Christine Boyer

Faltering Weight

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2023: VOL. 38.

WINNER OF THE FICTION EDITOR’S PRIZE.

Emma twists the thin band of gold around her finger and eases it over her swollen knuckle to drop into the pocket of her cardigan. She dips her hand in the kitchen sink to test the water’s temperature. The sharp lemon of the dish detergent prickles against her nose, and she plunges the greasy pan into the scalding water to soak. There’s only the three of them, but they seem to dirty up plenty of dishes.

She looks out of the window over the sink, and her own reflection stares back at her. Her face is a pale moon in the glass, eyes cratered with deep smudges underneath them. She looks older than she is and feels even older than that, but when she squints, she can almost make out the teenager she was.

Past her reflection, there’s not much to see in the gloomy twilight. The sun sank behind the hills already, so her husband and his father finish their chores in the half-light of evening.

She isn’t used to such dark nights. She grew up with the cheerful yellow of the street lamps in town, the circles of white thrown by porch lights left on until everyone was safely home. Out here on the farm, there’s nothing between her and the night.

She reaches into the water and scrubs the pan with a steel-wool pad, breaks up the burnt-on bits of meat that cling to the bottom. Clots of pink-tinged grease rise to the surface of the dishwater; chunks of sinew stick to her wet hands. She feels a fluttering in her stomach and rinses off the pan to lay it on the sideboard to dry.

She places a hand, knuckles pink and shiny and swollen, on her bulging abdomen. She read online that at six months, the baby has eyelids that are open. She pictures the baby curled in the darkness of her body, blind eyes staring at nothing.

Dizziness washes over her, and she reaches out, steadies herself against the sink.

She’s been sick the entire pregnancy. No reprieve even after the first trimester ended, despite what her doctor told her. Anything can set her off, set her salivating with the iron tang of blood heavy on her tongue as her stomach roils and churns. The ammonia smell of the chicken coop, the sight of the pink slick of mildew in the grout in the bathroom. The smell of her father-in-law’s cigars and how he chews the end of them, the way his fleshy lips work against the wet, brown paper.

The sight of the baby moving inside her makes her sick too. The feeling of it, the way a foot or the curve of the skull against her belly makes the skin ripple and flex. Her hand on her belly, she can feel it now—something hard, a foot or hand, pushing back against her.

Saliva floods her mouth. She squeezes her eyes shut. She wills herself to keep her dinner down.

She hears the back door open, the heavy clomp of work boots in the mudroom. Teddy and his father have finished their chores.

She takes a couple of deep breaths—in through the nose, out through the mouth—and opens her eyes. She hears the men clambering around the mud room, and then they are in the kitchen, the sharp odor of sweat and manure trailing them.

Before she turns to greet them, she reaches into the pocket of her sweater. She shoves her wedding ring onto her finger. The hard metal edge scrapes her swollen knuckle and breaks the skin. The blood beads slowly, and when she wipes it on her sweater, it leaves a faint pink smear.

Their bedroom sits in the corner of the old farmhouse, so it gets the wind from two sides. It’s only early autumn, but the nights are already cold. Emma burrows into the faded quilt and tries to get warm.

Being married is still strange, but the strangest part is sleeping next to another person. For the first eighteen years of her life, she slept alone in a room decorated in bright yellow like the center of a daisy. She slept across the hallway from her father’s steady snoring and her mother’s sighing and muttering.

When she and Teddy married, she moved into his family’s farmhouse and set up in the corner bedroom. It isn’t the sunshiny yellow of her childhood room; it’s painted a lurid dark pink that faded over time to a bruised kidney color. Still, she tries to cheer the room up. Wildflowers in a vase on the windowsill. A couple of throw pillows on the bed.

She tucks her cold nose under the edge of the quilt and rolls over to look at her husband. Teddy lies on his side, facing away from her. The muscles of his back are ropy, well-defined by farm life. She can see the planes and curves rippling under his white undershirt. He never seems to get cold either, and she feels the urge to slip her chilly, bloodless hands under his shirt to steal some of his warmth.

Instead, she pulls the pillow from under her head and slips it between her knees. It’s difficult to get comfortable. If she lies on her back, she gets heartburn so fierce that her stifled burps are sour and hot. If she lies on her side, she wakes up feeling ancient, her hips and knees aching and throbbing.

When she does finally manage to nod off, her sleep is paper-thin and full of uneasy dreams she can’t quite remember in the morning.

She sighs and shifts on the lumpy mattress. She feels the bed move as Teddy half-turns towards her.

“Can’t get comfortable?” he asks.

“No.”

The bed shifts again. She feels his hand in the darkness, big as a bear’s paw, groping for her. He finds the crest of her shoulder, pats it awkwardly. She waits for him to say something, words of comfort or even a weak joke to make her laugh, but he doesn’t say anything.

