The Quilt
Madeline Fowler
My mother said that my grandmother bled over this quilt in every way a woman can. Her fingers met pins over it, she discovered her first drop into womanhood under it, her daughter bled her way out of her body beside it, and she died wrapped within it, her mouth dripping blood on its seams.
Then, after grandmother smothered the quilt with her touch and her life, Mom touched it only twice.
The first time was right after grandmother died, when it smelled of blood and death, and Mom washed it with water so hot it hissed. Bleach powder and vinegar, till the oranges spilled, the blues faded. She hand–washed it too, afraid the machine would rip grandmother’s careful stitches out. Her skin turned pink then red under the water, and she scrubbed until her hands split, seared. For years after, she insisted there was a burning in her fingertips that the doctors called phantasmic, brought on by nerve death. The nerve death wasn’t necessarily from the scrubbing and the burning water, but Mom acted as if it was. As if the quilt conspired against her, punishing her for trying to remove its blood, and haunted her hands for the rest of her years.
After my grandmother died, after Mom scrubbed the quilt till her fingertips died, after; Mom didn’t dare touch the quilt, but she didn’t dare part with it either. She had my father hang it above their bed, and it stayed there, staring, for another forty years. Mom didn’t touch it again until the day she died.
As death wrenched the breath from her body, her hand, I saw, pointed inexplicably to the quilt above her head. Her fingertip traced the seam once and then, like snapping from a trance, she screamed and threw herself to the opposite side of the bed. I held her shoulders as she screamed and coughed until blood from her mouth splattered on the seam she had caressed, and she went limp.
Died. Just as the quilt absorbed her death’s blood, exactly as it had her life.
The quilt was mine then.
I am a rational, scientific woman. My mother was haunted by superstitions and dreams of witches, by salt thrown over her shoulder, by sage and quartz and shadows she imagined just out of sight. I am not – I am not my mother.
I studied sciences in college, all sorts. Biology, physics, chemistry, and neuroscience, which is what I found myself most drawn to in the end. I was invested in how we truly work inside, how we are driven to action, how the brain creates shadows within it and projects them onto a world that is blank until our brains tell our eyes what we think we are seeing.
My mother was terrified of the quilt, and enamored by her terror. I am not. My mother saw shadows in the seams and faces in its squares. I do not. My mother’s brain shook with fear at every shadowed corner, edged on by cocktails of Xanax and Ritalin (Ritalin for the Xanax, Xanax for theg Ritalin, and so on). Mine is not.
I know that if I were more like her, I would believe that the quilt killed her. But the quilt did not kill her. The shadows in her mind did, along with the tumors in her lungs. The tumors weakened her, but when she touched the quilt, her mind cast so many shadows that her heart couldn’t take it and just stopped. The blood that she coughed up – was from the tumors. She was screaming so hard that her lungs couldn’t take it.
Why did she touch the quilt that scared her so much then? The same morbid curiosity that led her to want it above her bed, I think. That infatuation with terror.
And if I were more like her, I would insist, as she did so many times, that it was the phantom fingertips, haunted hands, that moved by some force beyond her control –
I am not like her. I am not my mother. My mother secretly loved the fear and that is why she indulged in it to the point where she killed herself with it. I do not, and I will not.
My father died shortly after my mother, and my husband and I hired a crew to help us pack up their home. Most of the stuff that my mother had accumulated – old magazines, dusty glassware, boxes of children’s clothes, good china for the good guests, and bad china for the bad – could be donated. If I could have, I would have donated the entire contents of the house – most everything smelled like mold or dust or burnt sage or a combination of all three. But I couldn’t, because of my sister.
My sister had always been easily swayed by my mother’s phantoms. She was the youngest, and, I think, had never grown past that attached stage that mothers and their youngest daughters get. What my mother thought, she thought; what my mother believed, she believed; what my mother was terrified of, she was terrified of as well.
