Wraith ; Semblance

by Riley Mason

  I could hear my heart sliding to a slow crawl from the churn of blood in my ears, almost as if it had suddenly slammed on the brakes. I could feel all the hands surrounding me suddenly release me as I had lost the will to fight, as the medicine began to do its work.

  The ambition to destroy something had been killed off by whatever sedative they had forced my body to take. I could see the doctor’s face enter my field of vision. That glare and glow surrounded his bloodied face even though I could see the professional I had come to admire and trust standing there no longer. He had become the man I was filled with hate for.

  He looked down at me, the blood was wiped from his eyes but the one that I had hit was already spilling red into his pupil, a trickle of blood down his face, and had already started to change to purple.

  When he looked down at me with such anger in his eyes the blue that was his typical shade had suddenly gone cold and dark, almost a jet black as he stared at me. He was no longer the kind man I was willing to listen to, the man who held all the answers I needed but rather a bitter old man who wanted to hurt me, defile me. One who held the stench of anger and the infection of hate inside of him.

  Doctor Samuels looked down on me in pure disgust that even in my dazed comprehension of what was happening, I could feel down to my bones, despite the shade of medicine poisoning my blood.

  As he began to speak, his lips already framing the words he was going to use, I could hear the venom in them before he even uttered a single word. That sinister smile spread across his face, polluting the message he was about to convey to me. “You killed your own child.”

  CHAPTER 17

  My eyes were nearly swollen shut as I allowed the memory to recede back into me as I lay there on the floor, back in the present now that the memory of what had happened had come and gone, leaving me strangled, helpless.

  All I wanted was for someone to come into the room, someone to save me from where my mind was moving to, where it had gone before I could stop it.

  I had these feelings when lost, repressed, dirty emotions got churned up in this ocean of my head. The toxic waste buried in the sands of my mind would spin up every single time something massive passed through my imagination, like some long ship abusing the ocean it passed over. Some sleeping giant waiting to come up and feed on whatever was there to take back down with it.

  Every time this happened, I was afraid I wouldn't be brought back. That the reality I had just left, the one that had given me up so freely to this dangerous thing that came out and about, always on the hunt for me, would just never give me back.

  That it would keep me. That it was strong enough to imprison me and never quite let me go because there was no real reason to. That instead of just coming back every now and again to do whatever damage it had intended, it would damage permanently, hurt me in any way it could. It would make sure that, in the end, I belonged to it, it did not belong to me.

  It was like being beneath the glass of the ocean surface, sparing air for a swim to it’s top. Not realizing just how much air you need for the trip, that panic that sets in, that spark of worry that comes over you in those moments that seem to last forever.

  I never learned how to let go of what Samuels had told me. That while I still had this gift inside of me, that I was going to lose it. There was nothing I could do, no medical remedy, no way to save a life I loved so much even though I had never seen him or her.

  I thought back to what he’d said to me, while the medicine was scurrying through my veins, tainting what it touched. That smile that spread across his face, the anger that fell out of him even though his voice was shallow and deliberate. I wanted him dead, I wanted to be the one who killed him.

  CHAPTER 18

  Finally, I stood. Putting my balance back together but keeping my hand pressed to the table knowing there was a chance I was still too frail to trust my own weight.

  I took in a few breaths, shallow ones at first. Gentle on my lungs and my balance. I closed my eyes, patient with getting up to my feet. I didn’t want to exert any part of myself, I knew what these episodes could do, what they could take when they come, the condition they leave me in when they’re gone.

  I rubbed at my face, feeling as the sweat clung to my fingers as I pushed them back through my hair.

  My lips still trembled, and my heart still shook in the cavern which held it, but I could feel it was starting the process of moving on.

  The storm was heading into the sunset, into some strange orbit of my body where it would eventually be forced to about-face and come right back, be delivered fresh and renewed to me all over again because that's what it did.

  It was still so raw inside of me. All of me hadn't returned back to normal. There was still some of the residual damage I was feeling, waiting there for it to walk away from me—to forget I was there and move onto something that was, at the very least, slightly more interesting.

  The thing I hated the most about this was the damage I felt about myself. That failure of motherhood stepped into me and convinced me of something I couldn't entirely be sure was in fact true.

  That my body couldn't support human life. That one of the key ingredients of being a woman, the natural ability to produce a child from start to finish just wasn't meant for me, it was something I was never going to be able to do.

  That there was some rotten point inside of me which repelled any life that was meant to grow. That I was just this baron centerpiece who couldn't sustain life because some part of me was no more than a wasteland of a forgotten woman.

  It was difficult to shake that thought out of my head. That I was this mistake walking and I had no way to properly correct or remedy the issue in any way, shape, or form, regardless of effort. That despite the malicious intentions of this natural phenomenon inside of me, I had to own and accept it for what it was rather than find some way to defeat what it could do to me.

