Flashback Shut Him Up in a Coffee Cup

[Philomena]

78 Spring - 15 Summer 491

Minnie seldom saw the sun. It is not to say she was not out in it - even for a bookish university student, one had to walk outside a great deal if one was not so wealthy as to own a horse or, gods forbid, a carriage, in Zeltiva. The sun certainly saw Minnie Lefting. But Minnie, in defiance of all the world's logic, had the abyss stare back, without her ever thinking, first, to stare.

It was not conscious, this avoidance of the sight of the sun, but it was perhaps the more powerful for that. There is a particular force of emotion in the soul, desolate and melancholic and afraid, that regresses the heart so far that one seeks only the hazy race-memory of one's own time before time - one seeks the dark, the warm, the all-encompassing, the rocking, intimate constrictions of a second womb. Light, in some subconscious way, is not illuminatory in this place - it is blinding. It is foreboding. It is the symbol of the great and dangerous world at large. Even in her rooms at university - shared, to scrape a few more mizas together for the sundries of university life - she cringed sometimes at night from the blazing light of her room-mate's hurricane lamp, working herself, despite the strain on her fever-damaged eyes, by guttering tallow-tapers, their yellow butter-fat glow giving her a feeling of homeliness, of safety. Their cheapness and dimness, there humble smell, was an island to her in the midst of the sea.

Aside from this intrinsic revulsion to the sun, there was the deep desire to avoid undirected thought; perambulating legs perambulate the brain. Minnie generally had a predisposition towards the known and the predictable. Her current state of mental disarray amplified this into a positive, inconsolable need. The transits between home and library and university and dining hall were less walks than scurries, a hand clutching impulsively at the pocket of her neckline where she kept her Charm miza as if they were reins by which she could swiftly direct the galloping, foam-flecked horse of her brain.

She had never been popular, as a child, but she had, at least, been part of a community. And she had always had Lanie. Both of these things - the rough community of the orphanage and the companionship of her friend were gone now. She had ridden uneasily through the first years, simply on the merits of her full schedule (she felt, after all, that she'd best use the scholarship while she had it), and the fact that that schedule was filled with classes. Things were so different now. She had heard her professors speak of the freedom of focus offered by graduate work, by the climb towards the position of doctor, where one was left to search after one's passions, to produce a Thesis. They had spoken of the time glowingly, perhaps with a bit of a rueful chuckle at kelp-tea fueled late nights making up for wandering daytimes.

The sheer thought of that void of time had terrified her. Its arrival - when she had taken her introductory coursework and was set adrift to research - proved the validity of that fear. Without the forced socialization of a class, she simply disappeared into the machinery of the university. She knew the poetry librarian - they even traded words outside of her research occasionally - but did not know her first name. She knew the names of the men and women whose stalls she frequented at market, but they clearly knew her simply as 'the dowdy student who buys the cheapest salted bottom-fish' or 'that infernal child I have to strain to hear every week'. She knew several of the other literature baccalaureate, but their interactions were largely business-like - they asked her things on occasion, she told them what she knew, they offered polite, solemn smiles in return and disappeared. The literature department was not a particularly large one to begin with, and the history department, with whom she shared many secondary interests, tended to be somewhat clannish with outsiders. And almost universally, the graduate students looked down on her - several of them were, just like her, former scholarship kids, but they had learned not to look like it. She had done a stellar job of making the mental transition to university life - she had taken her bacc with high honors. But the cultural transition was simply incomprehensible to her.

She was, in short, an outsider.

She did not try to change this anymore - the continuous, unspoken air of otherness, of inferiority, had naturally embedded itself into her mind as a reflection of fact. This was one of the greatest reasons that she still, occasionally, tried desperately to slip into the bohemia of the city: they felt like a culture of outsiders. But even counter-culture is a culture, with its taboos and expectations, taboos she inadvertently crossed, and expectations she did not understand well enough to meet.

She sunk, then, deeper and deeper into her research, deeper and deeper into the network of facts, suppositions, theories, cross-references and footnotes that, though each is so exceedingly fine, are so numerous that one can build of them a cocoon against the world. Minnie became this sort of student - the butterfly, frightened of her wings, trying to squeeze back inside the cocoon. Her life contracted into its essential elements: she wrote, she prayed to Qalaya, she researched, she ate, she slept. The rest was forsaken unless she was pressed.

The sun stayed thus, the eye that watched her dissolution, until the last dregs of Spring began to dry and bloom into summer-heat. And then she only saw the sun because it was behind a head, a halo of bright hair, a glowing complexion under the corona of a sun-bonnet, drawn down by a traveller's bundle. And this vision, she would not have seen, but for a smell.

It was a confusing smell, for the coat it wore was blue and foreign, an odor of a clearer, far-off sunshine, and the imbued pollen of years worth of foreign flowers. A faint smell of paint and powder fluttered around the coat. But underneath this, underneath the traveling dress odor of freshly-eaten kelp fritters (so strange in a foreigner who were so delicate about kelp-flavors) and warm kelp-beer (even stranger), underneath this dress was the naked body of the smell. This core of an odor, as faint and masked as it was, was like a fish-hook drawn abruptly through Minnie's lip and violently tugged - a smell of having sat on a cart too long, but who was sitting? The sweat of the thigh, of the armpit, of the neck, of the head beneath that heavy rich hair, of the little drops evaporating in the salt-wind from those clear, sun-kissed cheeks gripped Minnie's face and turned her. It was, unmistakably, Lanie's smell.

Her head jerked up, and the apparition beneath the sunbonnet was a strange face. But it was not a foreign one, it was a strange version of Lanie's face - tauter, prettier, and blown dark with cloudless lands, like a ripened rose.

"Lanie!" The voice was not an explosion of joy. It was the clatter of the invisible knife she held against her own throat in a sudden fall to the pavement, it shivered with steel and stone and fear.

Lanie reached a hand up. Her face had clearly seen Minnie before Minnie had seen hers, for it had had time to compose into a terrible, enigmatical shame. The fingers wore thick gloves of doeskin, and they brushed Minnie's cheek gently, wafting the smell of hesitation and hunt-markets. Her voice had smoothed the burrs of the street, but had the same round fierceness underneath, as cowed as it was beneath the trepidation of her approach, "Minnie… hello, sister."

And then, the last strangeness finally worked its way into Minnie's mind: Lanie's willow-reed form was swollen. The rose had turned to rose-hip. Lanie was bearing a child.

Minnie shuddered, and drew back, involuntarily from the glove. She had forgotten, she realized how tall Lanie had grown by the time she left, to say nothing of the fact that she had had a few years growing left to do in her absence. Minnie had to tilt her head back to address her, almost, and when she looked forwards, it was not even at Lanie's neck, but at the bodice over her milk-sagged bust.

"Lanie… Lanie… I… my Qalaya…"

Lanie shrunk back now, but shamefully, rather than fearfully, her gloved hand drawn across her belly, "No, no. I've only one God to be, anymore, Minnie, and we both know it is not Qalaya."

"Lanie, you're…"

"Yes. I'm… sorry."

"Why… I…"

"I have a lot of apologies, some for the past and some for the present."

Minnie took a breath and straightened her spine, "I don't want them. Come home, Lanes."

Lanie was silent, for a few minutes, there in the streets by the Drover's Circus. Finally she said, "Min, I am having a baby. And I am the one who left you before. I have the same curses. I will make things very hard."

"You came back for a reason, Lanes."

"Because I knew you'd take me, because I knew you were foolish enough--" she spoke softly, very, very soft.

Minnie stared at her skin, and remembered the sharp wounded burning of her skin, the racking fever. She thought of her eyes, damaged now from the illness. And she leaned forward, lifting a trembling finger to press against the girls plump, beautiful lips, "Shh… then let me be a fool. Sisters care for each other. Come home, Lanie, Alanza-mae. Come home."

Lanie looked down, shading her eyes with their lids, and sighed, murmured, "Perhaps. Perhaps for a time, Mina-wren."