The one difference between my sister and my mother, as far as I could tell because I was never flexible enough to squeeze myself into their tight bond, was that whereas my mother secretly adored the fear, my sister could barely stand it. As children we would sometimes play in my mother’s room, jumping on her bed because ours were much too small. One day – we couldn’t have been older than eight – my sister stopped jumping to sit beside the pillows and stare at the quilt that loomed above us. Something about it must have fascinated her – the stitching or the colors maybe – and she reached for it.
Mom came from nowhere as if summoned just by the intention to touch the quilt, and grabbed my sister’s wrist, dragging her away from the quilt. She was screaming, don’t you ever touch that, don’t you ever, don’t you know evil when you see it?
My mother had never spoken to us so harshly before and I don’t think she ever did again.
My sister had red marks on her wrist where Mom had grabbed her. My mother carefully rubbed salve into the marks while my sister cried and I sat beside her, silent and shocked by a display of violence I had never, and would never again, see from my mother. As she rubbed, she explained how the quilt stole her mother, and then it stole her fingertips, that it was trying to steal her completely and steal us too, her daughters. She said that our grandmother had bled into the quilt in every way a woman could, and now as much as the quilt had belonged to her, she belonged to the quilt just as much.
My sister latched onto this speech, ate up every word like she was starved. From then on, she and my mother were so intangibly and supernaturally connected by this imaginary monster – and since they were bound so tight by a delusion I could never, and never wanted to, suspend my rationality to accept, I was never able to find my way inside their bindings.
That evening, while my mother and sister watched TV together and my father sat nearby listening but not watching, I snuck into my mother’s bedroom again. I stared at the quilt, trying to see what my sister saw, trying to understand what scared my mother so much. I almost touched it. There was no enchantment or anything like that, but a desire to disobey my mother and a knowledge that I could get away with it. But I didn’t – because I feared whatever rage flew from my mother that day and how wild and uncontrollable it could be.
My mother was now dead and I wanted to donate the quilt and get rid of her beloved fear once and for all. As we packed up my mother’s bedroom, the quilt kept pulling my eye towards it. It was unnerving, the sight of it, the history of it. The blood that my mother had coughed on it was still there. I’m sure, somewhere, maybe in the batting between the front and back panels, my grandmother’s blood was still there as well. Traces or something. It was unsanitary, not to mention disturbing.
I asked my husband to take it down. He glanced at it, saw the blood, and, though he was probably disgusted since he had such a weak disposition, he went to take down the quilt. He had been so discomforted by my grief that he resigned himself to doing most things I asked.
He was reaching for the quilt when my sister screamed, flying into the room like she’d been called just by the thought of touching the quilt. “Don’t touch it!” She screamed at him. “Don’t touch it!” She grabbed his arm nearest to the quilt and clawed like a cat. She liked to keep her nails long and red, plastic, inconvenient for almost everything except to claw someone’s eyes out, which she seemed intent on doing to my husband.
I grabbed my sister by her waist and pulled her backwards. “It’s just a quilt!” I yelled at her. She flung herself into the corner, wide eyed, like a caged animal. My husband’s arm bled where she grabbed him, and he seemed sickened by the sight of it. “It’s just a fucking quilt,” I told her.
“It’s evil,” she said. Her eyes trailed after my husband who stumbled out of the room to care for his arm. Her chest heaved when he left. “It killed our mother.” “Cancer killed her! And the pills!”
“The quilt– ”
“The only way the quilt could have killed her is if she made herself so afraid of it that her heart stopped.” I stepped closer to the quilt. The orange hexagons bled into the blues. The red stained the white. The colors were muddied now. A mess. Tangled. “It’s a ghost story. Grow up. I’m not going to let her fear control me. If you’re smart, you won’t either.” I took the matter, finally, into my own hands. I grabbed the quilt, feeling the fabric beneath my fingertips for the first time, and ripped it from its place of honor on my mother’s wall, once and for all. I rolled it into a ball and tucked it under my arm. My fingertips did not die like my mother’s did. If anything, they tingled with more life than ever.
My sister’s face was shadowed with horror unimaginable and in that moment, I saw more of my mother in her than ever before.
