CW: difficult birth.
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Her voice is a conduit for pain. It is a human sound bawling out of her throat, evulsed from her heaving diaphragm. The seizing of her uterus is a convulsion contained within the bone hold of her pelvis; cramping and twisting, desirous of nothing more than to expel its contents.
If she had language, she would be bleating for her death. The waves of agony drive her down to her front-legged knees. She folds forward, the geit supplicant, praying to a horned god she has not hitherto known existed. Her polled forehead presses into the clover she had just been nibbling. The inflorescence closed tight beneath the new moon, waiting impatiently for the dawn to unfurl and unroll each petal. Over the weeks, her belly has grown turgid and distended. She is a beast, and her cognition is the burden of a sagging weight. Her udders swaying heavy, and two hearts beating inside one body. Another plaintive cry and he is cast out of her. Arms and hands, head and shoulders, torso and hocks, then the still so soft cloven hooves. He falls earthward as the Angel of Light fell from Heaven, and the descent wakes him fully. His womb dreams dissipate in a spray of amniotic fluid, shit and blood. On the ground, he contorts, caul-swaddled, the world veiled. She does not know that gods die and are reborn, but she does know the sound and smell of her own kind. This product of her wame spooks her, unrecognized, and she bolts. The birth cord stretches, it tugs the undelivered afterbirth from within her out. The tie snaps and breaks, and she is free. In less than a quarter of an hour, she will be far and away, asleep beneath the new moon. Innocent of responsibility to death. For her, there is only life. And then no life. The newborn creature stretches out a hoof, a hand. With an animal instinct, he bites at the amnion, tears the sac open. And he wails the world his arrival. |
Elizabeth Vegvary lives and writes in the wooded foothills of the Cascade Mountain Range, reveling in those days and nights when the wind crashes through the treetops sounding just exactly like the sea.