[Philomena]

There were, of course, complications. Minnie had to move from the University housing, which strained her expenses considerably. Lanie, somehow, seemed to have come into resources, but Minnie hesitated to take money from her, unsure of whence it came or how long it would be before Lanie could replace it. So, she took a very humble flat, a garret above a tailor, close to the Saville. The flat was a ramshackle affair, unfurnished, unpainted, ugly. It was the first place that Minnie ever felt was home. The charm of that word was difficult to understand - perhaps it came to its own simply because she had used it with Lanie to have her come. But where before, her room had felt simply like a way station in the days movements, her flat felt different. It felt like where she had to leave, and where she was gifted to return to. A haven.

In many respects, despite this, she felt a certain cautious, gentle benevolence towards the gods - somehow, the worst of her misery had prepared her for this very moment. No one knew her well enough to notice changes in her demeanor, so no one cared that she moved, that she began spending time at home. Her lack of friends meant that no one came to her house, and exposed themselves to Lanie. What Lanie needed was someone who could care for her without exposing the rest of the city to her - someone at once both fiercely loyal and entirely friendless. Minnie felt a strange pride and gratefulness at being able to fill this need to a tee.

Lanie even began to cheer up, somehow. Minnie was delirious with desperate, clinging joy to have her there, her joy at the return of the prodigal intensified by the hollow shell the prodigal filled by her return. It was enough, enough to mask, in the bright of sunshine and company, Lanie's guilt, and leave only the raw desire to be loved. It was at night that the haunting thoughts came - each slight sleepers irregularity of breath, every place where the pillow and straw left marks upon Minnie's skin, ever shiver or tremble of the habitually nervous Minnie's body sent Lanie into smothered paroxysms of fear and guilt. There was, after all, no illusions between the two of them that Lanie's presence was unremarked by Minnie's immune system. Her eyes had a constant weepiness to them, now, and her fingers ached in their joints at night more than simply the work of gripping a pen would explain. She felt short of breath, and her voice murmured with just the shallowest puddle of fluid in her lungs. She went into a coughing fit one day, and Lanie, in terror began throwing her things into a bundle to leave. Minnie, still coughing had actually slapped her across the face, and shouted at her. The Landlady had come up, to ask what was the matter, and Minnie had been forced to fabricate a story about a dropped book, and apologize for disturbing the customers.

But, she was only, as the low-street girls said, of a disposition, now - she was not quite sick, just teetering around it. They did what they could. They sat, weirdly, in across the room from each other while they spoke. They brought two separate palettes to sleep on. They did not share their meals. They did not touch, hold hands, embrace.

They washed the dishes together at first, blushingly, like children in love holding hands behind their parents' backs. The warm dishwater and the slippery bubbles of lye took on a special power for them both, a sort of middle round. Their hands whispered things to each other beneath the water. One day, Minnie, in a burst of happiness, gripped Lanie's hand beneath the water, and Lanie's eyes went wild and frightened. Minnie washed them alone now, if she caught them in time. Usually Lanie took care of them before she came home.

The pregnancy seemed normal - normal was the wrong word. The pregnancy was glorious. It was the sort of pregnancy that does not exist, the sort in which the mother glows, in which her steps stay graceful through the end, in which the belly seems like a warm, round altar to the gods, instead of a great mass of clumsy. Her face shone with a radiance that doubled the pure shame it was that she had to be kept away from sight. Minnie wished that she could rub her friend's feet as she had seen the village wives do for each other, not because Lanie needed it, but rather because it would make such a lovely tableaux.

It was a simple time. There were no parties, no walks for they kept Lanie off the streets, no shopping, no adventures. There was no midwife. They read. Lanie stitched, while Minnie attempted to stitch - she'd never been a hand at it, and still could do little more than make her Miza-pockets. Minnie told stories of the years they'd been apart - funny stories, sad stories, lonely stories. She read the opera libretto she had written aloud. Lanie told stories she had learned from others - she told none about herself. Minnie wrote these down. She thought, continuously about the story of Wrenmae. She never asked. Lanie never offered.

