Finally, she was in the room. The doctor smiled distractedly, waved her towards the chair. She sat, her bag clutched on her lap like a shield.
“So,” the doctor said, “Katherine.”
“Kate.”
The doctor looked over the top of her glasses. She was new at the clinic. Dr Roberts—whom Kate had been seeing since high school—had passed away several months ago. “Kate.” Her smile was sympathetic, concerned. “Your husband not with you today?”
“He’s working. And it’s his turn to pick our daughter up from school.”
The doctor nodded, studied the file again before closing it, taking off her glasses, placing them on the desk in front of her. A year ago—the last time Kate had been into the clinic—the file had been thick with notes and test results going back several years, but the file in front of Dr Hall was slim. Kate felt the first clutch of wariness grasp her. She looked for the first time at the posters on the walls, advocating full disclosure, early testing, therapeutic termination, and sterilisation for those women who continued to conceive non-viable foetuses. Babies.
“Have you spoken to him about your situation?” Dr Hall said.
“I thought it would be better to get the results first.”
“I see.” The doctor peered at Kate, tilting her head like a bird about to strike, frowning a little. “You know, there’s no reason to be unduly concerned. You’ve had one perfectly normal, healthy child. Statistics indicate that a woman like yourself—who has had at least one prior viable pregnancy brought to term—is more likely to conceive another. And this is only your second conception.”
Kate glanced at her file again. There had been four miscarriages before Julia, and two since. Normally, a third non-viable conception would have made her a candidate for compulsory sterilisation, but Dr Roberts had seen a lot of women like her. They had recommended him to each other, whispering his name, passing his phone number to each other, scrawled on the back of old receipts or folded into library books. He was sympathetic, they’d said. She had heard rumours that his own wife had been one of them. That they had a daughter they’d released into the wild. But Dr Roberts was gone now and Kate’s file was magically thinner; her history erased.
Dr Hall moved out from behind her desk and sat in the chair nearest to Kate. She put her hand on Kate’s arm and tried to smile. “These are never easy conversations,” she said.
A week ago, during the tests, Kate had quashed the feeling that things were not right. During the ultrasound, the radiographer had smiled reassuringly, but Kate had heard the heartbeats racing each other, the beats blurring together. She had seen the radiographer’s frown and heard the doubt in his voice when he reassured Kate that perfectly normal babies sometimes came in twos and threes.
Kate pulled her bag closer to her belly. “So the results are not good,” she said. “Not normal.”
“I’m afraid the tests show that the pregnancy is not genetically viable,” Dr Hall said. “But we’ve caught it early. At this stage, we can perform a simple correction either at the public hospital, if you don’t have insurance, or at a private clinic.”
“A termination, you mean.”
Dr Hall nodded. “It’s for the best. You can try again in a few weeks.”
“I’ll have to think about,” Kate said. “Speak to my husband.”
Dr Hall leaned forward on the desk. “Mrs Baines, I understand from Dr Roberts’ notes that this is not your first unviable pregnancy. I’m sure Dr Roberts explained to you, in the past, the legal and medical necessities. The need for timeliness. If you delay the procedure beyond another week, things become more complicated. More dangerous.”
Kate stared at her handbag. The clasp no longer snapped shut. Her bag’s mouth gaped like an old woman’s: toothless and slack. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said, standing and moving towards the door, “to make the necessary arrangements.”
Dr Hall moved to stand between Kate and the door. She put her hand on Kate’s arm. “Please do,” she said. “I know it’s unpleasant, but these processes have been put in place to protect everyone, particularly women like yourself. And the alternative, should you chose not to cooperate …”
Kate nodded without raising her eyes and, eventually, the doctor opened the door. The woman and child in the waiting room looked up, and Dr Hall smiled and asked them into her office. “I’ll hear from you tomorrow,” she said to Kate. “Before 4 pm.”
