Katie Harms

Annie and Dot moved into the house when Annie was five months pregnant. Prior their friend Daniel had visited on a hot summer day grey and still and silent, the sky pressing its way into the city. He borrowed a crystal highball glass from the kitchen and the birds below flocked around trashcans to peck and eat and ignore passersby, their quick steps and damp sweat as they pushed through the heat in long formless throngs. Annie and Dot were patient and, when Daniel left, Dot used a turkey baster as—cliche or not—it was an effective method. They fell pregnant on their first try and that night they stared through their windows at dusk, the skyscrapers jeweled with the light of other people. Annie began to cry for all she could see was hope packaged in bright little squares trapped and stacked and endless against the encroaching sky. It was all so incomprehensible her stomach roiled into her chest and she knew it was time to leave.

            The first months Annie was bedridden. Annie and Dot’s apartment smelled of disease and Annie paced through it and lay inside of it and dreamed of a house in a faraway place. She thumbed through newspapers and circled property listings, her vomit and spit and heaving breath circling sink and toilet basins, large mixing bowls or cooking pots Dot would leave by the bed and the sofa with small, folded washcloths and plates of saltine crackers. On a cloudy day like all the others one listing came with a picture as big as her thumb: brick house, good bones, needs work. The house was unreadable and smudged with black but Annie smoothed the newspaper onto the coffee table to show Dot nonetheless. Dot squinted at the ink to make out the bones and eventually she agreed to go see it. Annie dressed in unstained clothes before taking the elevator beneath the city to their car. As they descended Annie’s stomach fluttered and Annie startled, but it was nothing beside the prospect of the house for it was not near time for the baby to move.

            They drove together through concrete and people and lights that never turned off though Annie could not see them during the day. When the roads widened so did Annie’s chest, her heart and lungs rising with the blue in the sky, and she felt the center of herself being pulled down the long country roads. The house itself remained an ink smudge until they stood at its foot; it was hidden on three rolling acres between yellowing trees despite standing on a hill in the middle. Beyond the house were wetlands and woods shifting orange and red and brown. There were quarry pits, too, and neighbors that weren’t neighbors for they were few and far between. When Dot turned off a dirt road down a long, paved driveway through towering oaks with leaves that would not yet fall for months, some not until pushed out by new buds, Annie placed a hand on her stomach. Beneath her hand she once more felt a flutter and although it came from deep within it seemed as though, were she to draw back her hand, her palm would hold small glittering crescents of blood. Annie did not remove her hand and instead she paused until she felt it once more. While she waited—which was not long—she looked not at Dot but at the house and its good and long-standing bones.

            The driveway had led them to the base of the hill the house was on and they greeted the realtor with smiles and handshakes. The sky felt thin and clean and far beyond them. Gooseflesh rose on Annie’s skin in the slight and ceaseless breeze. Together the three climbed the hill to the house’s front door, Annie’s legs tiring with the effort and, though they stopped short of the house for the realtor to show them the surrounding land, Annie did not listen; it was as if she were already inside and in rest. The realtor gestured at the house, at the backyard behind it that slipped down into the wetlands and contained a small channel that led to a lake. There was a lawn for the baby to play on, and in the spring the channel would flood and they could swim through the parted reeds to the bowl of the lake. Dot squeezed Annie’s hand and Annie’s heart beat in return, so quickly and fiercely it could have been two rather than one.

            The house creaked as they entered, both the door and the floor, and the end-of-October sun reflected off the lake. The doubled light came through windows and made everything bright. They toured the first floor and Dot listened to the realtor and Annie closed her eyes and felt the sun burn red against her eyelids, her face warm and her skin cool, her stomach easy for she was not empty.

            After Dot had seen the first floor she held Annie’s arm as they descended the carpeted stairs to the basement. Annie stood at one of the two walk-out sliding glass doors in the living space while Dot toured what the current owners had turned into an exercise room, one wall mirrored and holding the light. Everything—the sky, the glass, the lake—gleamed and shimmered and rippled in time with the flutter in Annie’s stomach, not with hope but something simpler, perhaps just the sun, and Annie had already made up her mind. She watched contentedly as a muskrat in the channel gorged itself on algae without stop, clearing an ever-widening circle of black around it as it filled itself for winter.