I had the quilt professionally dry cleaned. I hoped that they would be able to clean it up enough so that I could donate it. The dry cleaners wore heavy, thick rubber gloves that reached up to their elbows, and they moved stiffly, mechanically as they took the quilt from me. When it came back, though, a dark brown stain stood where my mother’s blood had been.
“Couldn’t get it out,” they said. “Stubborn. Every time we thought we got it out, it came back darker. Clung onto the fabric. Dyed the threads. We can offer you a discount.”
I threw the quilt over my shoulder and carried it out of the dry cleaners. My mother had managed to get my grandmother’s blood out of the thing years and years ago – why her own blood clung desperately to the fabric I did not know. Why my mother’s vinegar and bleach mixture did what the dry cleaners’ chemicals could not, I did not know. Whatever the dry cleaners had done had muddied the quilt’s colors even more. The blues were more faded, the oranges spilled further. And, strangely, the quilt itself felt heavier on my shoulder than it had when I pulled it off the wall or carried it inside the dry cleaners. Now, as I walked three city blocks back to our townhouse, I felt as if the quilt was weighing me down, forcing me to slow down. People sped up around me, moving faster to try to dodge me.
When I finally made it home, I threw the quilt down on the back of the couch, and, exhausted by the heaviness in my bones and the affliction of my mind, I collapsed on the couch beside it and fell, almost immediately, to sleep.
It was, perhaps, the deepest sleep of my life. I did not dream, or if I did, it was just of blackness, nothingness. It was as if I was aware of myself sinking deeper and deeper to the farthest reaches of my brain, as if there was a dark, hidden, silent place hidden in my brain that called for me, somewhere that had always been and will always be, that I was sinking into – like I was weighed down with an anchor and the only natural place for me to fall was into this preordained neural space of complete and utter darkness.
And I fit, like a puzzle piece snapping into place.
When I awoke, I found my grandmother’s quilt draped over me. It had fallen, it must have, though it seemed like it had been lovingly tucked around my body. Encasing me.
Later on, my husband would tell me that he had found me asleep on the couch and placed the quilt over me. Hadn’t you seen the bloodstain, I would ask. There was no bloodstain, he would say. I didn’t see a bloodstain.
Underneath the weight of the blanket, curled into the couch, I drifted in and out of sleep for what may have been minutes, though it felt like hours. It may have been hours.
I slept.
When I was next able to pull myself to my feet, I was shocked to discover an aching pain in every one of my joints, down to the sinew, the muscle, the bone. The ache was deep and comfortable, as if it had always been there and I had only just noticed.
And as I walked away from the couch, I watched my husband moving faster around me. I watched him dress and brush his teeth and make his coffee and take his briefcase in a matter of minutes, seconds even. It was as if he moved faster with every step. I moved slowly as he and the world spun quickly around me, only making it to the kitchen, not a hundred feet away from the couch, after he had left the apartment altogether. He had left dishes from his breakfast, I noticed, and they needed washing.
It occurs to me that I haven’t fully described the quilt that my grandmother and mother had left behind. My grandmother had made it as a little girl out of blue and orange hexagons. Hexagons make sense as she liked to do things in sixes, I remember. She baked in sixes: six loaves of bread, six cookies on each pan, six tablespoons of butter divided by a sharp kitchen knife for biscuits. So she sewed in sixes too. The quilt itself is made up of dozens of hexagons, meant to look like bunches of flowers – orange center, blue petals, or blue center, white petals, or so on, so on, and so on. When I was young – very, very young, so young that I may not be remembering it correctly – my grandmother, not dead yet but getting there, told me that the quilt was to be passed, mother to daughter. Eventually, she told me, I would have to give it to my future daughter.
When my husband married me, he made it very clear that he wanted children. I had always been unsure of my feelings towards children. The concept of it, the image, by my husband’s dreamy, idealized standards seemed to be picturesque and very old–fashioned in a 50s housewife kind of way. Sometimes it would seem comforting like it might give me a purpose, a nice role to snap into. Yet, of course, it’s too easy. The expectation, the ease of falling into this role is unnerving. The idea of becoming like my mother, of having someone so dependent on you that you become just as dependent on them – that dependence and that fragility. It’s unnerving. But then again what could be more perfect than that image of a mother with her husband and child?
