the infant

That morning at seven o’clock, I went to tend the sheep. They looked like a dozen little clouds of greyish-white on the wild hillside, wreathed by clusters of blackberry bushes and thick tangles of green weeds. They ate calmly. A light mist came down from the low mantle of charcoal stratus in the sky. On the edges of the horizon, a fog was retreating from us, having already soaked the earth during the dark hours of morning.

The sheep and I were used to fog. We thirteen of us had dallied on the same hillside for myriad seasons, and every season was drowsy, whether warm or cold. In the warmth, the sheep and I would laze upon the flat, black rocks in the valley, and, understanding that the sheep may have had no interest in my doing it, I would read literature to them. The pages of Orlando or my collection of Rumi poems would dampen in the perspiring air, and eventually my mind would grow so curdled that I would cease to comprehend what I was reading aloud. Words became noises, like the soft baas occasionally punctuating the turning of pages, or like the hot wind piping through the hills.

But this was a cold season, and in the cold seasons I wrapped my body in dense cotton before opening my cottage door. The grasses, laid with thin sheaths of frost, cracked a little when I stepped on them.  Mists of freezing rain sprinkled my shawled head. Despite my layers of clothing, my bones shivered. There was a gaping emptiness in me. I could still feel blood on my thighs. Now it was drying, chafing as I walked.

When I reached the sheep, I did nothing but look at them. It had been effort enough to trudge so many steps away from my cottage to the hillside. Sylvia, one of the old ones, tipped up her sweet grey head at my approach. She was blind, but she knew me. A few of the others acknowledged my presence in their own way, while the rest of them were not to be bothered in their business of taking breakfast.

I sat down beside Sylvia and put my arms around her. The wool she grew was untamed; it came up in thick curls. She smelled of animal and rain. I could have spoken. I could have told her, “I lost my baby this morning.”

But I spent a long while saying nothing.

***

At noon I was making myself a meal of leek soup and some slices of pumpernickel bread when I remembered the pair of infant’s boots I’d purchased at the market yesterday. Dropping my ladle into the pot, I went over to the next room, taking the boots from the wardrobe in which I’d stowed them. The boots were yellow and impossibly soft. I returned to the kitchen, opened the front door, and flung the boots out with all the wretched power my arm could summon. The boots skittered across the wet grass. I turned away before they settled.

The cold rain started coming down worse. I refused to look at the boots lying there — I didn’t want to see eager tendrils of mud ruin them. I shut the door and went back to making my meal. A stone had settled in my esophagus. My hand trembled as I stirred the soup.

I spent the night soaking myself in the bathtub. When the water became too cold, I drained it and filled up the tub again. When I felt I might weep, I stuck my head under the water until I didn’t feel like weeping anymore. My flesh wrinkled from absorption. I scrubbed my thighs long after the blood was gone. My arms and legs were pale underwater as though dead, drowned. Eventually I stopped scrubbing and drew myself up out of the tub. I fell asleep in the whispers of my bed sheets.

***

When I woke, I saw a slant of daylight on the pillow beside me. The light was coming in through a gap in the drapes. I reached up and moved the drapes aside so I could see the sky; it was a white slate, unbroken and bright. I rose and dressed myself. I brewed tea. The full scent of lady grey drifted through the house, and idly I turned to gaze out the window. A small shock seized me when I noticed the two little yellow clumps of material on the grass, looking more like ragged wet masses than boots. As I looked at them, the stone at the base of my throat grew larger.

In an instant I stood from my table and went out to the boots, having made up my mind to dispose of them thoroughly. I did not bother to cocoon my body and so the wind cut against my skin. As soon as I came close enough to reach down for the boots, I halted, having noticed something. Two little stems had grown upward, one from each yellow boot. These stems were the muted grey-brown color of mushrooms, and when I touched them, they felt strange – they were smooth and hummed a little against my fingertips. I withdrew my hand. A shiver overcame me. Crouched over and cold, I stared for long moments at the stemming boots.

Only the tentative voices of the sheep broke my focus. I looked; they were not far. A few of them were eyeing me with curiosity, as though perplexed by my motionless crouching behavior. I shouted to them, “It’s nothing,” stood up, and went back inside.

The following morning at six o’clock, I came out with a watering can. A strange feeling had been bubbling up since I noticed the stems growing in the boots the previous day. The stone in my throat began to dissolve in the bubbles, until it disappeared entirely, as every day for several weeks I ventured out to the yellow boots and poured water over them. The stems turned into stalks, and began to grow into each other, connecting at about a foot high. The humming I felt in their flesh when I touched them grew stronger over time until it became a clear pulse that mingled with my own.