“Our apartment could fit in the basement alone,” Dot called. Her voice echoed giddily against the bare walls of the house. The realtor laughed, her heels clicking against the floor as they went to yet another room. Annie glanced from the windows at the series of rooms behind her and when she returned her attention once more to the yard and the channel and the reeds she startled so violently her stomach went still. A coyote with bright eyes identical to the suns in the sky and the lake slunk towards her, head bowed and back arched, feet light as if it weren’t walking at all.

Slowly Annie crouched and put her hands on the sliding door, her belly button not yet touching the glass. On the other side of the door the coyote padded closer still, its muzzle a breath away from the baby though neither Annie nor the coyote seemed to be breathing. Annie startled again when the coyote rubbed its flank against the glass exactly as would a cat. Annie, then, let out her own breath and her stomach dropped lower, or perhaps she had just moved closer herself, and the flutter returned as her shirt grazed the glass. When Dot and the realtor emerged from the two back rooms the coyote, as quickly as it had initially appeared, ran off down the lawn, its sleek coat catching the light as it entered the muddied and tangled channel. It seemed as though it might run right out to the middle of the lake but before it could Annie lost it in the shadows with a rustle of leaves, the muskrat gone too save the black hole left in the algae. Dot and the relator saw nothing but the glittering sun reflecting off the water back into the sky. 

            The day Annie and Dot moved in they began to paint the walls white. They drove twelve miles to the hardware store for paint cans, rollers, and trays. It was December and Annie was nearly six months along. The roads were slick and matted with dead leaves, the reeds in the wetlands blanched and crusted with ice, the cattails long since molted, the tufts having already drifted through the air as a preamble to snow. Small white birds with black heads and black wings flit between branches in empty bushes, hard to see against the sky.

“Black-capped Chickadees,” Annie said. At some point between viewing the home and making the down payment she had ordered several field guides and flipped through the pictures at night when the heartburn and the lights beyond her window kept her awake, canis latrans dog-eared and well-worn. Dot smiled and nodded and turned on the radio, taking each curve in the road slower than the one that came before. The baby kicked off beat with the music but in time with the static that cut in and out as they went.

“The baby is moving,” Annie said and Dot touched Annie’s stomach with a gentle gloved hand.

“The baby likes that we moved,” Dot corrected, and she moved her hand from Annie’s stomach to take Annie’s in her own. At the hardware store they stayed hand-in-hand as they loaded their cart and at home they danced as they painted and ate dinner on the floor on a blanket they unpacked from one of their boxes. The doubled sun set in the lake and the sky and they watched as first the trees turned black and then everything else, all that was not the house soon unseeable and quiet, Annie and her baby a-flutter and happy and finally home.

            After the first day of painting Annie went to take a shower, the activity and the baby making her more sore than usual in her back and her hips, her knees and her feet. She turned the knob until it would no longer turn and she sat on the toilet to wait for hot water. After five minutes she sighed and stepped into the tub, the spray still cold. A daddy long legs dangled in the corner by the shower head. Annie watched the spider and while she did so the hot water clicked on with a thud and scalded her stomach red. She winced then turned and tilted her neck so the water could run through her hair and as she stretched Annie found her spine rigid for she had suddenly smelled blood. Annie glanced down the tip of her nose and expected to see a stream down her thigh and her calf to the drain. But there was nothing yet the smell grew stronger; Annie soon realized the water itself was hot and metallic, coating her from crown to toe. She heaved and reached to turn off the faucet but when she did a piercing tea-kettle whistle shrieked through the shower head. Annie thought briefly of the coyote on the patio, of the starved screams it would make on these cold winter nights. Carefully but quickly and with the water still running Annie climbed out and wandered the house wet and naked and smelling of blood.

