Amelie Daigle

One night, in this very house, a child was born dead. A man stared out of his window while his wife screamed. That was the first time snow fell on this town.

A stillborn waterbaby lies between his mother’s legs; the midwife slices the umbilical cord with a washed knife. The mother screams. The bedsheets are red, but her blood can still be seen dark and glistening against saffron. The sheets are drenched. It was a bloody birth. The midwife hums a song from her childhood she remembers out of nowhere as she calmly rinses off the small corpse; the man stares out the window. The child is cleaned and deposited in a small wooden box. The mother’s screams slowly shift from pain to recognition of her loss.

There is another child in the house, aside from the one that lies breathless in a wooden box. This child came out of a womb breathing, and his mother did not scream nearly so loud, but the man at the window, he was screaming then, because his new son’s skin was dark the men who live on the water. The man at the window had come from the North; he and his brother had come to this land as buyers, searching for exotic books they could sell for a profit at home. It is rumored that he keeps, or kept, another wife in the North, some light-haired blue-eyed woman with a clear, cold gaze like her husband’s; his eyes are clear now as he stares at the box that holds his wife’s second failure.

Rich red-brown eyes twisted with pain, clouded with tears, she sobs and writhes with a hopeless fury, throwing herself against the sheets. The gaze of her husband holds the calm of a judge who has decided to remain impartial. She knows he is thinking of the men on the water. She knows he is thinking that he married something ruined. And they will continue this dance, she knows; year after year she will continue to have failed.