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Red Cedar Review 41.1 (2006) 77-88



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The Fertile Yellow

We're getting pregnant tonight, my wife says. She places a hand over the soft midsection of her abdomen. You remember, right? Don't keep me waiting, baby. Baby, baby, she says. She is dancing: hips and shoulders, sway and sway. She balances a glass mixing bowl in her hand. The batter rolls over the white end of the spatula in coagulated bulbs and folds.

I stand waiting. Wives and pregnancy are terrible things.

Murderous, she calls me. Murderer, murderer. These are delectable, laughing words for her. She shows raw teeth. One laugh, another. Kiss, kiss, she says. She nibbles at my earlobes, places lips over white crested knuckles. She nods, pleased, knife in one hand and carelessness eroded over her fluffy cheek bones and wax lips, chopped walnuts on the cutting board. It's after midnight and Claire is sending me out for eggs and vanilla. She insists: Do not forget the goddamn eggs, Jack.

I love my wife. Her love is a menace. How can I face her? How do you walk around as a murderer? Like you own it, I suppose.

Ann gloats: Give her your seed, give her that seed, Jack. I retire to the stairs, sit, listen to rain.

These nights have given way.

I have been delivered into mad bouts of pregnancy.

* * *

We had to lose the cat. Litter is sterile. Nothing sterile abides here, no, a mausoleum. There are consequences to consider. There are tiny thalidomide newborns. Three fingers, two nubs, wrists like Lego blocks and shovel hands.

Count them, she said. Count the fingers. She held the picture close. It was in color. One and two. Half of a third. See, she said, see them. I have ten fingers. Feet shaped like spears. Claire likes my fat toes. She wants children with fat toes, not ones with nubs and stumps. She wants them to play the piano. She wants to be able to suck on them. [End Page 77]

Months, years even, without the cat. She yelled and I listened. There wasn't space to fit in any more words, apologies, space to even breathe. She kept coming, coming. I was trying to ruin our marriage, she said. There was fear in her voice, sustained and sung like wayward melodies, surging in strength with each dull thud of a kick, the back of her hand embracing the chalky residue of counters when aimed for my forehead, my cheeks, and me sweeping clean, swept clear of her wingspan. She bit. I still have the faint traces of marks, treasures and trophies, errant reminders, call them what you wish. She cornered me with a rolling pin, its smooth rounds crisp with flour, and I can remember not wanting to touch her because I was afraid for the baby. You could just begin to see the bulge in her stomach, the belly button in its first days of poking out like a miniature nose. Careful, I cautioned. Three months, first trimester: murderer, murderer. There was a nausea in my throat: a cluster of them hibernating, sulking and thick enough to pull out a single strand at a time. We pulled together, one body to the next.

But it happened there anyway—right there with arms circling, screams and kicks like the mad cries of Spanish conquistadores. She miscarried from hurting me.

Then everything was pale and cold and ambulances and Claire bleeding. I had first imagined puddles of blood from a miscarriage, blood to fill a room—there wasn't. I was surprised, amused at how clean the bathroom tile gradually appeared as Claire kept soaking it up with sponges, one after the next: green scrub, green scrub, yellow sponge, purge–water, blood, fleshy intangibles—she let all of them slip off her fingers into the garbage, down a drain.

I took a chair, acted as the man. Calm. Supportive. I lent a shoulder. She rose like a wave, lay there, bent on the tile, immobile.

By the time the ambulance arrived, I swear, and let me tell...

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