“Iron,” Dot said when Annie found her. “The inspector report says we should get the well tested. I’ll work on scheduling that tomorrow.”

  Annie threw up and Dot knelt by her and gathered her hair, the hot water still shrieking as the house filled with a smell that would not be soon to wash out.

            At nine months the ice in the channel that led to the lake melted and algae began to bloom a muddy green as Annie and Dot painted and organized the nursery. The snow swiftly became water and the marshes overflowed, flooding the trunks of the surrounding trees, the house’s patio; the lake swelled and merged with the marsh, encroaching on the hill the house was on. Annie was swollen too and through the second story windows she watched the water approach. The water brought mushrooms that sprung and died within hours, new ones cropping up in the fertile black soil of the dead ones. Snapping turtles hatched and crawled from their shells down the hill to disappear into the marsh; Annie would see them later thick and as round as dinner plates. The rain splattered holes in the algae cover and the water beneath appeared black, the channel flickering epileptic. The ever-cycling arpeggio of fist-sized green frogs pulsed across the channel and the lake, ascending and descending with the moon. In the mornings the marsh and the reeds and the empty bushes would become obscured by a fog that rolled out over the lake and against the woods on the other side until it was broken by the sun and the call of the birds.

            As the ground thawed and the leaves began to bud first on the maples in the backyard then on the oaks lining the driveway, Annie and Dot began to walk to try to induce labor. They walked the driveway to retrieve the mail and Annie noted the fungus growing on the stumps and fallen branches, an oozing marshmallow white one day, charred black the next. Annie and Dot then followed the dirt roads, through the woods and empty fields, along the quarries, past the farms and lakes, the farmhouses and lakehouses. Annie’s stomach hung low, the baby’s elbows and knees pushing jagged shapes into her skin, her pelvic bones slowly pulled apart and separated. The bones separated enough that eventually Annie could not lift her legs more than a few inches off the ground, but still they walked, shuffling together with steady feet. When they returned to the house the pain would ease and the baby would settle and Annie would watch the marsh flicker and the mushrooms grow, and she would breathe and rest and wait. Dot would prepare meals and the rooms and the beds and the house though Annie was sure the house was ready. 

            When Annie gave birth it was at home in the middle of the night. The pain started early evening and she showered while Dot napped, holding her breath against the smell of the iron. When the pain became intolerable Annie shook Dot awake and Dot screamed, thinking, in her half-asleep state, that Annie was a ghost or night terror. While Annie kneeled in front of the toilet and shrieked and paced and clutched at railings and chairs and tables Dot called the midwife. Annie screamed so loudly and ferally Dot thought the police would come but Annie knew anyone who heard would simply assume the wails had come from a coyote. And so with no one else to witness it, the night stayed quiet and dark and unseeable, the only sounds Annie and the wind and the settling house.

When Annie transitioned the midwife came. She drove down the oak-lined drive and parked at the bottom of the hill. The trees slanted over the drive, black against the sky, multiplying in shadows thrown from the headlights. The midwife, bag in hand, climbed the hill through the night to the open door where Dot had been standing in wait.

            The baby came in in the early hours of the morning just as day was breaking. It was overcast and the rain fell slowly, clinging to the branches and budding leaves. The sun could only be seen in nascent veins of deep blue between the clouds and as Annie pushed she willed the sky to open into a bright and blinding white but it held firm in a way Annie could not. She kneeled at the foot of the bed as she split in two and the baby landed in Dot’s arms.

They named the baby Martha. The placenta came soon after she did and it was promptly placed within a metal mixing bowl. The umbilical cord pulsed until white and emptied, Martha’s belly button then clamped so she could be bundled into a blanket pulled from the dryer. The midwife cleaned the blood and the blankets and she took the placenta with her to dispose of but Annie stopped her with a quiet murmur upon seeing the gleaming bowl in the midwife’s palms for Annie had planned to bury it near the mouth of the lake.

