Written by Sama Bell
Content Warning: Abortion, mildly graphic
I never thought I would hope to bleed.
When I took the second of two pills I was drawing water into the basin. I’d made it thoughtless,
like taking my daily multivitamin, another part of my day fading into the background mundanity
of water filling a tub. Steam unfurled from the surface and clung onto the mirror, veiling me as I
stripped. My world was silent when I lowered into the tub.
One to four hours. That was what the pamphlet they handed me when I walked out the door had
said. The rest of my day was to be set suspended in water, waiting for the rest. I debated with no
certainty about the cost of my worldly ambition. The cost of more, the value of myself over the
potential of another.
The first time I understood motherhood in its sacrificial brutality I was five years old.
The neighborhood stray cat gave birth in our bathroom. She came to us rippling in contractions,
yowling on our front porch. I looked with the irreverent eyes of a child, this writhing creature on
the concrete stoop. ‘Is she dying?’ I’d asked my father. Death I had seen before, again and again on
the television screen that watched over me after kindergarten.
‘No, she is pregnant,’ he’d assured me. ‘Same difference,’ my mother had said. We took her in. They gave
her a ragged blanket and went to bed.
I stayed with her.
It was the innocent curiosity of a child that kept me there, never seeing birth before. Not in its
bestial reality—not in its tidal gushing, the straining, the blood. I had not known entry to the
world came at such a price. Her fur drenched with birthing fluid, foul and sickeningly sweet.
Each kitten slid out in a sinewy sausage casing. She clipped the sack with her teeth and would
lick until the little thing started to mewl. Five born in health, their mouths gaping for the nipple,
latching onto their mother as a parasite that would stay with her for weeks.
Her labor continued through the night. Straining, pushing, her low guttural yowls reverberating
off the sand-and-seashell walls of my childhood bathroom. It would be hours before the last
gooey case hit the tile, the vague shape of a kitten outlined in the opaque fleshy sack. She didn’t
move to cut the birthing case as she had with the others. I don’t know why, maybe she was tired,
or relieved to be done, or maybe she wanted nothing to do with what had prolonged her
suffering. It didn’t move and she didn’t move for it.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know the intricacies of birth, that the little sack that
protected the kitten’s path to life could have just as easily become its cairn as it suffocated it.
When the sun rose and I was still in that bathroom, curled up in the shower tub. It was
uncomfortable, I remember thinking, but no more uncomfortable than giving birth on a linoleum
floor, as I had come to learn. The five living kittens wriggled relentlessly against each other. And
there, on the cold tile, alone where it had entered the world, was the kit stuck in its casing.
Certainly dead by then, but I wouldn’t know that until morning. My brothers would wake and
wail that it was my fault, I could have cut it open, saved the little thing—or gotten someone
more up to the task. As much as I tried to explain in my childhood eloquence that I did not know
that death had even been on the table for the kitten, death had been served and I had been the
fault.
They buried the kitten. I didn’t get to be there.
I’d been a colicky baby. Screeching red in the face until the dark hours of the morning. Nothing
could soothe the natural unrest I came into the world with. My father would joke that I didn’t
want to be there, that I had been taken from God’s side and clearly I wasn’t happy about it. My
mother would say, overwrought and deprived of even the simplest pleasures of sleep, that God
could take me back at any time.
My mother wanted to want me. I believed that.
Wanted, like you wanted your first love. Wanting, like the first rush of hormones after the first
kiss, the first flutter of your heart, the first time you were close enough to smell the sweetness of
another’s breath. And even still, wanting like the months, even years later when the spark faded
and left a steady, comfortable, constricting obligation.
You see, I was the inheritor of her, all of her. The dangerous and unforgiving occupation of
being a daughter. My brothers came from a long line of fathers, and I, the scion of my mothers,
shared the same water of our womb.
I crawled from her wailing mouth, the answer to her ambition, her insecurity, opportunities she
allowed to pass by. The vision of the girl she once was, the woman she could have become. I was
a promised trophy for her sacrifice sprung from the body we once shared.
Her gifts to me were unending. Her love, her hate. As I grew I came to understand it all as I
stood as a mirrored reflection of herself, the remorse she held for her life being planted gently
into me as indebted fear. The shames she passed tenderly into my open hand, ‘do something
more,’ she would have said to me, if she knew the words would not burn.
I was four years old when she first gifted me a piece of herself. Not the blood in my veins, not
the marrow of my bone; she gave me something true. Open and honest and naked in the mirror.
This would be one of the last times my mother was naked in front of me. One of the last times
we showered together. One of the last times I looked to her with the reverence a child has for
their mother, an apostle at the foot of Mary.
‘I am never going to be me again,’ she said. Her fingers traced over the gentle folds of her skin,
drifting listless against red tracings I had thought looked like licorice over her hips and stomach.
Marrs on skin I never knew her without, but there must have been a time before the rivening,
when she was whole. A time I would never know.
It was the last time I saw her body as something sacred, something that hadn’t been taken from
her. I would not allow it be taken from me.
The pain started slow. A churning of my bowels as they sought to untie themselves from what
rooted. I should have known these mere cramps were just the war drums on the horizon, a
warning of what was to come.
A pressure, deep inside me, like a balloon inflating, expanding near to the point of popping. I
saved myself from my groaning as I sunk to my jaw in the tub, the water feeling like a gentle
finger over my lips. The tub began to fill with a light pink. ‘There will be blood,’ they told me, and
it’s not uncommon for the beginnings of the placenta to pass. There would be no body, not this
far along.
A blade seemed to fall across my abdomen. My body seized, strained, relaxed, until a gooey,
amorphous sack spilled from me. It split apart in the water and trailed rich blood as it floated
away towards the bottom of the tub, taking with it any question or debate I had.
I would be more.
I remember thinking how weird it was that the mother cat did not mourn for the kitten. Or at least
did not seem to care. She was happy with her brood, licking their ears and filling their bellies. ‘Is
she sad?’ I asked my mother. My mother would take a long draw of her coffee and sigh. ‘It’s
normal for one to die,’ she assured me, ‘it gives the others a better chance.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
A better chance. The trade seemed fair. Utilitarian, but fair. And I felt better, I guess, about that
little kitten dying.
.
Sama Bell is an emerging writer based in Oregon. They recently earned their degree in Media Design and Creative Writing from Southern Oregon University. Their journey through life, and a curious approach to the stories of others, has shaped a deep passion for capturing small slivers of the human condition with reverence, expressed through short stories, flash fiction, and nonlinear games. They are currently working on their first novel. Epistemic Literary marks their first publication. Instagram: @bellsirony