Of course, it was settled when we found out I couldn’t have children a year after our marriage. My husband was severely disappointed and spent his time pretending to comfort me when he was really comforting himself.
When I found out I was pregnant the day after I brought my grandmother’s quilt home, I couldn’t believe how far my body had betrayed me.
My husband was thrilled. A miracle.
That night, despite myself, I caught my gaze drifting to the quilt, still draped on the couch, always back to the quilt. My husband tried to speak to me about doctors, names, blues and pinks. But the quilt called me.
I had never known what about the quilt fascinated and terrified the women in my family so much. Objectively, rationally, I knew that it could not be the killer they imagined. But something else in me, something more like my mother, could see – could imagine, I suppose – all the life that it had sucked into its seams and the batting and the stitching, and it pulsed with all the life it had taken, my grandmother, and then my mother’s fingertips, then my mother herself, it pulsed with this life, and I touched my stomach, and felt – imagined I could feel – the fetus’s pulse in time with the quilt’s. Synched. Doubled. Twinned. All that life – had it taken mine too? My child’s? Somewhere within me, my mother screamed her last death rattle, and somewhere inside the quilt, though surely it was just my imagination, she longed desperately to be free.
Very quickly, quicker than my doctor told me to expect, I could put my hand on my belly and feel its heart beat beneath my palm. As the months passed and the fetus took shape from a misshapen oval on the ultrasound into a tiny human within me, the heartbeat grew stronger and stronger. Soon, I didn’t need to press my hand against my stomach to feel it. And with each heartbeat, my fingertips buzzed with life more and more.
I would find myself thinking often of my mother and her haunted hands – her obsession with death that spread to her life, her family, and her fingertips. My fingers buzzed with life, intoxicated with life. They never rested.
The first time I saw the quilt beat with life, I thought it was my imagination. That night, I had been overwhelmed with my unexpected pregnancy, and, though we had never been close, I was grieving my parents, and so my imagination had run wild. I even thought it was some sort of wild fantasy inherited from my mother. Something in the wiring of my brain, and the brains of all the women in my family, just waiting for this moment. I tried to forget the image of the quilt beating and thumping like it had that first night.
But it started again.
I began seeing the quilt move out of the corner of my eye, beating once or twice, like a trick of the light. Then, slowly but surely, as the days and weeks passed, it grew stronger and louder and once again, just like the night I found out I was pregnant, the quilt beat heavily, rhythmically, with all the gravity of a human heart.
And as the baby’s heartbeat grew, it became clearer and clearer that somehow, by some principle I could not understand, the baby’s heart and the quilt beat in sync, always in sync. Stronger and louder with every passing day until the beating together was insufferable. Soon, I could feel the baby’s heartbeat throughout my entire body, starting like a shock wave and radiating outwards, through my chest, throat, shoulders, hands, pooling in my fingertips. And with each shock, slowly then gradually faster and faster, the quilt beat in sync.
A few times, I tried to walk outside to clear my mind. I thought if I could breathe in enough fresh air, I might be able to purge this fantasy that, at the time, I thought I must have inherited from my mother. Outside, in the fresh air, the baby’s heartbeat would calm and I would tell myself: It is just a quilt. It has to be just a quilt. It can only be just a quilt. And each time I ventured outside, now in the fresh air and away from the quilt, I would think: I am going crazy, just like my mother. I would only last a few stray moments more after that thought before the baby’s heartbeat grew louder again and I would be overcome with waves of nausea and dizziness that would only, and could only, pass when I returned to our home, where the quilt lay beating.
And so as the weeks of my pregnancy passed, I couldn’t justify it any longer. The quilt was beating. My husband denied it when I said so, but I knew it was real.Each beat consumed nearly all my senses. Was this what my mother had seen and heard, always?
