by Meg Elison
“Sylvia, I would like you to meet Chloe. Chloe, this is Sylvia, daughter of Sylvia. She is the Midwife—the doctor I told you about. She will protect you and help you, just like I did. Maybe better.”
“Nobody could be better.” Chloe spoke with the hitching thickness of a child headed for tears.
“That’s not true, child.” Etta put her hand on the small blonde head. “Sylvia here knows how to make you stop itching, for one.”
She scooped the child up again in one motion, nudging Chloe’s skinny legs to either side of her right hip. Etta thought Chloe was four or five, based on the way she spoke and thought her way through actions. The child was tall, if that guess was correct, but so underweight that Etta was sure her own pack was heavier. They walked a few feet like that and Etta put her down on an exam table. She looked into the child’s scared brown eyes.
“Sylvia would like to check you out to make sure you are healthy. That’s her job, she takes care of people’s bodies. I’m going to stay with you, but the Midwife needs permission to touch you. Will you tell her that’s okay, or no?”
Chloe looked down and didn’t speak.
“She will be gentle and careful, and you can say stop anytime. Can you say ‘Stop’ for me?”
“Stop.” Barely audible.
“Say ‘Stop!’” Etta said it loudly but didn’t yell, popping the p just a little.
Chloe did not say it.
Sylvia stood with her hands folded, waiting.
“Chloe, remember when we were in the woods and I heard something? And I told you not to move?”
Nodding.
“Can you say that? Say what I said.”
Chloe smiled a little. “Don’t fucking move!”
Etta laughed. “Just like that. How about if you want to stop, you say ‘Don’t move’?”
Nodding again.
“Okay. Chloe, does Sylvia have permission to touch you gently and carefully?”
Nodding. Eyes wide.
Sylvia stepped forward, making eye contact with the girl. “Thank you. I promise I will listen to you.”
Sylvia squeezed the girl’s hand. Chloe looked at her other hand, turning her head away.
The Midwife checked the child’s joints and looked for wounds. She noted that the girl was scarred all over, with an arm that had been broken and healed without proper setting, but alright. Etta watched, arms folded.
“Chloe, are you itchy?”
“Mhmm.”
“On your head?”
“Mhmm.” The child scratched vigorously as if the mention of it had reminded her.
Etta fought the urge to do the same.
“Other places?”
“Mhmm.” Chloe scratched at her vulva through her cotton shift. The garment was filthy, but Etta hadn’t been able to get the child to wear anything else. Below the shift, Chloe wore scavenged leather cowboy boots two sizes too big. On her feet were two precious pairs of Etta’s wool socks. She hadn’t wanted to wear those either, until Etta had showed the girl her own feet, unblistered and whole.
“Okay.” Sylvia dipped her hands in a basin of warm water. “First thing is you need to have a bath and get some new clothes. Next thing is I think we have a home for you. There is another little girl there. Would you like to meet her?”
Nodding.
Etta came near the child again. “I have to go for a little while to have my own bath and see some people. Sylvia is a good Midwife, though, and she will take care of you. I trust her. Is that okay with you?”
Chloe looked bewildered, but nodded again. Etta kissed her own fingertips and laid them on the child’s forehead. For just that second, Chloe closed her eyes.
Sylvia set Chloe in a shallow tub with strong soap and added a few inches of hot water from the big pot mixed with cold from the basin. She watched as the child began to wash herself and left her to it. She met Etta in the hall.
“Where did you get her?” Her brow was furrowed.
“Outside of Estiel.”
“Alone?”
“No, she was being sold. A man and an old woman. No idea where they got her. She doesn’t remember anything before them.”
“Did you kill them?” Sylvia seemed curious but unconcerned.
“Him.” Etta studied her fingernails as she spoke. They were short and filthy.
“Is she cut?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t look and I can’t ask her. The old woman had knives on her belt.” She shrugged. “I headed straight here after that. It’s been a few days.”