* * *
She kissed her husband and slipped out of bed. The hall was dark and warm. Barely any light penetrated here. She went into her daughter’s room, careful not to trip on the toys spread across the floor, the books laid out in a careful grid. She smoothed the hair from Julia’s forehead and kissed her hot cheek. (There is always a last time for everything.)
She had cried when Julia was born. Nothing could have prepared her for the experience of childbirth, for the way it hauled her back into the scents of her childhood: of blood and fur and earth. In the birthing room across the hall she had heard another woman grunting, almost growling, and closed her eyes in terror. She’d submitted herself to all the tests, and taken her own medication religiously—even more after the pregnancy was first confirmed and then approved—but there was always a risk. When the final pains came, and she felt her daughter’s round head pushing down through her, she felt as if she was exploding. She wanted to howl, and let the claws push through her skin, to bare her teeth and snarl at the midwife. “You’re doing great,” the woman said. “Really good.”
And then Julia’s head crowned, the contractions eased a little and she reached down, during the breathy pause, and touched her daughter’s head. The wet slick of hair that felt—to her seeking, terrified fingers—like wet fur. She had had an urge she had never told anyone about: to haul the child out and lick it clean. And then the next pain came, hauling her down into the bowels of the earth where everything was darkness and pain. “Good, good,” said the midwife as Kate clenched her teeth, bore down and felt her daughter slip out of her body. Tiny, toothless. Human, after all.
She never told anyone about the momentary, sinking disappointment she felt. The sense that her daughter—beautiful, beloved—was hers, but not of her. That it was like bearing another woman’s child. But then the nurse lifted the baby up and she had seen Julia’s pink, crumpled face, pulled her to the breast and let her suckle. She was overwhelmed by relief as Julia suckled and she examined her pink skin, her ten fingers and toes, he smooth belly and round chin and snub nose. Knowing the midwife was going out into the hall and recording a normal birth, that soon she would be released from the locked birthing ward into the pink and grey maternity ward with the other mothers. That she wouldn’t have to know what it was like, despite all the testing and precautions, to give birth to a fox.
Kate left Julia sleeping and went into the hall again, back through the house to the kitchen. She touched the bench and the stove, the clean dishes stacked in the drying rack, the copper pots suspended from the ceiling. Finally, when there was nothing left to delay her, she stepped out into the dark.
The garden backed onto the National Reserve; there was no fence to mark the divide. The grass was mown up to a certain point, and then was left to grow leggy and wild. The trees grew close together. There was a path, which soon petered out. When her husband had brought her here, to show her the house he had chosen, she had wondered whether the proximity to the forest was intended as warning or comfort. The trees were beautiful, and strange; reminders of the wildness of her almost-forgotten childhood. Sometimes, especially in winter, she heard the others. The low growling, the muted animal calls. Sometimes she had come out in the morning and found their spoor on the back step, or a hank of plaited fur on the path between the house and the washing line. A threat. A gift. A form of welcome or recognition. She had quickly cleaned away these things, washed her hands, combed her hair, smiled at her husband as he came out of the shower smelling of nothing but skin and soap.
Perhaps, if this had
been her first child, she would have been able to go through with the procedure, as Dr Hall had called it. The termination. But she knew too well the way the slight tightening of her belly became a child. Knew that even now the children inside her were making their connections, that the longing she had to crack open eggs and suck the warm, silky contents was both hers and her children’s. The dreams she had: of running through the undergrowth, of hauling a damp-furred child from between her legs and licking the bloody, salty fluid away until the fur was red and thick and alive beneath her tongue. She knew, too, the way love fizzed up through her when she had held her newborn daughter: a soft acid burning away any doubts she might have had. No matter how strange the child might be.
Kate knelt at the edge of the garden to remove her shoes. Despite the fences and the traps, the suburbs were full of foxes at night. They came in out of the reserve, running low across the ground. Sometimes she saw them streak beneath a streetlight, or dashing across a floodlit garden. Over the last few months, since she had felt the child take root in her body, she’d seen them more often. It was as if they were taunting her. As if they knew. Every morning, when she went out into the garden, she would find their pawprints in the freshly-turned earth of the garden, or on the back deck. More and more of them each night. They were circling the house while she slept, watching her, waiting to see what she would do.