When the midwife left, Annie and Dot sat on the bed and stared at Martha. Martha’s mouth fell from Annie’s breast and she opened her eyes, black and blind and big and new. She blinked once then twice and her pupils grew bigger still in the dark, blue hour of morning, the dimly lit room. Annie felt the weight of her baby in her arms and she could feel herself, too, heavy in her bed in the house they now lived in, all of them cradled in good bones. Annie tilted her neck to kiss Martha’s head. The thick, wet, spring wind drifted gently through an open window, and, before Annie’s lips could reach Martha the house creaked and Martha began to cry.

“Try taking her outside,” Dot said at dawn on the seventh night, looking up from a book in her lap, squinting her eyes to see in the low light of a bedside lamp.  “It says the change of environment can break them out of it.”

Annie nodded and gathered up Martha’s small thrashing body to go out onto the front porch. The screen snapped back against the frame and Martha wailed harder still. Annie shivered from exhaustion or the night and she rocked from one foot to the other, tightening her arms around Martha and against the clean chill of the air. Rain fell in soft patters as though it weren’t raining at all and the birds and the sky were otherwise quiet, the ground loud with the hum of crickets and the croaks of the channel’s frogs. Annie whispered to Martha in a voice no louder than the rain and she rocked and rocked as though in a dream until she spotted two yellow eyes watching them from the trees along the driveway. The eyes shone opalescent and Annie paused but not in fear, the dread only rising when Martha cried louder. The dread crept up her neck just as it had on one walk while still pregnant when she had come across a possum lying on the side of the road. As Annie approached it she had begun to fear that it would reanimate at any moment and scurry off, having only been playing dead. As Annie got closer she saw how its jaw was bent back, that it had been run over—the blood and bone and teeth had been confused into nothing against the gravel. The panic that had spread through her then came from feeling relief at something so gruesome, at knowing it wasn’t just pretending. 

The yellow eyes bobbed closer, following the driveway as the animal made its way up the hill. As though Annie had called it, a coyote slunk to her, lithe and unaffected by the climb. It stopped at the porch steps, head low and body arched, in bow or in wait.

Annie stilled and held her breath. Martha appeared to do the same, her cries stopping suddenly, her eyes closing as though she might fall asleep or already had. Annie thought briefly of willing the coyote up the last few steps onto the porch, where it would sniff, its tongue darting out between gleaming teeth, ready to lick Martha clean as though she were its own. Annie felt herself beginning to sink down into a crouch, her grip on Martha loosening, when Dot slowly opened the screen door, the click of the handle and creak of the hinges scaring the coyote away.

“See, I told you it would work,” Dot whispered into the night. Annie searched the tree line for its shimmering yellow eyes but could not find them and Martha once more began to scream.

When the sky purpled each morning to match their bruised eyes and the first cries broke throughout the house Annie and Dot would shift in bed, moving through the rooms in a fugue. Annie would fumble to load Martha into her baby wrap, her breast already out and leaking, and Annie and Martha would walk because it sometimes quieted her. They walked through tunnels of trees and along a small stream that always appeared white and iced over regardless of how warm the sky became. The houses along these roads sat between soy and corn fields, the trees long-since cleared, the branches and trunks cut, bundled, and towered into neatly organized teepees twenty feet tall. Crows would fly in mass exodus from between the stalks at the first echo of Annie’s footfalls or Martha’s shrill cries and strangled, strung together sounds.

On one stretch of their walk there were no houses at all, just mailboxes and long driveways that disappeared deep into the woods. The dogs though, hidden within acres of trees and brambles, would still bark when Annie and Martha passed, somehow hearing them, their howls echoing against the expanse of trees and the growls of the next unseeable dog. As the chain of barking amplified down the road the birds would leave their perches and gather above the trees in murmuration, coiling and uncoiling against the sound, writhing away to quieter places. Red and black squirrels and chipmunks darted through the decaying underbrush from last season, rustling through the grasses and leaves, their claws latching into tree bark with quick clicks as they sprinted up and away.  At first Annie paused at the sound of the squirrels in the leaves and she scanned the trees for glowing eyes, but Martha would cry and Annie could see only the glow of the sun, and so she never stilled long enough to feel her disappointment.