And then, the day came. Minnie had never seen a baby born - she had seen newborn babies, but never seen a baby actually being born. But, she had seen a horse, once, and cats, now and again. They set Lanie on their one chair, and set the washbasin beneath her. Lanie took a leather belt, to keep her from screaming - Minnie had not suggested this, but Lanie had insisted, frightened of the prying eyes of the lady downstairs. Between the contractions, Minnie had teased her kindly, about the belt, about returning to the diet of their youth. Lanie had laughed. Minnie found the process of birth less terrifying than she had expected. It was painful, and she wished desperately that she could stroke Lanie's back, pull back her hair, hold her gripped hands as she pushed. But Lanie did not look frightened - in fact, the birth, it seemed, made her less frightened than she'd been since she came. Lanie held an old horse-blanket beneath her and walked the floor. Minnie boiled her soup. Lanie lay on the floor to stretch the throbbing in her back. Minnie sang creakily to her. Lanie cried. Minnie cried, staring at her across the room.

And then, a baby was born. The crisis was obvious, and Minnie leapt forward to be on hand for it, ignoring Lanie's highly distracted attempts to ward her off. Three great bourne down pushes, and a low groan, so low the belt did no good. And then, a tiny, slippery crown of brown hair appeared in the gap. Another push, and there was a face. It was only then that the prosaic quality of the experience changed.

The face was a horrible shad of blue-grey, the color of a corpse. The muscles beneath its skin slack. The baby was still - not preternaturally so. The stillness terribly, sickeningly natural. Minnie felt her face change - she had been so caught in the blood and fluid, the press and movement of her hand, reaching impatiently after the new child, she had not realized her face, her voice. It had bloomed into a sort of ecstasy - that crown of hair had had a magic to it that she had not imagined, and that she did not understand. The blue, pale face, on the other hand, set a knife into this joy and, she felt it pour from the gash, into a solemn, sudden stillness. There was holiness hear, still. But it was a dark and terrible holiness, the holiness of the forsaken moment, now.

Lanie did not seem to notice. Minnie did not press it upon her. Lanie was preoccupied, clearly, the bodies desperate hungry urge to finish, to thrust out the last edges of the great work of creation had inured her to the world, even to Minnie herself. But for Minnie, now, the movements, the tensing and un-tensing, the rolling turmoil of Lanie's belly, the slow slippery movement of the child out of the canal, these lost their transcendent quality. She saw them for what they were now - mechanical, instinctual, animal. Grotesque even. She saw Lanie's blood on her own hands, and smeared over the blue-grey baby's face, and felt, somehow, like a murderer.

And then, the baby was there, in Minnie's hands. She was no doctor, but she could see the source of the baby's color now. The long, snakelike cord, still running from the baby to the mother, had wound about the child's neck, strangling him. And now Lanie knew.

"Minnie… Minnie, what is it? Minnie, why isn't the baby crying?" her voice was rough and tear-stained.

"He's dead, Lanie. He's dead. The cord, it… he's dead."

Lanie was silent for a moment, her body still heaving for breath. Then, in a bleak and grating voice, she managed, "Dress him, Philomena. Clean him, and swaddle him. I couldn't give him anything else. I will give him a burial."

Minnie was, she confessed to herself, too ashamed to meet Lanie's eyes. This work was something of a blessing. The smell of blood and of the black masses of distress the baby had expunged before succumbing to the strangulation were heavy in the air and on the baby's skin. Minnie began, as silently as possible, to unwind the cord. The baby's neck was bruised black in places. Minnie stroked it, slowly, thoughtfully, emptily. And felt, just the corner, just the shiver of a twitch there.

She started, her hands fumbling, and nearly dropped the baby into the bloody-basin. This very clumsiness knocked the baby's body into the brave attempt of the newly born to maintain their life. The baby's tiny stomach lurched and bucked, gurgling with a thick wetness. Minnie, now driven wildly to the instinctual movements of a mother, turned the creature over in her arms, and struck hollow-handed against its back. The baby struggled meekly, its limbs quivering. She reached inside the baby's mouth with her minuscule pinkie finger, sweeping the throat, and found a gobbet of curdled blood there. The baby gagged, hideously, its throat pressing against Minnie's fingernail so hard that she felt her nail make a tiny cut into the flesh. Then, it vomited up a stomach of mealy fluid, and, for the first time, it tore open the seam of a mewling, ragged scream.