Sylvia made a face. “Well, she’s covered in both lice and fleas. You probably are, too. You’ll have to see to that. I’m gonna place her with Ani and her daughter. I know she’s ready for a foundling and will be happy to get a sister for Belle. Unless you want to take her.”
Etta shook her head.
“Alright. Scrub up before you see your mother.” Sylvia kissed Etta lightly on the cheek. “Glad you’re back. Stay a little while.”
Etta nodded but did not commit. She turned and left.
She went to the bathers. They had been through all this before. They took her clothes and pack, scrubbed them all down with lye, and then did the same to Etta herself. Etta carefully shaved her black skin with her sharpest razor and then allowed the washers to grease her down with their special preparation of lanolin with lavender and peppermint. It went on as thick as tree sap and burned in that cold, minty way. Etta felt like she was on fire, but it was a pleasure to burn. She felt clean, and she knew this would keep the bugs away.
Lanolin was expensive in Nowhere, but they always had some for her. Peppermint and lavender grew wild, and both helped to cut the smell of sheep. Etta, fragrant and tingling, paid the bathers handsomely with seven new books from her bag and a small tin of stale but prized cocoa.
The washer men smiled to each other and agreed to tell no one of the cocoa so they could split it amongst their house. The books they agreed they would share, once they had read them first.
Bald and burning beneath her clothes, Etta headed to the shrine of the Unnamed.
The Unnamed Midwife had been a founder in Nowhere. She had been from the old world, a trained nurse and Midwife who had lived through the dying and seen how it all came down. She had left behind her journals, which told the whole story—her own as well as the world’s. It was known by every man, woman, and child in Nowhere. They kept their own journals as a way to carry on her work.
The Midwife’s journals and the books that they salvaged told them everything they would ever know of the world before the plague. There had once been a world that held as many women as it did men. Women had been free, and childbirth had been simple, hardly ever deadly. The Unnamed had lived in that world, and had learned to live in one where each city held perhaps one living woman for every ten men. She had written what it had meant to go from being free to being hunted, when one world became another. She was the change, and the strength to survive it.
The Unnamed was Etta’s hero. Not as a Midwife, but as a survivor, a person who could be anything they had to be to survive.
Handwritten copies of her story, copied every year by young scribe boys, were stacked on a wood table. The leather of their bindings shone where they had been handled a thousand times. Gold beeswax candles burned day and night so that the room smelled faintly of honey. The twining figure of a caduceus was carved into the floor. The people of Nowhere said that the Unnamed had had a tattoo of that strange image on her chest, but Etta didn’t believe it. It wasn’t in the book, and it seemed too dreamy for the woman who had practically built the settlement of Nowhere by herself, and written its history besides.
On the wall behind the books, there was no image of the Unnamed. Instead, a salvaged old-world mirror hung with dark drapes around it. If you were looking for the Unnamed here, you had to find her in yourself. Etta saw her own reflection and sighed, choosing to look instead at the floor. She knelt for a while with her head down. She drifted off to sleep in the quiet glow of candles.
Etta started and came to her feet quickly but unsteadily.
She knew the voice belonged to her mother, but at first it scared her as much as if it had been a stranger. She stood a minute, hands on hips and head down.
“Mother.”
“Etta, my living daughter.” Ina came forward and wrapped her thin arms around Etta. Etta let herself be held, but she shifted uneasily until her mother let go.
“You’re home early! Almost a moon!” Ina’s eyes were bright and clear, and she had good, strong teeth. She had been nearly forty when Etta was born. She was not the oldest woman in Nowhere, but she was close.
Etta nodded. “That’s right. I found a girl, too little to travel with me, and not far from here. So I turned back.”
“Where is the child?” Ina’s lined face lit up with joy. She was not wearing her wooden baby belly, the symbol of her status as the Mother of a living child; she must have come in a hurry when she heard Etta was back.
“Sylvia had to clean her up. She’s getting homed with Ani and Belle.”
“I see.”