People crossed themselves when a fox crossed their path, or muttered old prayers. Despite everything, despite knowing it was genetic, people were still superstitious. Pregnant women avoided the forest, drank hot potions if they’d even seen a fox, let alone touched one. Waiting in the antenatal clinic, Kate had overheard other mothers-to-be sharing stories about a woman they knew, or had heard about. The woman had been bitten by a fox one night, by the bins outside her house, and though she’d done everything they said, her child had come out furred, clawing its way down the birth canal before being been taken away.
“We’ve set traps all round the house,” one woman said, and the others nodded at the wisdom of such measures.
“I’ve heard you can get wolfsbane tablets from that Chinese herbalist up on Market Street,” said another.
“Aren’t they poisonous?”
The woman shrugged, rubbed her hand over her belly. “This is my third. I took wolfsbane tablets every day for the first two.”
“I heard they make you miscarry.”
“Only if there’s something wrong with it anyway.”
“I’ve heard that if you suspend a fox’s tooth on a string over your belly, it will swing back and forth if your baby’s normal, but spin in a circle if it’s a fox.”
One woman leaned forward, dropped her voice. “D’you remember Simone? That woman with the toddler?”
“Haven’t seen her in a while.”
“She’s gone,” said the woman. “Found out it was a fox she was carrying and ran. Her husband’s furious: says he didn’t even know she was a carrier.”
“Run?” Kate said, and the circle opened, leaned back and eyed her suspiciously.
“Gone feral. Run back to her kind to whelp her kit in a den in the forest.”
“I heard she gave birth in one of those underground shelters and then released the pup into the wild.”
“How would you be,” said a young woman, aghast. “Knowing it was out there, a … child of yours, one of them.”
The women shook their heads, rubbed their bellies and crossed themselves.
“Takes all kinds,” said one, and the others nodded.
Kate shook the memory away and placed her shoes side by side at the edge of the mown lawn, alongside the ziplocked bag filled with packets of tablets she’d bought out from the kitchen, and the pregnancy test—two blue lines on a white plastic stick. He’d know what it meant, her husband. He would have heard stories about others—people like her—who’d gone back to the old ways. Given up on the therapy for one reason or another: for love, out of anger or grief, or just because no matter how well the drug therapies worked they couldn’t take away the longing she still felt to be low and wild and free. Perhaps it was harder for people like her—the ones who’d been caught and taken away from their dams when they were just pups—but who still remembered what it was like to be curled up in a litter of fur and musk and leaf-rot. To run naked in the woods and smell the rain.
Perhaps, after she’d been gone a while, he’d find a new wife. Not someone like her—but another kind of woman, one who wasn’t genetically compromised. Someone he could feel safe with. Probably when he was young it had seemed exciting, part of his youthful rebellion, to date someone like her. To love her and marry her. But he had changed, and so had she. When he didn’t get that promotion, when the others didn’t invite them for barbecues and tennis games, she knew he wondered if it was because of her. And if he didn’t say so now, it was only a matter of time before he would. Before he looked at her long, rusty hair that crackled and snapped when he ran his hands through it, almost alive, and wondered aloud if she shouldn’t dye it, or cut it short, try a little harder to fit in.
She tossed her hair down her bare back, felt the warmth of it against her skin and heard a fox howl, somewhere close. She stepped onto the path. For a moment, she felt the tug of both worlds, both futures, pulling at her. The house at her back with its bricks and glass and clean, white sheets. Her husband sleeping. Her daughter, too, curled up in bed, her milky skin flushed with dreams. And the forest ahead of her. The darkness of it, the earth and mud and dampness, the rising sap and the cold wind. The blood and bone beneath it, running in the shadows. The hunters with their guns.
