Christopher Ransom: The Birthing House

His thoughts swung between two choices, as they had for all men.

Love and death.

Life and murder.

An end and a beginning.

The front door burst open with a thunderous crash and the men were shouting his name, ordering him to come out, to reveal his sin. The voices fanned out through the house and the dogs sang as they set upon the interlopers.

She took his hands, folding them in prayer. She held him until her warmth spread through his fingers but he clung to the darkness, the grief, the anger.

His fingers crawled over her breasts and along her throat and she moaned, reading his intention as if reading his mind.

Without slowing she opened his palms and slid them down, lower, lower, placing them flat against her belly, showing him his work, holding his new world inside her body until he could feel what was to come, what he had never felt before, that which he had been searching for since it had been stolen from him years and years ago, when he was seventeen.

The men with guns beat a heavy drum up the stairs.

Any second now, in a sliver of time, a span within which life might blossom or be smothered, the law would fall on them and its weight and judgment would be mighty. Knowing this, he entertained visions of cold courtrooms and colder prison cells, of foster parents for the dogs and endless grief for the parents, of earth tilled for burial and graves wreathed with flowers, all of them strands of a future flowing from this human contest to go on.

But those were only visions, realities yet to be born. Until they cast him inexorably toward such a fate, he refused to allow them shelter. For at last his home was full, its hearth so very warm.

Inside her womb he felt the affirmation of his power to create, the other side of the darkness, his only purpose in this world, his final beginning.

The stirring within, its tiny beating heart.

Soon she would be a mother, and he a father.

Published by Hachette Digital 2008

Copyright (c) 2008 Christopher Ransom

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clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance

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is available from the British Library.

eISBN : 978 0 7481 1137 4

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