What struck me as peculiar was that the sheep seemed to dislike when I paid attention to the stuff growing out of the boots. Even blind Sylvia cried in protest when I bent toward the boots, stamping her hooves against the grass. All the sheep acted disturbed. When their cries became too loud, I shouted to them, “It’s nothing,” and the flock shrank from me.

Eventually, I stopped paying attention to the sheep altogether, drawing more pleasure from the bizarre, newly emerging life just outside my cottage. I often contemplated what sort of life it was, since it was not identical to any type of plant I had ever encountered. Eventually I decided it was a sort of super-living fungus, a pulsating cousin of the mushroom, which would certainly account for its pigmentation. After the third week, the stuff began to transition from the ashen grey-brown color to a richer tone that more closely resembled my own flesh. Its skin adopted a supple softness that sent chills through my body when I touched it. Another week passed and the intersecting stalks became fuller. They grew rapidly upward until the whole thing began to resemble a crudely-formed torso and two legs standing inside the yellow boots, which were, by now, wasted into the ground.

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” I mumbled as I watered the thing each morning. The sheep bleated in anxiety as they watched me. Soon I would go outside too eagerly to put on layers for warmth; I became numb to the wind. My knuckles were white as I held the watering can, not feeling its handle in my grasp. “It’s nothing,” I said.

***

One bleak, dark morning I went out at seven o’clock and discovered something that made me drop my watering can. A fully developed infant child stood naked in the grass, its wide brown eyes blinking up at the sky. The boots were gone — they had disintegrated into the dirt. My throat expelled a wavering cry.  I took but a moment of astonishment before I began to rush forth. As I moved, the voices of the sheep rose in volume as though pleading with me. “It’s nothing!” I wept, and went to embrace the child.

Its little frame was warm. I could hear and feel its soft breath on my neck. The sheep were running away, their hooves pattering against the grass as they made distance from my child and me. But I cared little for the sheep.  I rocked the child in my arms, uttering a stream of nonsensical prayers in an expression of gratitude to the abundant earth.

After a stretch of time, I drew away from my child to have a look at it. The big, glassy eyes were still gazing to the heavens. The mouth hung slightly open, a trail of drool going down the chin. It was a chubby thing with rosy cheeks and a little brown hair. Its fat hands were in loose fists. Everything looked natural and as it should be, except the feet — these, I found, were small, coiled, and still the dull color of mushrooms. I began to withdraw. Perhaps noticing my slight revulsion to its inhuman feet, the child spoke.

“Penelope,” it said.

Its voice was tiny and thin. It never broke its gaze from the sky, which was swirling with sooty clouds. These reflected in the eyes.

The child spoke again. “Penelope,” it said.

Penelope was my name. Something powerful, like a deep ocean swell, washed thunderously over me, and I thought: This is not my child. I did not register anything past that single conviction, which pounded my temples with one fist and gripped my breastbone with the other. There was no question of what to do, nor would there have been an answer. There was only the cold grass pressing against my knees and the thickly misted air rising miles into the sky, where the highest sailing birds trilled their aimless symphony with little memory of what was below. My chest throbbed and my hands shook as I took a stone from the ground. The child did not notice this action, but continued to stare blankly upward. A gust of wind rushed over us.  The stone was heavy in my hand and my gut churned with nausea. I raised the stone and in a single motion I brought it down on the creature’s head.

***

The sheep returned to watch me burn it. They stood, a congregation of woolly bodies, as I wrapped the infant’s body in many layers of floral cotton. Blood soaked through the cloth almost instantly.

I placed the bundle into the pit and lit the fire. Licks of orange and yellow grew; they began to caress the little bundle, charring it quickly in their embrace. Warmth radiated onto my body. An organic, yet slightly stinging, odor came through the smoke that unfurled into the dark morning sky.

My hands on my heart, I stood watching the bundle burn. When the flames had diminished to tiny crests of yellow light atop a lump of ash, when the smoke had dissipated into the mist, and when the frozen air crept under my flesh once more, I made to go back inside.

A weak bleat came from one of the sheep. I turned toward the flock, which had born witness to the whole event. Sylvia was coming toward me with a fragile and shaking gait.

“No,” I said, “It’s nothing.”

Sylvia paused, uncertain.  She bleated again.

“It’s nothing,” I said, more softly this time.

Sylvia tilted her head as though trying to measure my authenticity. After a pregnant silence, she began moving toward me once more. Her eyes, sightless and glazed, nonetheless seemed to seek me. I reached out my hand; it met her wool once she found me. I knelt down. My face was level with hers. I said nothing more. I just stroked the coarse, white hairs on her face.

Sylvia lingered for a moment. Then she slowly turned around and made her way back to the flock. They all retreated to the hillside for breakfast. I watched them go, and watched the coming fog quietly swallow them up, as it would soon swallow me.

—

© 2014 nessa jasper