1st place, Prose in the Randall Albers Young Writers Award: “Harboring” by Hazel Brown

Harboring

I remember it was a Sunday when I discovered I was pregnant because Franz went off to church and I stayed home.

Franz was never gone. All except for Sundays of course. He’d set off in the mornings, then extend his leave into the late afternoon when he’d luncheon with the other adherents of the church. I went once. The people were amiable and the wine, though selfishly portioned, was fine. It was a tolerable time, but I couldn't go again. While Franz was away, I had words to tend to, like gardens, plotting away pieces of myself.

We were both young when we moved onto the pond, Franz and I; yet I lived in this cottage far before I knew him. I lived alone, for long, beautiful days– writing, bathing, being– before I met Franz. But rarely did I leave the cottage. All I needed was my indoors. My bath to clean me, my groceries to nourish me, and my stories to scar with the letters, asking to be eternally rearranged. I wrote, then. Big, bounding bodies. I wrote works, not stories. I wrote real bodies not just arms, legs, earwax, and nostril hairs of poetry. I sat at my grand, oak table in the attic, or even on the porch, devising and stringing myself through my writing. My books. I made bodies then, not just fractures.

Then I married Franz, and my own body became of greater importance.

Sunday– his day of gods– I deemed my day of bodies. A day tending to the particular bodies that meant something to me. Bodies of written work, bodies of water, the body I call my own. I would write my chapters, bathe in our peeling, clawfoot tub, or lay around, watching the hairs stand up on my skin– pale and always overheated, even in winter. My solitude never seemed to weaken. It was always a place of its own, wielding its name like a fly swatter, batting away buzzing irritations of human form.

Then that Sunday came. The annunciation: where I ought to have been bleeding, I wasn’t. That was when I knew. I knew because how does a woman not know when a body is preparing to puff up and grow restless inside her? I even felt the potential bodies within that body– the fetus’s sperm or egg– that may one day be another baby. I knew I was pregnant that Sunday, for I felt all the other bodies my own had to offer, but none of the kind I had been familiar with. Not my empty pages, laying against one another, pretending to sleep.

Months into my pregnancy, Franz still went to church on Sundays. God, God, let me have a lovely baby! Some nonsense. But thank the gods for church, I suppose. I couldn’t have survived my pregnancy sane if he hadn’t left me once a week to myself. Sunday– my day of bodies– was the one breath I had to myself. And I wasn't even fully by myself, was I? There was my word in there, that word in this excruciating sentence of mine. Not a word. A baby, soon. No word. Nothing I care for.

***

Before we met, Franz had lived where our neighbors now live, just next door to my cottage. While I lived alone for those brief days (maybe it was months, couldn’t have been a year, could it?) Franz was all the while beside me, at his grandparents cabin. I hadn’t known any of them, or anyone else on the pond for that matter. It was a small pond, but sometimes I'd think: small pond, but houses; small houses, but bodies; just bodies, but maybe more bodies someday. Maybe bodies now, across the pond, sleeping. So many dark windows I cannot see through.

I first met Franz when the pond froze over. He had gone down with his grandparents to watch his young cousins skate across the ice. One little brunette girl and a boy, taller than I had seen a young boy ever be. I watched out the front windows as Franz laced up their skates and the grandma and grandpa sat themselves in red, plastic chairs with mugs in their gloved hands. I remember smiling down at Franz and thinking I may have children with that man someday. And by irrevocable chance he peered up into my window with that face of his, the one he makes in prayer, kneeling up at some cross or another. Or at dinner when he blesses the food that will be entering our bodies, and I appease, with an ease, while I really consult with myself am I the devil? I laugh, but never so he can see.

Franz’s grandmother passed away soon after we had married. We had already both moved our lives into my cottage; though, somehow, my life changed more than his did. We both remained on the same pond, myself even staying in the same bed! But I had never lived with anyone like that before, slept with them, breathed with them, and ate my meals beside them, half-praying. And so we were both trapped with each other, but, for Franz, it seemed the divine design. I had only ever been trapped inside of myself. With Franz, perhaps I still am within myself; perhaps it is that I have reverted into I with such verve and I do not respect any spectator. A husband. A baby. All the babies that could ever be had.

Soon after his grandmother’s funeral, her ashes scattered along the waterside, Franz’s grandfather moved away too. Far away, to Belgium, to Barbados, to Brazil– I couldn’t say. But I knew that neither Franz nor I had many relatives to tell when we had the news: we were to have a baby! A bay-bee. But who was there to tell that to, cooing, our faces blushed and proud? Where did his little cousins go– that dark haired girl and the giant boy. Why is nobody skating across the pond? It will be winter soon. I am insulating a child. But, no; no words.

***

Between ours and the neighboring cottage were sparse woods. The trees were thin, bare, and many had fallen into natural brush piles ready to decompose or burn. We often brought the branches and larger sticks from the wood down to the fire pit at the pond. Franz snapped even the thickest of branches over his knee without even the slightest of a grunt. I could only snap the thin ones between my hands, even before I was pregnant.

We shared those woods. Our new neighbors, The Flannerys, moved in beside us just a few months after Franz’s grandparents vacated the place. Their knowledge of the land had grown so quick it seemed they had been there all along, despite Franz and I having lived there for many seasons longer. Yet All Franz and I did was stay inside– him reading verses, and I, scrawling little stories on napkins, in the closet halls, or on my grand, oak table.