I tried to ignore it. I tried to focus on anything else. For the days and weeks and months I listened to fast, heavy rock music at full blast. I kept the television on at all times, game shows and reality shows and infomercials with bright flashing graphics designed to keep my attention. I flipped through novels and textbooks and any other book I could find, but I was never able to comprehend what I read. My mind was too full, too distracted.
But the beating quickly became insufferable. The nonstop beating, beating, beating, filling my belly and lungs and brain, and the beating, beating, beating from the quilt louder and louder until I couldn’t think or focus on anything other than beating, beating, beating.
It came to a peak when I was six, nearly seven, months pregnant. The music, the television, the books, were not helping. I couldn’t block it out anymore. I knew I couldn’t get rid of the quilt – nobody in their right mind would take it and something prevented me from throwing it out. I had to keep the quilt, of course, but I couldn’t take another day of it beating in our living room, driving me insane and obsessive and terrified.
There was a plastic bin filled with baby toys my husband had left out in the living room. I emptied it out on the floor and, stepping over pacifiers and teddy bears, I gathered what strength I could and grabbed the quilt.
It was still heavy, heavier than I could rationalize. It dragged on the floor as I tried to pile it into the toy bin. I had avoided touching the quilt again until now. With my hands on it, I could feel for the first time – the beating. It seemed to come from deep inside the quilt. Grandmother had stitched the two exterior pieces carefully by hand and filled the interior with a thick cotton batting. It was the cotton batting that beat. I could feel it strain at the seams, then grow slack in between beats. My hands shook. My speaker was playing rock music and my television was tuned into a reality show, but all I could hear was rushing blood in my ears, my heart, my baby’s heart, and the quilt.
Quickly, I gathered it in the toy bin and shut the lid on tight. One hand on my belly and the other on the bin, I pushed it towards the closet. It resisted. It pushed back. It took all I had, back, knees, arms straining, but I shoved it into the back of the linen closet, covered it with beach towels and spare sheets, and shut and locked the door.
For the first time in months: peace.
The quilt was muffled.
The baby settled inside of me.
Relief, fuzzy like static, ran through me as a shudder.
I breathed.
It did get better for a time.
The baby’s heartbeat didn’t fill my entire body; it settled into slight kicks, hiccups, and a soft heartbeat that I could only feel if I pressed my hand against my belly and concentrated on it. I could leave the house without getting sick, and even when I was in the house, I could relax. I couldn’t hear the quilt beat anymore. I thought that my mother’s madness had officially left me.
When I was eight months pregnant and wobbly on my feet, though, I fainted for the first time. I remembered getting out of bed after my husband left for work, reaching for a glass of water, then a ringing in my ears, a wildfire heat crawling through my body, my heart growing feral, and then – blank space. Just nothing.
I woke up on the floor, hands rested on my stomach. I panicked in the moments after waking, trying to feel for the baby’s movement while rolling onto my hands and knees to get up. I still felt the heat that had consumed me all over, though it was fading, slowly. When I managed to stand, I breathed deeply, feeling the baby stir alongside my movement. The heat started to dissipate away entirely – but –
But–
I clenched my fingers, once, twice, three times. I pinched the tips of my pinkies, dug my nails into my thumbs, shook my hands back and forth, but the fire didn’t leave my fingertips. They burned. Not a sharp burn, but a mild, tingling one, like staying in the sun for too long or grazing your knuckle against a hot pan. The kind of burn that, if you tried to, you could just barely ignore it, even though it was always there.
I did try to rationalize, despite all that had happened over the course of my pregnancy. Maybe I pinched a nerve in my shoulder as I had fallen to the floor, and the pain was radiating outwards. Maybe as I was out, the baby laid on my spine wrong and some nerve had gone numb and was burning as it awoke. Maybe it would pass. Maybe it was in my head. Maybe I wasn’t turning into my mother.
