year, and his face is still full of the roundness and softness of youth. But there is no pink left to him, not a single hint of bloom, not even along the bridge of his nose or the smooth plane of his cheeks. A bit of dirt falls from the edge of the grave and scatters across his face. His cheeks are freckled with earth and Ellie reaches out to wipe it away.

“Ready?” Pete says.

She nods without lifting her head. He draws a thin line across his palm with his pocketknife. The blood wells to the surface, dotting his skin with deep red pinpricks. Pete tilts his hand to the side and lets a few drops fall onto the boy’s lips.

“Blood of the father,” he says.

He draws a handkerchief from his pocket, cursing under his breath as he wraps the cloth tight across the wound. He hands Ellie a Mason jar. There is a smear of blood on the side and she reaches around it to undo the lid.

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