Minnie screamed too, she was never sure why. Somehow, in the intimacy of her own life with this baby's she had lost the boundary between her own consciousness and his. She shuddered as violently as the child she had just resuscitated. She heard Lanie calling, but the power of the comprehension of speech was lost for the moment. Her hands, holding the baby shook with a powerful emotional palsy, and her spectacles fell off into the basin, leaving her as blind as the newborn child with his half-formed eyes. She felt Lanie's hand, a little cold, on her shoulder, shaking her, and she extended the baby, felt her hands and Lanie's mix together across the child's surface, and that meeting of three separate lives sent her into something that… she intended to be joy, but that ended up as a great and powerful sort of sehnsucht, a nostalgia for that which had never been, and never could be. Lanie lifted the baby away, a smear of blue-turning-red against a smear of pale fingers. Minnie sat back, and her brain reassembled itself at the bottom of the chasm into which it had collapsed.

"Minnie! Minnie! Its a baby! Minnie! Its a baby!" it was the sort of idiotic, inane statement that would be hilarious at any other moment, but with the ugly, wriggling perturbations of new life pulsing through a half-formed lump of child-flesh, all is holy. All is profound.

The door flew open now, the Landlady's voice flying through the room, "What is going on? What is it? I heard screaming! What is going --" the sudden stop signaled that, perhaps, the waving blur of movement approaching, passing Minnie, was proof that the tailor-woman had seen the baby, now, "What is this! It is born? Here in my rooms? Here in my rooms! It is a blessing on my house. It is a blessing on my house!"

Minnie fumbled for her glasses. She heard the tailor fumble out the door without closing it, heard her clatter down the stairs. She heard the quivering bells of Lanie laughing, felt then, with a slapstick, the mass of the afterbirth pour out over her arms. She tumbled her glasses out of the muck and wiped them smeary against her dress, putting them on - the left lens had a crack now, and the smear of red across the vision gave the whole scene a rosy glow. And there was the tailor tumbling in with a bottle of wine, and three glasses, shouting "Fortified wine! Give the woman wine! She's just had a baby!" as she happily thrust the bottle into Minnie's arms. There was a shutter loose on the front window, pulled open by a violent wind that Minnie had not even noticed before, slamming in a joyous, mischievous way against the window-panes. There was Lanie's shivering legs, there were Minnie's own clumsy hands trying to lay a blanket across them despite the summer heat, despite the fact that it was her best quilt. And there, there, there was Lanie, holding the baby against her bared breast, laughing, laughing, laughing.

[Philomena]

"Lully-low, Lully-low, la-lai. Lully-low, my child..."

Gypa screamed wildly. He had been screaming, now, for 7 hours, and the quality of Minnie's lullaby had changed, from gentle, soothing, filled with mother-pity, into desperate, pleading, hopeless. She had stopped singing altogether, a few times, but when she did, Gypa - Egyptus, Lanie had named him, but the two sisters had the natural gift of nicknaming so typical of orphans - turned to her with his shaking head, and the quality of his scream changed. Knowing Gypa was knowing the tenor of his screams. The lullaby scream was a scream of pain. The lullaby-less scream, that was a scream of terror, of desertion. The lullabies, the rocking, the spoonfuls of oil and molasses, these did not reduce the pain, but the child seemed to at least understand that an effort was being expended, that a cure was being attempted. The slack armed stillness and silence of the exhausted caretaker - these the body understood for what they were: admissions of futility. Confessions that the pain that gripped the child was a beast, unshakable and hungry.

There were moments, even, only flashes of moments, where there was something in Minnie (and she had seen it in Lanie as well) that hated this child, that resented his unresponsiveness to their work. That hated the fact that he couldn't simply be well, for a moment, be happy. She felt the wild, midnight urge to shake the child, to scream at him, to somehow force him into understanding that there was nothing she could do, and that he would have to accept this. It was the hate of love, the hatred that one discovers with the desperate corners of intense love, the mutual scars of co-soldiers. It was the wracking of a heart, broken for him

She was, after all, no different now. When she ate, the food in her stomach sprouted daggers. When she breathed, her diaphragm had to draw the breath through a growing pool of mucus by sheer force of will. Her hands, clutched tight around the child, were a mass of swollen knots, and on her belly the pox had appeared once again, grating painfully against the baby's linens as she rocked him dully.