But it didn’t pass. The fire grew stronger, burning constantly inside the tips of my fingers. And worse, though certainly my burning fingers would have been more than enough to terrify me, the fainting kept happening. When my husband, for the health of his unborn child, brought me to the doctor’s, the nurses and doctor spoke of ‘blacking out.’ They described blackness around the edges of my vision until I couldn’t see anything. They spoke as if it was certain, as if there was no doubt that this was my experience.
But, when I fainted, it wasn’t blackness. It was fuzzy, staticy white, like a television turned to the wrong channel. And the more I fainted, the more I felt that, somehow, even though I was unconscious, I was still awake, just staring at white static as my body burned from the inside out.
The doctor didn’t believe me and said something vague about hallucinations just before losing consciousness. “Very common,” he said, “hallucinations. Very common.” He wrote the symptoms off as high blood pressure. He said, “hearing your heartbeat in your ears, the confusion, the black outs. Some women experience changes in their vision – shakiness, blurring.”
Before I could respond, my husband said that I had been very anxious. The pregnancy had made me very anxious. The doctor told him, “that’s common too with high blood pressure.” High blood pressure was very concerning in a woman as far along as I was, and very concerning for my baby, he said. Problems with my kidneys and liver and lungs and brain, he said. Seizures were possible, and perhaps even death to the baby and the mother both, he said.
It was all very serious, and part of me knew that. It was very, very serious. And even though what the doctor said was logical, yes, very logical and even rational, I didn’t believe him. I knew what was happening. I knew it was the quilt.
It was going to kill me. Just like my mother. Just like my grandmother. There was some inherited evil held between the fabric. It was muffled under beach towels and old bed sheets in the linen closet, but it was beating away, waiting.
My husband and the doctor both wanted me to go to the hospital, or at the very least, lay in bed until my “blood pressure” went down or the baby came. But it’s not natural for a person to lay in bed, as if I was a computer that could be shut off and turned back on to get rid of the hiccups in my program. But my husband and doctor insisted on bed rest, and I never trusted my doctor. It was because of this that I realized I couldn’t trust my husband anymore. He didn’t understand the evil that had invaded our lives. He just pretended it didn’t exist even though it was right in front of his face, just as I stupidly had my entire life.
I didn’t speak to him as he brought me home. My husband probably thought I was scared or angry or dejected, but I was not. I knew what I had to do. I knew it just as completely as my mother had known why her fingertips had died, as my sister had known why she lived in terror, and as I knew that there was some deep, inherited evil sewn into the quilt.
At home, after the doctor, my husband hovered over me, holding onto my arm and waist. He guided me to the couch in the living room, wanting me to just rest, just wait. It was cold in our old townhouse with its thin walls, and I watched as he lit the fire in the fireplace. I broke my silence: “Bring me my grandmother’s quilt?”
He seemed to notice that the quilt was not in the living room for the first time in months. “Where is it?” He asked, putting the fire poker down.
“The linen closet, in the toy box. In the back,” I said.
He opened his mouth as if to question me, but, meek from all his fear and denial, he said nothing and walked out of the living room, towards the linen closet.
I heard him jiggle the lock, maybe surprised that it was fastened for the first time since we moved in, then unfasten it. As soon as the lock disengaged and the door creaked open, I could hear the beating again, muffled slightly by the layers of fabric and plastic. Panic rose in my throat. My baby’s heartbeat was suddenly fast and loud and stronger than ever, and as I heard the toy box lid click open, as the quilt’s beating grew thick and insufferably loud, the baby’s heartbeat synched. I held my hand to my belly. I was going to end this. I had to end this.
My husband carried the quilt as if it was nothing, as if there wasn’t a crushing, swallowing weight to it, as if it wasn’t beating like a living breathing thing in his arms. He was oblivious, and I grew more and more panicked, angrier and angrier.
He draped the quilt over my legs. The dark brown bloodstain from my mother consumed the fabric, yet my husband still did not see it. And the quilt beat excitedly as it touched my legs, and still, still, my husband acted as if he did not see it. His obliviousness to something so real, so tangibly evil right in front of our eyes, could only be purposeful. He must have been purposefully ignoring it, too scared of it, hoping that I alone would handle it. And, I knew, I was the only one who could do what needed to be done.
