Christopher Ransom: The Birthing House

The dogs raced after her down the stairs, but even they could not stop her momentum as she back-flipped head first over the banister and dropped the remaining ten feet on to the wood floor. He heard her neck. It was the sound of a sapling birch cracking in winter. Her body folded over itself and she came to rest looking up at him.

The dogs went to her immediately, whining and licking her arms and neck and face.

He stood motionless at the top of the stairs, then fell to his knees, peering through the spindles under the elbow of the banister. He watched the stain spread through the crotch of her pink sweatpants, her body releasing what it no longer needed.

But for the sound of the dogs lapping at her skin, the house was quiet.

'I'm comee, Baby,' he said, his speech slurred. 'I'm onna be with you.'

He was light, floating down the stairway to meet her. Would she be cold? Would she tell him what to do when he got there?

He watched through the spindles under the banister, looking back and low now as he descended, until, tilting his head sideways, he could just make out the top of her head, her hair fanned out behind her.

The final slide down to the floor was painful, but the pain kept him awake a while longer. When he reached the foyer he collapsed, and the pain sharpened as if the blade were still in him, twisting and carving out the important parts, burning him in a fever that left him wet and chilled until all he could think of was that witch in that movie, melting.

Now he lay in the foyer, looking up at the stairway, counting spindles under the banister until he forgot how to count. Now he lay here thinking of his father. Now he lay here waiting to die.

His dogs came around once, sniffing him, whining, and then ran off. Time passed. He hadn't seen them for a long time. He hoped they would be able to escape. Find a new home.

The bleeding worsened for a spell and then slowed to a trickle. He wanted to die next to her. But even this was not enough to carry him further. He was stuck on the floor, and his head fell sideways so that she would be the last thing he would see. He reached a hand out. He wanted to touch her before she became cold.

'Jo . . . Baby.' He could feel the words but not hear the sound of them.

He stared at her. The fact of her death brought its full weight on him, and he would have endured this pain burning him inside every day for a hundred years if doing so would bring her back. He was shivering. He shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them one more time.

Jo's hair moved over the floor.

He blinked, forcing his eyes to stay open.

Her body tensed almost imperceptibly. He watched, fascinated, certain that he had imagined it. A minute passed. Then her spine jerked, arching her off the floor, and her neck began to crack as her head swiveled. She rolled to one side and took hold of her leg, pulling it like a dead weight log across the floor.

She sat up.

Oh, thank God. Jo . . .

She grunted, and got to her knees. She fixed upon him with her black eyes and smiled. Her teeth were red and broken and she was drooling blood on to her shirt. When she stood above him another of her bones popped. Her lip was split open along her ancient scar, and her mouth curled inward with her first inhalation, twitching like an epileptic's. When she coughed her blood rained down on him. He was still trying to scream when she leaned over, scooped him up like a doll, and began to climb the stairs.

39

He was nothing.

He was a blank slate of consciousness. The night was full upon him and he could no longer see or hear. A freezing cold enveloped him, seeped into every fiber, every pore, until his bones became ice. Something responding to his need was entering his body now, and she had a need of her own. His deadened perceptions were being fed, ignited by the smallest sparks of memory. He tried to name his thoughts with words but clasped only sliding images both fundamental and meaningless. At last he succumbed and let her thoughts flow into him. They wrapped around the tent poles of his imagination and stalled the heavy canvas of enshrouding death to stage a play, filling the tent with objects and performers to weave the history he had been hiding from since the night he burned the album.

The first objects came in a blur, things between words and images.

It's as if someone has screamed this particular word in his mind, and in doing so left an exploding pain behind his eyes. His eyes open now, seeing a world unlike this one and yet eerily familiar, for it is at once artificial and historic, a private vision granted in sepia. While he is still not sure where or when he is - or even who he is - he understands, slowly but with gathering force, that she has made it this way for him. She is constructing a way for him to share her mind, transporting him back through time a century or more, using a muted palate and jumping, impossible Super 8 home movie-like segments to help him to bear witness.

He is in one of the smaller bedrooms of the birthing house, standing before a mirror. He knows he is here, but he does not see himself in the mirror. The reflection staring back at him belongs to a girl. She is four or five years old, thin, with blonde hair the gold of honey, a yellow ribbon laced through the gold in a bow. She is wearing a black dress that falls to her ankles, and small pointed leather shoes. She watches him, confused. She is saddened by something just beyond the reach of their shared thoughts.

Then he understands. His eyes are now her eyes. He is with her, a guest or a prisoner, he does not yet know.

Behind him - behind her - there is a heavy knock on a wooden door.

'Come now, Alma.' The voice is deep.

At this intrusion, the girl in the mirror startles and turns, her hard shoes clocking on the wood floors as she runs from the room. The floors of the house tilt beneath him and the front stairs become a blur as the vertigo returns. He loses sight.

The Doctor. Again this word that is more than a word, a formidable presence that cloaks her every thought like a god. It is all he hears in the blackness, and perhaps it is the blackness. He feels as if he is holding his breath for a long time.

When the sun sends streaks of peach and gold over his eyes, he opens them again and sees a large hand holding her hand, feels its heavy grip.

The Doctor's hand.

The Doctor is pulling her along the worn path in the backyard. Conrad, what is left of Conrad and what has now become child Alma, is filled with her emotions - fear, hope, the oblique sadness. They are walking over the wet green grass of the magical place, the once forested land the Doctor calls in his tall strong voice Our Eden , where the slope of the land rides like the ocean swell down lower to the garden and, off to one side, the place he thinks of as his garage but which she knows only as the forbidden place.

Speaking either to herself or to him, her voice comes to him again.

That is where he takes the Others like Mother when they are near their time.

His instinct is to speak, but no sooner does the thought emerge than her much stronger thoughts clamp down on him from inside.

No. Do not speak. Mind what he say, and mind what he do.

He falls deeper into her, becoming only a spectator.

They have stopped near the iron-gated garden where the raspberry branches and grape vines curl and form a lush green wall, and the Doctor's hand releases her hand as he removes his black hat and places it against his broad chest, nodding at her with his sad gray eyes. He is hard-faced, with rosy cheeks and a rough black beard. There are red lines in his eyes and tight creases around his brow and grim mouth, and she is reminded that he harbors an intensity that can change from love to wrath in a blink of those sad gray eyes. She is hoping to do it right, always hoping to do it right for him. The April rain has come and the air is cool, cooling and wetting her dress as she kneels at his side while he says the words he says here. She can hear his heavy breath hitching through the words. She feels ashamed that she is not crying too, but she cannot bring the tears to flow as he invites her to the prayer he gives over the small cross planted before them: