Barren

Tell me the story again, about her ovaries like dried cereal. Useless rocks in sacks. She tried so hard: hormones, extraction, prayer, but she remained as barren as the desert. She lay very still while they injected her with her husband's semen, and then that of a stranger, after she'd been abandoned for a wide-hipped woman. She even had a phantom of all the wished-for babies, missed real periods, swelled, but it was just air and want, and the doctors said it would retreat in time. I heard she took to her basement, making porcelain and gray clay figurines which she put on display in the curio cabinet where her children's photos and bronzed booties should have been. She painted overalls on elephants, pigtails on small girls with heart lips, eyelashes on baby cubs, made an intentional mistake on each, so as to not outshine God. Well what's the difference, she'd said to no one in particular. I made them with my own two hands. Once in a magazine, she saw three crocheted old women unraveling yarn from their own legs to create crocheted babies and thought, that is the motherhood I've always wanted: to be subsumed, to create something new and beautiful from her old parts before they turned to dust.