Mercedes Lackey - Lamma's Night (anthology)

And, taking the filled bag home, walking along the road and knowing that, as her father would be at work when she returned, so her mother would also be out of the house {playing bridge and drinking tea at Mrs. Sandhurst's), she found that she could not but dismiss Jimmy's statements and predictions as untruths that had not so much sullied his mouth as confirmed him in his place: that as he was man and she was woman, so it was his lot to believe, and it was hers to know. And she did know. Even with the water boiling in the white kitchen of her father's house, even with the weeds lying rinsed in the tin colander, ready to go into the water for the precisely three minutes of boiling needed to produce an infusion that was neither too weak nor too lethal, she knew, and she knew that she knew.

But then, Jimmy's surety shown for the dust that it was, the poison cup brewed and waiting for the touch of her lips, that deliverance in which she had not dared to believe for almost four months (for the doctors in town all knew her and her father and her mother, and she could not, could not ask for such a thing or reveal what had to be revealed in order to ask for it) within the reach of an arm, she realized that there were other possibilities. No, she knew with all of her fertile womanhood that there were other possibilities, possibilities inherent in the basic, vivific mixing of sperm and egg that no high-school biology textbook, no matter how explicit in its descriptions or protested against by Mr. Burke's Baptist congregation, could adequately or even partially reveal; for as there was falsehood in Jimmy White's cocksurety, so there was also truth, for he was magic, as all men were magic, and therein lay the real magic: the magic of women, of children, and of nurture, of men who worked a job and came home one day to find a baby turned into a child or a child turned into a woman or a man with no help or interference or even faint suggestion from them.

But it was his. And she had not asked for it or wanted it. What grew within her belly came not from love, not from even a passing acquaintance, but only from the lust of a young man now dead twelve hours and an April night that had given him the opportunity he had wanted.

And yet, still. And still. And maybe. And then, again, maybe. And in her mind she saw Jimmy at her window, and Jimmy in the soda shop; and she saw, too, Mrs. Gavin, childless and alone save for the money her husband had left in trust for her, the money she would never own but only use until she died, and all of it out of her own choice and a book she had, by chance, found in the public library forty years ago, the same book that now lay on the kitchen counter beside the still-steaming pot and the tin colander and the cup that would make her one with Mrs. Gavin, even as Jimmy White had insisted that he was one with his father and his grandfather.

And so, after looking at the cup with its cooling poison for a long time, she picked it up, and she

[yep it ends like this]