My husband left the room quickly after that and, though I struggled against the suffocating weight of the quilt on my legs, I kicked it away and shoved it to the floor, sliding down to the carpet beside it. The quilt beat faster and faster, excited to be close to me again, and the baby inside of me followed suit.
I gripped the edges of the quilt and pulled, but I found myself too weak to move it in this state. I saw in its hexagons and careful seams the haunted lives of my grandmother, my mother, my sister, and myself. I saw how it had consumed each of us, drained us, leaving nothing but panic and anger and terror. And I saw it already consuming the life of the poor baby girl inside of me, before she had even been born, and I knew, since the very beginning, I knew that the quilt had always been trying to consume her. I could not let her face the same terrible fate as the rest of us.
Frantically, I found a weak spot between an orange hexagon and a blue hexagon and pulled, pulled, so fast and so hard that my shoulders cracked. I kept pulling at the seams, working to the sound of fabric ripping, moving so fast that it seemed as if my arms had taken a life of their own, moving of their own accord, as they destroyed the quilt and its legacy of death and blood and life.
Finally, my hands found an opening between the front and the back of the quilt. I ripped them apart once and for all, and to my horror, I found not a white batting, but a stiff, red mess of cotton, clinging to itself and beating with life. It was not human, not even flesh. I could feel, deep in my heart, the life of my mother within it, and the life of my grandmother, and the never ending fear of my sister, and my own sanity. It was the quilt itself, its cotton insides, that had soaked up all of our blood, all of our lives, all of our deaths, and was now throbbing with it, beating with it.
It was clear what I had to do. My body knew before my mind did. Muscles aching, I dragged what was left of the pulsing quilt and all of its shreds to the fireplace. It was heavy, it resisted, but I pushed and pulled with all my force, until, determined, I held the quilt in the fire until it smoldered and burned. My fingertips stung and sizzled, licked by fire, but I feared if I let go, the quilt would continue to live, and continue to suck the life from my unborn child. Eventually, I couldn’t even feel my fingertips anymore, I couldn’t feel any burning. Instead, as I watched the quilt burn in the fire, piece my piece, hexagon by hexagon, sixes by sixes, I felt my mother’s arms around me, proud for the first time, and I felt her breath on my neck, and I heard her voice, you’ve done it, you’ve done it, you’ve done it.
When my husband found me, he forced me away from my work. He shook me, clutching my hands and shouting frantically. I screamed back, “Don’t you know evil when you see it?”
I sit here now in my hospital room with my hands wrapped in gauze. The nurses come in to change my bandages twice a day, but I can't feel my fingertips, and so I do not look at them. They give me pain medicine too, even though I have insisted that there is no pain in my fingers, there’s just nothing, like white space. There is no pain anymore.
Instead, twice a day, I ask if I can see my baby, whom I gave birth to some time ago, though I cannot rightly remember through all of the drugs the nurses give me. The nurses don’t respond, or they murmur that they will ask the doctor, but I have not seen her yet.
My husband doesn’t visit me, and I haven’t asked the nurses for him. I have not forgiven him for leaving me to handle the evil all by myself while it sucked the life out of myself and our unborn daughter. I have not forgiven him for ignoring what was right in front of his eyes. I don’t think I ever will.
My sister has been my one lifeline to the outside world since I’ve been here, though. She calls often and we speak in circles around what happened. But, today, she visits in person with a small bundle of blankets in her arms. She sits beside me and shows me my daughter.
Her lips are bluish and her skin is thin so that you can see her veins around her forehead and eyes. Her eyes are closed. She’s sleeping.
Without saying anything, my sister places her in my arms, and since I cannot with my bandaged hands, she cradles the baby’s head. Her red, plastic nails are stark against the baby’s blue veins.
“It was going to take her, like Mom,” I say. “It wanted her too.”
My sister is, again, quiet for another moment. “It’s over now,” she repeats. “It’s done.”