She met him at his family’s farm stand. He joked with her as he boxed up the sweet corn for her mother’s picnic, and his lopsided grin made her smile. There was something about him, something that set him apart from the boys in her class that she usually dated. He was older than her, a man doing man’s work, and it had struck some chord deep in her that thrummed and vibrated and left her unable to sleep that night.

Teddy leaves his hand on her shoulder for a moment, then gives her a gentle squeeze. He rolls back over, and his breathing steadily deepens. Then came his rasping snores.

Emma thinks about Teddy’s hands. The first time in his old pick-up after months of teasing and panting restraint, he fumbled with the button on her jeans, his big, blocky fingers struggling with the brass button. When he palmed her breasts, his calloused hands rasped against her, and he mumbled, “Sorry,” when she jerked away.

Afterwards, he had laid his hand along hers, palm to palm: his rough with blunt fingers, her own fingers slender and tapered.

She used to think about his hands and what they could do. The things they could coax from her. It used to make her weak with need to think of them, stroking and grasping, but the only time Teddy touches her now is to pat her on the shoulder before he rolls over and starts snoring.

She turns onto her back and sighs. In the faint light of the room, she can see the little peelings of paint on the wall like tongues. There are water stains on the plaster ceiling. One by the door looks like a cat’s head, round with two pointed ears. The one above her head is shaped like a kidney bean.

The baby was about the size of a kidney bean at two months, according to the website she looked at. That was when Emma’s mother figured it out: her daughter’s sudden nausea, the exhaustion. Emma herself had no idea what any of it meant until her mother drove her to a doctor two towns over.

The shame of it, her mother ranted on the drive home. The absolute shame of it. At least you had the sense to graduate high school first. But all that money spent on a Catholic school. Wasted!

She was given two choices, though they weren’t really choices. Not really. There are never really choices in situations like this, in places and times like this. Young, sheltered, stupidly naïve: of course Emma made the choice she did.

She wore an empire-cut wedding dress to hide her thickening waist, and runnels of sweat ran between her shoulder blades in the stifling summer heat. Teddy had stood beside her in front of the minister, rigid and pale, his hand sweating in hers.

Her parents sat on one side of the church—her mother flushed with the hectic, unhealthy red of shame, her father with his eyes stubbornly fixed on the floor. Teddy’s father sat alone on the other side, his black suit shiny at the elbows and an inch too short in the sleeves.

When the ceremony was over, her father loaded Emma’s suitcases into Teddy’s truck. The newlyweds drove straight to the farm. There was no honeymoon. As Emma’s mother archly pointed out, they’d already had their honeymoon in the cab of that old pickup truck months ago anyway.

September ends and the rambling wild roses that run the length of the porch drop their petals, pale pink ceding to brown as they dry up and blow away. Teddy and his father buy more hay to put up for the winter since the lower fields flooded and ruined acres of feed in the spring rains.

By October, the water troughs in the henhouse form thin crusts of ice overnight, and Emma puffs like a smokestack when she gathers eggs.

She tries to make a go of it. She tries to be more than the soft townie that she knows Teddy and his father think her to be. She has a vision of herself as a hearty, earthy type.

She consults blogs dedicated to a twee, sanitized version of her life: deep stone sinks and flannel blankets artfully tossed over salvaged and reupholstered couches, baskets of produce grown outside the kitchen door.

She wants to be the type of woman who puts up jams and preserves like jewels, the type who bakes hearty muffins she can sell at the farm stand.

She imagines herself making friends with the wives of other nearby farmers, trading heirloom seeds and recipes and charming anecdotes about their menfolk. Early on, she tries inviting her friends from school, but most have moved onward like a flock of migrating geese: off to college, off to travel, off to apprentice at nascent careers. So she tries to make new friends with the other farmers’ wives, but they are far older than her, stoop-backed and worn-down, silent to her nervous chattering.

She stops visiting the neighbors by the time winter starts in earnest.

She tries. When Teddy is up late one night with a birthing cow, she stays up with him. She pulls on a pair of his jeans, just a touch too big around the curve of her belly. Pulls on rubber boots, a faded flannel coat. Joins him in the barn to attend to the spring calf that comes far too soon.

The cow’s deep lowing strikes a note in Emma’s own body, and the baby in her ripples against her skin in response. But where her baby stays safely tucked away, the calf does not: Teddy reaches into the cow, wrenches his arms this way and that. He falls backwards in a great rush of watery blood that floods Emma’s nostrils with its rich iron tang.

What comes out isn’t a calf. It’s a twisted thing stuffed into a rippling opaque amniotic sac. She had pictured it as she pictured her own baby, a smooth, well-formed thing steadily growing—but this not-calf is misshapen.

There is no great rush of blood either. She had imagined it, but it is just a pale watery pink that streaks her husband’s arms as he stands and tosses the deformed calf into a wheelbarrow to incinerate later.