The Flannerys were a great deal older than us, as if they had faded gray right within that cabin, looking out at passing time blowing across the pond. They were lovely together. Some nights, I'd watch them sitting together on their porch, one arm around the other's body. Always facing out over the pond, eyes closed, pleased, content. The couple had no kids, no grandkids; they instead peered over the pond waiting for something. I still do not know if that something was excitement or death. Perhaps both.

In my first trimester, The Flannerys would help me carry parcels from the shops after seeing the fragile handles tear, out flying cucumbers– tomatoes rolling and bruising until spread across the sidewalk like clotted blood. Mrs. Flannery would appear before me just after I had dropped a parcel or even as I was walking up from the driveway to hold my arm. I knew she kept a watch out her window, those days when I was first pregnant. She waited for me to don a helpless face. Mr. Flannery was kind too, but kept his nosiness to a mere peek through their side window which could view our own cottage through the brush.

***

I didn’t bathe much that whole month before it was born. My hair was oily, and through the oils, I began to see the first signs of gray. Little fiber-like things fading from my scalp, lighter than the rest of it all. Predetermined, silver seeds, choosing, then, to sprout. I was– I admit– a mess.

One evening, Franz brought up that matter, delicately, aware of the temper that might arise from my condition. My temper never came from Franz; it was my inability to tend to my bodies that caused the irritation. In my state, there was no composing my books, no bathing in the bath without Franz lifting me in. No body that isn’t holding another body inside a body inside a body inside a body inside...

I had told Franz, in that month, that I was too tired to go shower or bathe. “I just need to lay down, that isn’t too much to understand, no?” I was testing him, always. Him, I say with distaste.

“Yes, yes; I hear you.” He was gentle.

“Yes, but are you the one carrying our child, or am I? I’m holding it now and will probably be the only one holding it then. Yes, yes; that’d be me. In just under a month I’ll be pushing that lump of dough from inside of me, all slimy and–”

“Don’t be crude–” He said, appeasing.

“Oh! Crude? That’s called honesty, Franz. That thing is gonna be–”

“Oh come off it, and stop calling our baby ‘thing’ ” he even put up air quotes as he said its name, “it's not a thing, either he or she will be a child– our child. Isn’t that lovely? Why don't you seem happy about this? Take a second.”

“How about nine months! How about you take nine months and–!”

“Baby, calm down. Let's get you in a bath and...”

I didn’t bathe that night out of pride; yet, it soon became a matter of how foul I smelled, for both of us. And, I really did pity him, I'd come to realize. Pitiful thing. The both of them. So I told Franz I'd bathe. But to bathe in a traditional fashion, that I could not do. I could not hold my husband’s hand, being lifted down into the tub. I could not be patted with washcloths and soothed. I am ashamed of it even being a consideration.

***

I went down to the pond with a bar of soap. I told Franz to stay up in the cottage, let me go down on my own. He argued and grabbed my arm with a gentle thing, maybe love. He yammered on about how I was almost due and how it isn’t safe to do anything but rest and... (I would go out and over to the pond– lay there like a limp lilypad, flat, flowerless, and rounding. I'd float in the water and it would take away all my weight, of my stomach, my voices)... But I knew, as I went down to the pond, that Franz was in the window, watching me.

I went down to bathe in the pond when it was black as ink. Waving my fingers through it as if I were then the pen, my child an idea.

I didn’t really bathe in the pond as I told Franz I would. I didn't lather myself in soap and swaddle the bubbling bar from head to toe. I didn't hum to myself as the sun dimmed like a wavering candle. I took the soap and I left it by the waterside. I stripped my clothes away right by the rocks, the ones that came in pebbles and boulders, dappled along the shore. The shore was a brief one. It was quaint and let the inky world of the pond lap upon it like a secret dribbling into an unasking ear. The waterside listened like no one else did. It took in the world of sand and stones and the waves, all like spoken words. Sometimes it even took my shoes or garments away via the pond. The pond would whisper to the shore and the sand would give my possessions back out to the requester. I knew that the water was needy. It was a greedy pond with grimy hands. Algae hung between its toes and dirt sullied its nail beds. But never at the surface did I see any of this humanity. At the surface, the pond was about as inhuman as a thing can get. It was placid and kind to me. It spoke in tongues so silent I couldn't even hear them; but I know water cannot stay quiet for as long as someone like me bathes in it. Water will speak whether the recipient can hear it or not. Water is indifferent to ears, to consideration. And so I dipped in my toes and began my float before my knees could even be brushed by the water. To swim is to rearrange space and time and your relation to it. But this, this floating is rearranging the particles of myself and taking pride in them however they lay. I floated right at the waterside, just deep enough so that my belly couldn't touch the sand and, if I looked up, I could feel as though I were in the middle of a vaster sea. There are vaster seas out there; yet ponds are little enough things that they are prideful in their bodies. Ponds do not cry that they are not oceans. Only oceans cry, for they can not hold a body and feel it enough. When I lay in the pond, I know it can feel my weight because I am not much of its own weight... nor is my own weight all mine. And I love my husband, I'm just tired and confused. No choice. Bodies, I am ashamed of us.

Soon I will be the mother of a child who is not a word. That is quite difficult to grasp. So I release myself, back onto the shore, waiting to learn if I sink or float.