"Lully-low, Lully-low, la-lai. Lully-low, my child…"

Lanie spent most of the time taking care of the child, and Minnie was so exhausted now, she neither worked nor objected when Lanie paid for things from her own stores. And Lanie… Lanie quite simply glowed. Her belly had drawn back in, to a taut drum, and her breasts bloomed rather than sagged. A beautiful and inviting curve of mother-fat lay on her hips, and a fine-featured fullness had come to her face, softening it in ways Minnie would have thought unlikely in her fierce, sharply boned friend. It was as if she drew in the breaths that Minnie and Gypa fought out of their lungs, and filled herself with the life of them, with the essential energy of them, the desperate heat of the two sick hearts serving to warm the gentle pulsing of her own.

And Minnie knew it was more than simply them, now. As Lanie grew more luminous and beautiful, the city around her grew grayer. The Tailor was desperately ill, her husband near death. She had crawled the stairs pitifully, to apologize, sure that it was she who had spread the sickness to the new baby, weeping with the drunken stupor of the sick. The pallor of the house crept out into the streets. The people who passed grew paler. Frailer. Summer was at its height, and yet there were shivering backs, and running noses and gummed eyes below Minnie's windows.

"Lully-low, Lully-low, la-lai. Lully-low, my child…"

And then, the baby grew quiet, one morning, and the quiet was worse than the screaming. It was the quiet of the surrendered body, the quiet that confessed that screaming would only hasten the end of things. Gypa's pallor began to seep slowly back to the grey-blue of his birth, his tiny lungs began to resonate with the thick gurgle of an overflowing tide. His chest shook as it rose, as it fell, and his face burned, an ugly, fiery blush of desperately under-oxygenated blood oozing underneath the skin with weak, intermittent heart-beats. Minnie looked down at him, and felt… a sort of peace. The baby's silence gave her time to think. And with thought, came reason. And with reason, a certain power.

When Lanie came home - for Minnie was too sick to shop now - the baby lay close wrapped in the mother-blood-stained quilt, his face slack, his eyes glassy. And Minnie stood in the center of the room, clutching the back of the chair. On the floor, lay Lanie's traveling bag. Minnie clutched one of Lanie's underclothes in her hand, gasping for enough breath to fold it and pack it inside.

Lanie was silent a moment, and finally said, "I am glad. I've driven you to hate me at last."

Minnie weakly fought her way into the chair, and coughed a hard, deep, wracking cough. She turned her head - it swiveled on the neck like an ill-fit wooden doll-joint - and stared straight at Lanie, "No. No, it is not that. I simply realized that I shall die one way or the other. And you will live with that, one way or the other."

Lanie shook her head, her eyes weeping beautifully across her full doll-like cheeks, "No. You will live when I am gone. You know that."

Minnie nodded, weakly, and caught her breath, "Yes. My body will. That is what I mean. Either my body will die, or my heart will die. Do you know…" she coughed again, and looked at Lanie, who strained against herself not to move toward Minnie, and Minnie smiled, a sad smile, her voice thick with phlegm and that same sehnsucht of a few weeks before, "My Lanie. My sister Lanie. Do you know, if you had come to me without a child? I would have not let you leave. I would have followed you. I would have clung to the cart. We should have lived in the Wilderlands…" she laughed, "At least for a few weeks. I would bring my last book. You would tell me the end of Wrenmae's last journey. Perhaps we'd be eaten up by the same wilder beast. Maybe I would just waste away, and you would take the book, and bring it back here for me, and they would put the set of my notebooks in some dusty corner, and none would ever read them, but you and I, Lanie, we would be there in them, for always."