They kept walking.  In front of one house was a van hand-painted with fetuses. The elderly man who lived there would sit on his porch or water his flowers and wave each time Annie and Martha went past. One morning, before the sun had fully risen—its orange only just cresting over the rolling hills and licking at the trees as though it were threatening to burn them down—two nuns in long, brown habits stood on the porch and spoke with the old man. Annie heard a shriek and a playful giggle and she looked away from the nuns and the old man and his van. Two young girls sprinted across his front yard in chase, their hair trailing behind them, their hands balled in their white night gowns, the hems hoisted up. Annie, Martha, the nuns, and the old man all stilled to watch the girls. Carmelite nuns, Annie read later, standing between bookshelves in the library, showing Martha pictures of nuns in brown habits printed within the book’s glossy pages. Martha said nothing and Annie frowned and sighed and reshelved the book, wiped the drool from Martha’s chin and neck and fingers, staring blankly for a moment before a cry pushed her on, back to their undertakings.

On what felt like the last day of summer, the sun high and steady, the sky a cloudless, colorless blue, they walked the dirt roads at the edges of the quarries, the land rising up to form walls neither Annie nor Martha could see over, the berms overgrown with weeds and tall grasses. They saw nothing but they could hear the earth tumbling into piles of gravel, the rumble of the semis that came and went. Annie imagined that beyond the grassy walls there was not anything, and that their house had always been laid at the very edge of everything; she pictured little girls in white dresses climbing the berms and they would, she thought, reach the top to peer over the edge where they’d see only an opalescent nothing that stretched for miles and blended, eventually, with the sky. The girls, she was suddenly sure of it, would hoist up their skirts and step forward.

Lost in her thoughts Annie had hardly realized that Martha had, at last, stopped crying. Her red, scrunched face was smooth and plain, her small, hiccupping body stilled. Martha was not looking with Annie at the quarry but her head was turned and she stared transfixed at the road behind them. She let out a small peel of laughter and Annie startled as if woken from a trance. She looked first at Martha with wonder and then followed Martha’s gaze where she saw, standing in the gravel and dirt in the middle of the road, the coyote. Annie did not move and it occurred to her, then, that the coyote’s eyes that she had been scanning for in the trees and the channel glowed not the same color as the sun or the lake but as whatever lay beyond the quarry wall. Annie and the coyote looked at one another and Martha laughed once more, no dread or panic between them. Without being called or asked the coyote slunk past Annie and Martha and climbed up the berm through the long, tangled grass. When it stood on the cusp of the edge of everything it did not look back so Annie, without thought, followed, untying Martha from her wrap.

Annie walked home as light as the breeze. She waited on the front porch of the house for Dot to come home from work, and she looked not between the oaks but up at the thin blue sky. It held no clouds, and Annie closed her eyes and felt the last of the sun on her cheeks and her chest.  Dot climbed the hill and Annie greeted her with a conspiratorial smile, reached for Dot’s hand and pulled her into the kitchen. There Annie opened a cabinet drawer and pulled from it a small white box tied with a shimmering gold ribbon.

Dot grinned and took the box from Annie. “What’s this?” she asked, shaking it once. “And where’s Martha? I don’t hear her for once. Did you finally get her down for a nap?”

Annie smiled in return. “Yes,” she said, and she nodded down at the box in Dot’s hand, encouraging her to open it.

Dot carefully untied the ribbon and lifted the lid, setting it down on the countertop. Dot giggled. Inside the gold-ribboned box, in their house on their hill, its bones hidden and quiet and still, was a turkey baster. As Dot turned the baster around in her hands Annie looked not at her but briefly out the window, at the bright weightless sky and the sun reflected in the lake, at the trees that would, at dusk, become black and as unseeable as the grass-walled quarries, the saturnalia of faraway howls.

“What do you think?” Annie asked finally. Dot squeezed the small red rubber bulb at the end of the baster in quick little flutters. “Should we try again?”