  To see and feel all those effects were one thing. To drop all my emotions and love and hate into a blender and then set it to the highest pulse action the machine had to offer and feel the velvety soup of raw mistake that came out was horrific.

  It was one thing to take it on without any proper expectations, to think that it had the very real possibility of happening again, wasn’t worth the gamble. I had to accept that this was what it was and there was no changing it.

  There were no tests or homework I could recite which would alleviate the risk associated with getting pregnant yet again. Just to see a baby start to create and then be taken from me the second it took on its own heartbeat independent of the one that I was using to power the creation.

  It rattled me to my core and as the years had moved and progressed, time all but forgetting the pain I carried with me, I had to endure the aftershocks, the leftovers of pain which took longer to move on.

  Some of it was rooted in me, pounded into the soft flesh of my mind during the storm that played overhead. Every time it happened, I was forced to see if I could dig it up and properly dispose of it, seeing if it were really possible to go back to the normalcy of what my life had left to it.

  CHAPTER 19

  It didn’t take long after the miscarriage for my relationship to travel to the same place my unborn child did. It was hard to hold any hope that the relationship could survive something so detrimental to it, not once something like that had happened.

  Two people had to share in the heartache that came along with something as horrible as this was, but it took two people to realize how dangerous it was to any relationship that tried to move on from it.

  I knew there were some things you couldn't fight. My fiancé knew the same thing. That’s what I had loved most about him—our dynamic when it came to emotions, how well we matched. We were threaded in the same manner, dug into one another in the same patterns, matched on all the right levels, our hearts falling into the same place.

  For a long time before my pregnancy, we were great, picture perfect even. My mother and father had loved him and
had believed when I had told them that he was the one, the one I wanted to share the rest of my life with.

  That I knew it somewhere in my heart and even if they had raised any objections, I might go on without their blessing.

  Most of me was entirely sure I would’ve because I was sure about how I felt. Those feelings inside of me were cultivated by me, I had grown them from nothing into something so picturesque that I didn’t dare want to part with it and I knew Luke felt the same way.

  When the news of the baby had struck, when it had finally gotten to him that there was going to be no baby, he remained as strong as I could have hoped for, as much as I could’ve needed. That wasn’t the last straw, both of us wanted a child. There were ways to test to see if the same failure that had stepped up and reared itself was going to show up again, ways to learn if we would have to endure this kind of pain twice if we had an idea to try again and give this another shot.

  “Are you sure you want to keep doing this?” Luke would ask me at night when we were in bed, I would be laying on his chest, he would be glued to the television not exactly watching it but thinking, lost in his own thoughts in the general direction of the tv.

  There had been tension being created between the two of us, growing from the knowledge of what had happened and what was next. It was causing stress that had never been invited into our relationship in the past, something stronger than either of us had dealt with in our lives, at least that part of my life.

  It was a new footing to have to learn how to negotiate but it was already finding a home between us when I had never thought our relationship could support that.

  “What do you mean?” I had asked, curious about his motive.

  It had been on my mind more than I had cared to speak about. While the issue was true to us as a couple, there was a more clearly defined blame inside of my body, where it was easy to hide the blame and the heartache.

  Luke’s contribution had worked, I had in fact gotten pregnant which was where his participation had come to an end. I knew it was me who had dropped the ball, he was right, I was the one who had failed.

  “I mean with what the doctors have been saying. We’ve gone to four specialists, none of them are giving us any news better than the other. All of them are telling us to hold onto hope at this point. I don't know if it’s worth it to try again and take the risk, I’m not sure I can handle it and I’m not sure that you can either.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Those words had torn at me, they were hard to hear from the love of your life. To know your future had ended, a bitter disaster had brought it all crashing down around you and there was nothing you could do about it.

  I had lifted my head, propping myself up and looked up at him. I knew my features were painted in confusion in response to what I was hearing. Knowing this was the inevitable end to the trip I had put both of us on.

  As I looked at him, I started to see someone I didn't quite recognize in the face that looked back at me.

  I hadn’t wanted to be around someone who was so willing to give up something so precious, but I knew I had to make amends to the fact that there were facts I had been hiding from myself. Facts Luke seemed certain enough to want to face head-on. I just wasn’t certain I was ready. I wasn’t sure I could handle doing that.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready to give that up just yet,” I had said back to him, cautious with my words, careful in how I delivered them.

  It felt real to me, a force of pure strength when those words were thought up but limp, weak, and forgotten by the time they came out. I was giving up too, I just wasn't entirely sure of my feelings on when to actually throw in the towel, but knowing that day was coming, sooner than I would've expected.

  I remember Luke bent down and kissed me on the top of my head. When he pulled himself back, resting back on the pillow that supported him, I could see his eyes had gone red and there was wetness in them.

