A Thing Happens

I passed by you and saw you kicking around helplessly in your blood. I said to you as you lay there in your blood, Live! I said to you as you lay there in your blood, Live!

– Ezekiel 16:6

The First Thing:

The bleeding woman cradles a pillow to her chest and tucks one fist beneath her chin. In the sparsely furnished studio apartment that is her home for the rest of the summer, wedged into an uncomfortable overstuffed chair, she watches YouTube videos of dolphins and whales on her laptop for no real reason other than her close proximity to the Atlantic gathered in a bay two blocks from where she sits. The mother dolphin swims with a baby dolphin balanced across her back—her pup, a calf ? What matters is that her baby is dead, so she carries it along the surface of the water for three days and nights. Dolphin mourning, says the reporter. Graphic images, she warns. Mama dolphin does not eat or dive or play or rest. She only swims, lifting her baby from water to sky, partial exposure, balancing baby along the thin seam between sea and air.

At least she got to hold her baby, thinks the bleeding woman, got to know its specific, physical being, its weight. At least mama dolphin was so lucky as to carry her baby, flopped over her back like a deflated tire, along the lurching sea in a final mad act of motherhood. The bleeding woman wants to have a baby, but not just any baby. She wants the one that she cannot have, the one that died in her womb a month ago and has finally begun to slowly bleed its way out.

Death, the bleeding woman once imagined, was like being swallowed. Not disappearing altogether but dropping into and against something else so great that she would cease to matter in service of everything else that did. She weighed the idea of death like she had once weighed the idea of love—as something tremendous and ordained that gave life its meaning.

Now that she carries the tiny dead inside of her, there is no such wonder. The dead feels neither hot nor cold, but a sensation she’s never known before. Her story is a common one: a missed miscarriage. A heart that stopped beating nearly four weeks prior but remained in a womb that denied it, instead behaving as though all was well. In the coming days, she will learn that such death takes many forms: blighted ova, ectopic pregnancies, molar pregnancies, incomplete miscarriages, multiple miscarriages, and—what she knows must be the most heartrending, for she cannot help but perceive loss on a scale— stillbirths, origins often unknown, that require arrangements with the funeral home when a fetus is over twenty weeks old.

In other words, there is nothing special about her circumstances. She is not Abraham leading her only son Isaac to Mount Moriah with knife clenched in her fist. She has not been promised a multitude of descendants, or any. Rather, she is one in four American women. Like many others, the sacrifice is simply demanded of her.

________

On a warm Wednesday in June, while temporarily living alone on that tiny curl of land stretched into the Atlantic, the bleeding woman takes a walk. She has been given a summer writing fellowship in Provincetown, Massachusetts—a bit of a dream that still hasn’t quite sunk in. Her husband drove with her and her carful of things across five states, helped her unpack and orient herself to the narrow streets and nearby dunes before returning to the Midwest to finish and defend his dissertation. He will have an in-house residency of sorts with books splayed over every surface reflecting the topography of his ideas, late-night pizza, drinking only coffee or beer, and a new habit of running in the dark once the viscous air has cooled a degree or two. He will return to her for an unexpected short visit in a few weeks, and again at the end of the summer, to pack...