Etta did not look up to see her mother’s disappointment. She didn’t have to, she knew that look and that tone.
“Well, come on home anyway. Your room is all made up. Some of the ranger boys brought back apples, and I dried a bunch for you. And I got you a gift.” Ina held out an arm so as to lay it around Etta’s waist and bring her along. Etta debated it for a second, then let it happen. They walked out of the shrine together.
Ina’s home was formerly officers’ quarters on the base that had existed before Nowhere. It featured a broad front window and granite countertops in the kitchen. The unbroken front window was an enviable sight, since there were no glaziers in Nowhere. Ina took great care of her house and lived stubbornly alone, after a few years in the House of Mothers. Her lovers came and went, but she could live with no one but herself.
She put on a teapot and filled her strainer with her own blend of mint leaves and dried peach slivers.
Etta sat at the kitchen table and unrolled a long leather strip.
“Brought you something.”
“Did you, now?”
Etta pulled more than a dozen pen nibs out of the pockets in the roll, stacking them in front of her.
“Clean metal, all of them. More than I’ve ever found.” Etta was pleased with herself. She waited.
Ina looked over her shoulder and nodded. Her hands were drawing forth a pan of cornbread from the cabinet.
“Cornbread’s cold, but there’s plenty of butter. I think there’s bacon in the smokehouse, I can go get it.”
“I’ll go, Mother.”
“Alright, then.” Ina watched her living child go.
Then they sat together for a long time without speaking. Etta ate slowly, methodically, as though she could pack more away if she set a pace. Ina nibbled at everything.
“So where did you find the girl? What’s her name?”
“Chloe. Just outside of Estiel, a couple of days ago.”
Ina sipped her tea. “You were back awfully quick.”
“So?”
“That’s where you found the twins, too. Right?”
“Yes.” Etta ate another piece of bacon, relishing the salt. She did not look at her mother. “So?”
“So nothing. Just thinking about it.”
Etta slurped the hot tea with honey. It was the only sound for a few minutes.
“You could have kept Chloe, you know. You could bring her here.”
Etta said nothing.
“Eventually I’ll be gone. You should think about getting you a Hive. Settling down.”
Many of the women in Nowhere kept Hives—groups of men who shared the duties and joys of marriage with a single woman, like the queen among bees. No one knew where the custom had come from, but the Unnamed had written of it, and included the stories of others from all over who lived the same way. With one woman for every ten men, it seemed a very sensible arrangement.
“I don’t want a Hive, Mother.”
“Or some children. You could have a daughter, or two daughters. You wouldn’t even have to settle for sons. You always seem to find girls.” Ina had abandoned the pretense of eating.
Etta set her fork down. She stared at the table. “Mother. Listen to me. I do not want to get pregnant. I don’t want any man, or any men. You know what I am. I don’t want to be a Mother, or a Midwife. I’m a raider. That’s what I do.”
“Even the Unnamed knew she had a purpose, Etta. If you want to be like her, you could—”
“I am like her. I am. That’s the point.”
“That’s not the point. The point is you have nothing to put before her as an offering. You never bring her any blood, even bad blood.”
Etta turned her head away. “I still follow her.” She waited a moment, staring at the floor. “And I know all about blood.”
Ina got up and crossed to her daughter’s side of the table. She reached into Etta’s bag and whipped out the journal stuck in the back there, purple leather and decorated with flowers. A gift Ina had given Etta when she had gotten her first blood. It was this that she was supposed to offer to the Unnamed: not the blood of the slavers she killed, but the blood a woman gives in the endless and doomed pursuit of having children.
Ina flipped the book open with one hand and smacked it down, laid open. The pages on both sides were utterly blank. No histories of the girls she had saved on the road. No stories of how she lived or the long-gone world she raided goods from. No Book of Etta.
“You’re not following shit.”
Etta sprang up and snatched the book, stuffing it back in the bag and packing up everything. She pulled her leather jacket back on, her breath coming hot and fast through flared nostrils.
