Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
She sleeps with her eyes closed, but her palms lay open. The bed is too empty, and her mind is too full. Thoughts shoot across her head like bullets; they pierce her heart, but never pass through her lips. She has not spoken for three days. With pale dry lips, cracked and white, she breathes out air. She longs to make her lungs as empty as her womb. she carried a heart with her, carried it in her heart.
Her knight. Her king. Her god. He held her close in the night, and safe in the day. He never says, but he might love her. She used to believe in God. He dreamed that she bewitched him into bed. And they loved with a love that was more than love; sweat, and tangled limbs. Bloody sheets, and warm kisses. The sweetness of it all made him dizzy, and her nauseous.
Perhaps too nauseous. For a week she would only eat tangerines. And her breasts became tender. Had he been too rough with them? Her blood never came , but she had always been irregular. They paid it no mind. She went to the hospital for her check up and a flu shot. As they weighed her, she realized that she had gained too much weight. After two months of throwing up breakfast, ill fitting clothes, and no blood, she asked for a pregnancy test. They felt like idiots. Deliriously happy idiots, that had made another little idiot that would torment the world.
Baby, they called it. That which was fairer than a summer day, more lovely and more temperate. A girl. They began to use ridiculous names, Gretchen, Ursula, Gertrude, Helga, and Brunhilde. It was going to be the first female president.
she couldn't have been more beautiful, he thought. She swallowed the moon and believed herself a blimp. But it marked her as his. He absolutely loved it, that is until she became to big to comfortably make love.
Swollen,round, and glowing her body betrayed them.
The umbilical cord wrapped around their child's neck, and strangled it to death.
she feels as if she tied the noose herself.
He watches her From their sepulchre, in the sea. they waste away until human voices wake them! And then: they drown.