Introduction
The dead beckoned, as dead things do. The moon sat low in the sky. The black shadows of the pines stretched like spears against the snow-covered field. I sat for a long time on the porch steps, listening to the echo of the wind. The snow fell like cotton. And the cotton didn’t really fall, it floated. Large, slow, fluffy flakes; dancing on the blackened silhouette of the barn. One final show of winter before spring.
Your father was working late. There were no clouds to insulate against the bitter cold. It was slow going, in my condition, from the house and through the trees. But I had to go. I had to be with them, to be near them. One more time before you arrived.
I saw the giant oak before I saw the field. The keeper of my secrets. I could make out the top half of the earthen pots that sat in the snow, lining the entrance. The blood I once smeared across the clay was barely visible in the dark. But I knew the tiny body was safe inside. The moon lit up the garden like a spotlight. The woody stalks of dried goldenrod and mint stuck out of the otherwise barren field. The snow was no longer falling; the wind was trapped behind the trees.
It all felt so lifeless.
Then you kicked against my rib cage, as you had become accustomed to doing. Reminding me that in only a few weeks’ time, life would spring forth. And you would be with me and the garden would once again be green and lush and spectacular.
I trudged through the field to the spot I liked to lay. I brushed snow away with my boots and squatted down, balancing the weight of my belly. I patted the ground: one, two, three. I imagined the frozen-mud caked to the hair of the decapitated body below. The headless storyteller rattling on about navigating wall street and baking chocolate cakes on Saturn’s rings. His audience, then, calling him a liar and him bopping her on the nose three times in reply: “Ahh, but… So. Are. You.”