Emma is used to turkey for Thanksgiving, but they don’t raise them on the farm. Teddy has no luck when he goes out hunting along the ridge for a wild one. Being farmers, they are against store-bought meat, neat chops and roasts oozing blood onto the Styrofoam trays.

For Thanksgiving, they have a pork shoulder from the hog they slaughter.

She muddles through that too, the colossal amount of labor it takes to kill a pig and turn it into meat. The bristly pink skin that turns bright red when they lower it into boiling water in the killing yard.

How each bit is used, the big hams and thick bacon, the velvety ears as big as Teddy’s hand. Even the pale coil of intestines that they rinse and rinse and chop up and eat with vinegary greens.

Teddy’s father is particularly fond of the trotters as a snack. Emma struggles to sit at the kitchen when he gnaws away at the hog’s cloven feet, recently pickled.

She would have found an excuse to leave the room. She should have. There’s always chores for her to do, never a moment of rest if she wants to stay on top of the constant work in the house.

Something paralyzes her, nails her to her seat. Her world narrows down, focusing on the wet smacking of her father-in-law’s lips as he worries at the pig’s feet; focusing on the churning in her belly as the baby twitches inside her.

December. The farm reaches its sleepy lull. Chores revolve around keeping the animals alive, the watering and feeding of them, the mucking out of stalls.

By now, Emma is mostly limited to the house.

Her hands and feet are so swollen that her skin is shiny. It creaks when she makes a fist or flexes her fingers, like old ice on the surface of a lake just waiting to crack up.

Her stomach is swollen too, more than she thought it would be. The baby is the size of an eggplant now, but Emma is far larger. The stretch marks open up almost overnight, thick jagged lines that burn when she rubs lotion onto them.

For a week, even her face swells up, round and moony. The fine capillaries break just under her skin, giving her a rosy complexion that looks unhealthy against the wan cast of the rest of her.

She stays in the house and cleans as best as she can. It’s called “nesting,” according to the internet—an inborn maternal instinct to prepare for the coming baby. She’s relieved when the nesting urge finally comes over her, sudden and strong as a punch. Everything else she’s read about—the excitement over picking a name, the excitement about decorating a nursery—passes her by.

She feels nothing when she considers the approaching appearance of the creature that’s been living inside her for almost a year. She can’t seem to conjure up what the spring will look like, recovered from birth, a fat-cheeked baby balanced on her hip.

In the very hidden part of her, she doesn’t even think of it as a baby. She thinks of it as...well, an it. She knows the sex, and she and Teddy pick out a name.

But when she lays her palm on her distended belly and sees her skin ripple, feels something pressing back against her, she doesn’t think, my baby. She thinks of something cool-blooded and scaled living deep in the water, swimming up near the surface with its unblinking, lidless eyes. If she lets the thought take root and grow, she can feel the panic prickling at the back of her skull. The image of the thing, the it under the water latches onto her mind until she dreams of something wrapping around her ankle, pulling her under.

She stays in the house and she cleans.

She washes clothes, mops the faded linoleum floor in the kitchen. She eases herself onto her knees to scrub the ring of soap scum that always seems to circle the bathtub like a noose.

It never seems that anything can be clean enough. Each day repeats: the same chores, the same dirt and dirty clothes and dirty dishes. Her world is a closed-in thing, caught in an amniotic sac that holds her fast. She has brief, mad visions where she takes the sharp knife used for butchering and slices her world open—lets it stretch and take up space again.

Teddy’s Aunt Helen comes to help. She is a farmer’s wife too, and a farmer’s daughter before that. She takes control of the household in her brisk, silent manner. She cooks, cleans.

She serves Emma lots of meat. She tells her that she needs the iron. She explains in her frank way—not couching the terms gently as the internet had—that the baby doesn’t feed from the food Emma eats. The baby feeds from Emma. It takes the calcium from her bones, the iron from her blood to build itself cell by cell. All Emma can do, Helen says, is try to replace what is being stolen from her.

Emma doesn’t think she can stomach even a bite—the pale pork chops sitting in a greasy puddle, the chicken thighs dimpled with crispy skin—but the older woman stands over her with her wiry arms crossed.

She chokes it all down, in the end.

She wakes from strange dreams that leave her unsettled.

Snow falls steadily through the night, and the farm has an eerie, muted quality to it. Normally, even from the house, she can hear the disgruntled cattle bellowing in the barn, but even they are silent now.

The house is quiet too. The usual creaking and settling is hushed for once. The men left early that morning before dawn—something about needing a new part for the tractor.

They are only a few days away from Christmas. Teddy’s father cut down a scrubby pine from up on the ridge, but it’s a wild-grown tree, patchy in places and crowded in others. It’s not the same, even when Emma manages to string some lights on it.