For a moment, she felt the fear overwhelm her, saw again what she had long told herself was not really a memory: her mother’s body a smear of fur and blood on the grass. The hunter marking his own face with her blood—one line of it on each of his cheeks—and then wiping the knife clean on his pants before he hauled her and her sisters out of hiding and bundled them into a sack. Her brothers he staked to the trunk of the tree and left to rot because, so they said, males were harder to turn back once they were more than a few hours old. (Though Dr Roberts had said—when tests had shown at least one of the children she had carried was a boy—that this was a lie. “The males go feral during puberty,” she had said, crying. “I heard they attack their mothers, their fathers. That they turn into animals.” Dr Roberts had leaned forward, his tired eyes searching hers for something she feared he might find. “They say a lot of things that aren’t true,” he said.)
She was only a little way down the path when she saw a fox in the dark: just its eyes, gleaming at her through the leaves. And then another. A low humming sound—not howling, but singing. A welcoming, earthy song. A rustling nearby, the stink of home. A press of hot fur as one of them twined around her feet before it darted away. Her belly tightened; she could feel its pulse urging her to run. Her heart was beating fast and she could smell the rain coming. A long way off, but coming. If she stayed, the children she bore … Her daughters. Her sonse …
She shook herself free of the thoughts that crowded in and began to run. Bare feet on bare earth. She could hear them, feel them, running beside her. Their hot breath, their low, rustling speed. It was as if they had been waiting. As if they had known she would come. They bounded onto the path ahead of her—first one and then another and another—a stream of fur into which she flowed. She ran, and ran. Everything loose and long and low and true. Something let go inside her and began to fall.
It was falling still.
Modern Love
…M Darusha Wehm
“Good morning, Marian.” Her alarm clock’s voice was soft and androgynously sensual. “You have three new messages,” it continued as she slowly woke. “The bank would like to offer you several investment choices for the busy professional, the government has ten tips to help you quit smoking and your mother wants you to call her.” She lay in bed, sunlight angling through the space between her curtains, the clock yakking away on the nightstand, but she
ignored it all. She was thinking of him.
It had only been going on for a couple of weeks, but she could barely remember a time before him. He really was the first thing she thought of when she woke and the last thought on her mind before falling asleep. He consumed her; she breathed his breath. Just thinking his name could make her completely lose track of time. Graeme. Spelled with E s, not like Gray-ham. Somehow more dignified that way, she thought. Graeme.
She could hear her alarm at the corner of her mind, but she was overwhelmed by her excitement at the thought of seeing him so soon. She felt like a teenager with a wicked crush, but it was so much more than that. She was a grown woman, he was a man, and this was no schoolyard infatuation. No, this was the real thing.
She sighed, and whispered his name. Graeme.
* * *
Marian didn’t remember the first time she’d met Graeme, and that drove her crazy. He worked at a coffee shop, the one she visited most afternoons after work on her way home, and that was how she knew him. But she couldn’t remember if he was already working there when she first walked in, looking for a latte and a quiet half hour, or if he started sometime after she’d become a regular. She didn’t even remember the first time she noticed how beautiful he was, standing behind the bar, frothing milk or serving up sandwiches, his coffee coloured skin set off against the creamy white of the ceramic mugs. It was like one day he was just another service worker that you hardly even notice, then the next day he was the centre of her life.
Obviously, it wasn’t that sudden. She’d noticed him at some point, in that way you realize someone is attractive, and wonder how you could possibly have ever missed it before. And it had just gone from there. She wasn’t exactly sure how it had begun, but one day she’d walked behind the red-haired barista with the tattoos, who was checking the online staff schedule. Marian had just happened to glimpse the site’s URL over the redhead’s shoulder, and her next move had suddenly seemed obvious. She’d hit up the site on her phone, and paging back a few days plus a little deduction yielded his name. Graeme Blake. Graeme. She just happened to copy his next month’s schedule to her phone. It was almost like public information, anyway, on such a poorly encrypted site as that.
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