Ina tried to put a hand on her shoulder, but Etta jerked away.
“Child, I just want your life to have meant something. What does it mean if you live and leave nothing behind? No child, no book. You’re a dead end.” Ina’s gnarled hands curled in empty space, coming to rest against her lower belly.
Etta looked at her mother’s hands lying there. She fought rage, then guilt. She held on to her pack.
I leave behind six women and two girls. Free. So far.
“Thanks, Mother.”
“Where are you going?”
“Back on the road.”
“Oh, where to this time? How far away do you have to go to understand what this life is really about?” Ina’s eyebrow cocked high in her thin face.
Etta clenched her jaw and opened the front door.
“You’ve lived your whole life in this village, Mother. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Go back to your kitchen.”
She slammed the door and faced the darkening orange sky. She didn’t want to hit the road without a good night’s sleep. She looked both ways on the path and made a decision.
She was going to Alice’s.
Alice, daughter of Carla, lived alone. She had a small Hive of two men, Antoine and Ian, but the two of them lived together and she visited when she felt like it. Her home was the back half of a small building, with a low bed surrounded by her collections of rocks and shells and crystals. The front half was her lab.
Etta let herself in, sidling past the surfaces that she knew, without looking, were littered with glass vessels and delicate tools. The lab windows were open up high, but the spring air could not dispel the odors of blood, urine, acids, and indefinable stinks that Etta couldn’t place.
Alice slept soundly in the back. Etta could hear her snoring softly. She slid her pack off when she reached the doorway, slipping out of her shoes and leaving them beside it. With her hands, she parted the curtain of wooden beads that separated the space.
The bed was greeny-gold, eerily lit by Alice’s handmade solar lamps. She coated ceramic pots with paint that stank and left them out all day to absorb sunlight. On a clear day like today, the pots glowed brightly and sh
e had only brought two inside. She was lit from either side of the bed, her messy curls aflame on one side and her turned-up nose lit delicately from above on the other.
Etta slid her pants down and whipped her shirt up over her head. She drew back Alice’s patchwork quilt and crept into the low, down-filled bed.
Alice stirred. “Toine?”
“No.” Etta kept her voice low and slipped an arm around Alice’s waist.
“Sylvia?”
“What?” Etta’s surprise brought her voice back into her normal register.
“Oh shit, Etta! How are you back already?” Alice flipped neatly over in bed and hugged her.
Etta pushed her away slightly to look at her face in the weird greenish light. “Sylvia?”
Alice rolled her eyes and sat up slightly. She reached and fumbled for a glass of water, found it, and slurped. “Oh, don’t be so shocked. You’ve never been jealous before.”
Etta held her breath. She had never been jealous of Alice’s Hive. This was different.
“You want a drink?” Alice’s face was all innocence.
“Hmph.” Etta gave Alice the eye for a few more beats and then took the water.
“Really, though, why are you back so soon?”
Etta put the glass down when it was empty. “Nobody is just happy to see me, I guess.”
Alice tucked the blanket under her arms to cover her freckled breasts and pressed her lips together. “That’s not what I said. I’m just curious. I thought you’d be gone all summer.”
Etta sighed tiredly and reached down to the floor to retrieve her shirt. Pulling it back on, she spoke without looking at Alice’s concerned face. “I found a little girl. Too little to travel with me. So I came home. And I missed you.”
Alice smiled on one side and put a hand out on the muscle at the outside of Etta’s thigh. “That’s sweet.”
Etta shifted away, ending their contact. “Guess you didn’t miss me, though. Not if Sylvia’s already the one you’re expecting to show up in the middle of the night.”
Alice glanced up at the windows. “Hardly the middle, love. The sun’s just down. You know the hours I keep.”
Etta sulked. “You start seeing her the day I left?”
Alice stood, breathtaking in any light, and stared down at Etta. “What I do is my business. What you do is your business. If you came here to pout like a child who has to share her toys, I’m already bored.” She crossed her arms.