Aunt Helen is nowhere to be found; she is probably out gathering eggs from the chickens. Emma walks on her aching feet to the kitchen. She thinks about making some toast for herself. The nausea never lets up, not even in this final stage, but she still tries to keep up her strength.

She has lost weight throughout her pregnancy. Her shapely arms and legs have been winnowed down to sticks. Her heart-shaped face lost its cherubic quality, and her cheekbones cut sharp under her wan skin. If it weren’t for the belly and the grotesquely swollen hands and feet, she’d look like a wraith.

Or at least, that’s how she looked months ago. She avoids mirrors now.

She decides to skip the toast once the familiar churning in her stomach starts. She waddles to the table and eases herself into a chair.

She aches all over—the stiffness in her joints never let up either—but now she feels a bone-deep pain centered under her belly. It grows and grows until she’s doubled over, one hand thrown across her stomach and the other clenching and unclenching in a fist in time with the waves of pain.

Aunt Helen finds her. To Emma, it feels like an eternity, each second stretched out and never-ending, but she knows it’s only minutes. The older woman’s stony face softens in pity as she bundles Emma up and loads her into the truck.

In the moments when the pain wanes, Emma feels like she’s watching herself from a great height. She watches herself stumble out of the truck, watches as a nurse eases her into a wheelchair. She watches as she is stripped of her clothing, put into a hospital gown, and installed into a hospital bed.

When the pain returns, she’s slammed back into her body. It tears through her, a crescendo that ends in a ripping, searing pain between her legs that makes stars explode behind her eyes. She arches against the bed, pants with the effort. Her skin is slick with sweat. She groans at the pain, then flushes in embarrassment: she sounds like the cow, she thinks, the one that keened in pain when Teddy eased his arms into its swollen flesh.

She has no idea how much time passes. Minutes. Hours. An eternity.

From the corner of her eye, Emma sees a nurse approach, then the doctor. Another woman too—Aunt Helen underneath a cheap paper gown and mask.

“I called Teddy,” Aunt Helen says. “He’s trying to get here, but the roads are slick.”

The nurse reaches out and turns Emma without a word, positions her. Places her feet in the stirrups while the doctor bends his head to peer between her legs.

“Take some deep breaths,” the doctor orders. “Try to relax.”

Emma tries. She does what she’s told. She breathes, she pushes. She nods when the doctor explains that it’s too late for pain management, that the baby is coming too quickly.

The pain ebbs and flows until it doesn’t: it sits low in her body and cracks her open, a wet roaring release as the monster finally breaks the surface.

She wakes in stages.

She’s dimly aware of being in a strange bed—not her cozy childhood bed and not the lumpy one from the farm. Eyes shut, she senses light nearby, the insides of her eyelids casting a wash of pink against her sightless vision. Then she notices the sounds. Soft treads of the sneakers on tiled floors, faraway beeping, muffled sobs somewhere nearby. Emma opens her eyes and looks around, remembers where she is.

There’s no pain. There isn’t much feeling at all, but there’s pressure. The promise of future pain.

A squeak near the doorway, and she turns to see a nurse wheeling in a plastic crib.

“Look who’s here!” the nurse says in a sing-song voice. She pushes it beside the hospital bed, and Emma props herself on her elbow to peer in at it.

It wasn’t like she expected. It wasn’t like the mommy forums said. She expected a chubby-cheeked baby. She expected that flood of motherly love to finally sweep her away, like something stuck under her breastbone that makes her breath catch in her throat at the sight of her baby.

The thing in the crib is a spindly thing. It’s a splotchy pink. Bits of waxy white cling to its tissue-paper skin so pale that she can see the network of blue veins pulsing near the surface. Wisps of colorless hair sprout from its misshapen head.

Its gummy little mouth works at the air, smacking and grunting and searching for something to latch onto. It doesn’t cry, not really, but its breathing is thick and wet, snorting softly like a piglet.

There’s no barb of motherly love at the sight of it. She feels something else, something she can’t voice to anyone. Something she can barely voice to herself, the Emma she used to be, tucked away and small inside her, winnowed down to almost nothing now.

She knows she will have to hold it. She’ll have to press its lumpy head to her breast and let that wet, pink mouth latch onto her. It would feed from her, drain her, cling to her as it had during the months she held it safe inside her body.

She sees her life then: the totality of it stretched out from this moment to some indefinable future. More babies, more spindly things grown from her body. Things curled in the darkness of her, feeding off her while she struggles to replace what’s lost. While she feeds on rare meat still steaming from the butchering. Her own body whittled down, worn down until she’s a bloodless husk.

The nurse reaches into the crib and lifts it up, hands it to Emma. Emma feels rippling and churning of the water, and then the surface breaks. She takes her baby. Something wraps around her, pulling her under.