Minnie sighed, her stomach churning and heaving, but with nothing left in it to throw up, "But you didn't come like that, sister-mine, my Alanza-mae, did you? And now, little Gypa, he must live. Do you think he will live when you are gone, too? I waited too long. I was too weak to let you go, Alanza-mae. But now, its time. You must go. And I will raise little Gypa. He will be my Lanie, now. My heart will die, into him, my best of friends. And I will tell him stories, I will read the stories to him. And then, what will it matter? You may find either one of us one day, and tell us the end. Or maybe he will tell it one day. Who knows? Maybe that is how tales end, not with the tellers but with their children. He is our baby, isn't he? At least a little bit? I do not want to take that from his father, whoever he is. He can be his as well. But in some little way, my Alanza-mae, he is ours now."

Lanie said soft, "And I… I will go and be alone. As it should be."

Minnie nodded, quiet and soft, the cough settling for the moment, "Perhaps. But no. The glory of losing one's heart, is that there is no anchor for the spirit - it was Marley that said that. We never read him, you and I. I will tell you… let me tell you that much. It was a poem he wrote, long ago, about a mistress who died:

My heart is gold, a golden case,
Distilled by fire from your heart,
My spirit is the cloud inside,
Held quick within its bonds.

My hand has cracked my heart in two,
For want of fingertips of you,
And now the fog can rise up from
The shell of me,
To dwell within it's home:
Thy gentle breast."

Lanie covered her eyes, but then, screwing them tightly shut she went and took the cloth from Minnie's hand, and put it in the bag, and picked it up. She turned away then, and stood in the doorway. She was silent a moment, then murmured soft, "There is money--"

"--beneath the bed in your box. I know."

"You must take--"

"--my medicine, as assuredly as the baby's. I will."

"I won't take over your life. I will send the father back for him."

"Then you must tell him to bring my Gypa back to me every spring. Like a flower. I want to see him in the last of the sea-tulips at Wright Manor, and I want him to stay until his birthday."

Lanie was silent again a moment, and then, with the same sonorousness of prayer she had drawn out so long ago, on the first day of their prayer to Qalaya, with the same dramatic power, she turned, her face a strange and lonely bird, foreign, for the first time ever, to Minnie when she looked on it, "And then, my dear one, when we both are old and grey, I shall come back. And we two, we shall go into the Wilderland, like you thought, when noone needs us anymore. And I will tell you the end. And we will die inside the same jaws, and be buried in the same beast's belly."

Minnie smiled, "As long, my sister, as we write the story down, and keep it safe when we are gone."

"I would come and wrap my arms around you one more time--"

"--but you will not. There is nothing left here for you to hold. The part that you would hold is in your breast now, Alanza-mae."

Lanie nodded softly, "Goodbye, then, Mina-Wren."

"For now, sister. For now."

The door shut with s snick that sounded so banal, so normal, that it shook at Minnie's broken nerves. She followed Lanie down the stairs with her ears, then stood to look at the window to watch her cross. Her hand flew to the panes then, as she saw her approach the corner, and almost before she knew it, she'd thrown the window open, her heart lurching, galloping. Her voice was strange and monstrous to her as she cried out, and it flew out of her like a thing that was not hers, "Lanie! Lanie come back! Lanie, no! No!"

She drew in a gasping, shuddering breath. Lanie stopped in the street but did not turn. She stood still for a moment, a long moment, then walked on, and disappeared.

And the shudder was gone. Minnie did not feel better, she did not feel any relief at all. She felt… nothing. A yawning, empty nothing. She turned back, shutting the window, slowly, and went over to the bed. She unrolled the baby, limp and unresponsive from the quilt, and pulled it tight against her blighted chest, then wrapped the quilt around their two bodies, together. Then, very, very softly, she started to sing.

"Lully-low, Lully-low, la-lai. Lully-low, my child… Lully-low, lay close to me..."

[Arcane]

Rewards and Treasure! Experience Points +5 Midwifery Lores Birth of Egyptus Comments You have a very artistic, eloquent way of writing. It is interesting to gain a little background into what seems to be a powerhouse villain that might change the landscape of Mizahar. I couldn't think of a good way to summarize the events that occurred in this thread to do them justice, so I decided to just summarize the entire events within a single lore.