  It had come to me, too.

  CHAPTER 21

  Soon enough, I realized there was no reason to call it quits sooner than expected. That natural trust that had thrived between the two of us had started to effectively break down and vanish into thin air.

  I knew I had projected the miscarriage onto him when it belonged nowhere, in truth it didn’t belong to either one of us, no one had to hold the blame. There was really no one person to blame. There was still a chance this was not a permanent error in my genetics.

  That there might be a chance for a normal, living, breathing baby if we were to give it a shot and travel down that road again, just accept fate as it was handed back.

  After that night though, Luke had made it clear in very subtle ways that he had no intentions of going down that road again. He had taken the loss of our child just as hard as I had, but he had almost no qualms about putting the entire ordeal to sleep. Forgetting it had ever happened and simply moving on from it, I supposed that was his way to cope with the pain he had, that he was holding onto.

  That was one thing I couldn't quite do. For one, I had been the one who had handled all of it. All the tragedy we had gone through was produced from inside of me. I had wanted to do it again, I had regretted all those words I had said in bed that night because I knew they carried a finality to them that I was in no way ready to entertain. Luke had all but confirmed those words and swore into their principles, and I knew he was never going to forget them.

  I had become cold to him because it was easier to do so. There was no longer a reason to talk, we had spat out the words at one another which had led to a paper-thin understanding of a truce that I didn't even want to be in the same room with let alone properly adhere to, I wanted to forget about the truce. Rip it up and try to reword something he thought had reached its end.

  The arguments started shortly thereafter, they were never direct. Never floating around the true issue at hand but rather started to spring up and attack all different matters of our daily lives.

  It had been something inside of me that I just couldn't let go, regardless of how important I knew it was to do just that. Despite what it was doing to me, despite what it could do to me in the long run, it wasn’t something I could loosen my grip on.

  It had never again been brought up until the last night we had been together. In the same house, under that one roof, sharing the same bed with one another. The argument had bubbled out of control, both of us had lost our reservations.

  Even now, thinking back, using the strength of my mind to try and find the meaning of the argument. The very words which had started that fire between us, I couldn't. It’s not that they weren't there it's just that they never held weight, they weren’t the true argument, it was what came after that did its work on us.

  It came about, our argument had traveled full circle and had moved back to a topic we had effectively ignored for the better part of a year before all those feelings I had repressed down into some depth of my mind had finally decided it was time to breathe free air again.

  “You didn’t want this baby,” I had said. My words like acid falling out of my mouth. “You never wanted it, you were thankful when you found out that I miscarried.”

  I watched as his face shook but it never broke, not for a single second. This time when the baby was brought up, it didn’t drag tears out of his eyes but an anger like I hadn’t seen before.

  “You have some fucking nerve accusing me of that. I wanted that baby just as bad as you did.”

  Instinctively, I had held my stomach, as if the spirit of our child was there, hearing the damage he caused, and I wanted to show him there was no reason to be alarmed about any of it.

  “You didn’t want anything,” I said softly not looking at him. “I wanted this, you knew we failed, and you never wanted to try again.”

  “I begged you to try again,” he said back to me coldly.

  “You said to believe the doctors, that all we have is hope. That that’s not enough to try and carry another child. That we’d fail, that we’d have to go
through all this again.”

  “Not one of them encouraged it,” his voice was so thick and sharp now, it was like his words were slapping me in the face.

  “Please go,” I finally said. “Just get out.”

  “No,” he said firmly.

  “I want you to go, Luke.”

  I watched as he came around the bed, gently put his hands on my neck and pressed his lips to mine.

  It disgusted me to feel his touch, it felt so strange now, like it didn’t belong with me anymore.

  When I pushed him back, I saw his face shift again, twist into something I didn’t quite recognize.

  Grabbing his hands off of me, he looked shocked and confused.

  “I said, get the fuck out of here,” I screamed.

  Then his hands moved from gently embracing my neck to his hand tied around my throat.

  “You lost my kid and you’re kicking me out and saying this is over and saying we can’t be with one another anymore?”

  My breath caught in my throat, I could feel the flush of red bleeding up into my face. My mouth was hung open, frantically trying to seduce the air back into my lungs.

  CHAPTER 22

  I started wildly coughing, covering the sprays of hoarse, throaty breaths coming out of my mouth. The air that slid into my throat was smooth, but it felt like I needed it. Like I had been standing there holding my breath while my mind replayed that very scene.

  The pain inside was so vivid now, it carried so much more weight than it had in the past when I had rendezvoused with these memories. Revisited them at a time when I felt the most alone and thought about reaching out to the one person I was certain I had loved. That was when I would quickly remind myself of the danger in that idea.

  My hand moved to my chest, massaged it, trying to subdue the turbulent air I had just dragged into myself.