Chapter 38
I went back to the cabin. As I approached it in the transference toward the evening when the sky was split blue and pink, I recognized it’s importance. Why no roads lead to this place.
One must be chosen. One must be led.
There are few sanctuaries left on Earth. Few solitudes. Ones that will endure forever, and those who take refuge in them survive through the ages of terror and excitement.
This is the only haven left in the world. The woods. The hidden places in them. The mildness of its environment. The unpredictability of the patterns in the roots and leaves being a sort of sanctuary from the electric currents interlaced into our sickly instantaneous world, which would only see these woods as future apartment complexes.
In honor of all the death happening around us Joselyn and I performed the most sacred of rituals. In order to restore the balance after liberating two souls so quickly—of Morgen and Hans—now two must come to make one.
Joselyn was in the bed with me.
She is on top.
Hypnotic hips worked like magick.
And I watched Joselyn suffer in delight, the ingestion of my water element repeatedly. Even though she was already with child, it seemed right to do so.
She suffered side effects which I attempted to transfer as much as possible to myself empathically, since by my nature I am incapable of becoming pregnant with anything except ideas and resentment.
Joselyn had various cramped muscular groups. Sometime even combinations. But she was much more snuggly at the same time. Inside her something was growing. We performed the ritual repeatedly until we couldn’t keep count how many times we’ve done it. Our souls clashed and melted into each other a little more each time. I don’t think you ever feel fully mated. Maybe in special passing moments.
We would close our eyes and breathe together. Controlled hyperventilation until there was no such thing as time. There was only us breathing.
The bigger her belly grew the more she slept.
We tried to do activities but Joselyn kept falling asleep wherever she was.
It was like living with a bear suffering from restless leg syndrome and a compressed bladder. That’s why they call it a baby bladder.
She would use her special obsidian mirror to inform me of the baby’s size compared to various fruits. She took the meaning of the plants very seriously.
She took a pill big enough you could read the EPO on the side of the capsule: Evergreen Primrose Oil. Which would gradually turn her ovaries into butter.
Red raspberry leaf tea stored in compostable bottles was delivered by strange women who claimed they were her sisters. Which I could not argue after seeing the type of amulets wore, the tattoos on their faces, the words they spoke.
After they arranged the bathtub and the entire cabin for the childbirth ritual they each kissed Joselyn on the head, whispering sacred word of encouragement and power. It was the opposite of a funeral.
The tallest of them left, who was wearing silk white robes, turned to me before she walked out and said, “It’s just like sex. You just wait, be gentle, and listen. You’ll do fine.”
Those eight months cooped up in the cabin is when we fell in love. Mostly because of the arguments and the understandings they gave birth to were so fruitful and delicious. It doesn’t matter how many hundreds of years on this planet, a human is a human, and two humans in close proximity at some point are going to disagree. But there is a point right before the nine-month mark, where she gives up, and leans in, and that’s when I shined.
Like something inside of me stepped out of the way and in stepped the Father’s spirit. I was blooming with love.
When the time came for Frankie to be born I was ready. This was my big ritual too. The one duty as a man I owe to the mother beings: servitude. And you have to be selected. If your DNA was chosen to continue the species, isn’t that considered a calling? Wouldn’t you call that a purpose?
We watched copious amounts of birthing videos (which was becoming a fairly popular category on PPL). A positive trend that the world has no idea Joselyn is influencing.
There’s a lot of waiting after the initial invocation—which was Joselyn looking down toward her chair saying, “Oh shit.” Her underwear was wet and she came to show me.
I gently open the waterfall of natural spring water from a very specific phreatic. An ancient water shelf that all the long roots of the forest draw from. The only way to access it is in Joselyn’s cabin in the aquamarine bathtub held up by golden legs on a double slate of marble. Like a vessel offering to God.
Bouquets of only white chrysanthemums left by her sisters are every where in sight. A bundle of stems were inserted into the mouth of the drain until only the flowers showed. The bath water running over them sounded just like the light taps and hisses of rain on the sides of the tents her ancestors lived in.
I knelt at the lip like a servant waiting to be told what was needed of me.
She held on to the edges of the tub and recited many incantations in rare Romani dialects and mantras, as the true mouth of God slowly opened.
She asked me to document it.
And when I lifted my phone to take pictures she swatted it away.
She made a triangle with two of her fingers and pointed at her eyes. Then turned the two fingers down towards her belly.
“This is gonna be crazy,” she said before screaming.
It feels like there’s one hundred wasp hives at war with each other inside my skull. Novel synapses firing and making new connections. And suddenly I saw everything in my world as something where meaning could be applied due to the subject-object nature of all relationships. Everything is an indication. A symptom or a warning. All my eyes can see are omens.
The chrysanthemums in the drain turn pink, then red until a crack is made by the baby’s mouth and a cry emerges. Like Frankenstein’s monster seeing all the light out of the windows of the windmill as they’re being burnt alive.
The white flower’s petals were blood-soaked black.
I washed our baby and wrapped them in a tight bundle of woven cotton and hand them to Joselyn whose face is pale and panting.
I’ve seen this face before. Morgen’s last face. The thing you always thought was true turns out to be true.
I spin the Frankenstein looking baby back toward me away from Joselyn’s limp arms.
She lowered her head back, laying her neck off over the lip.
Her lips popped and quivered.
Trying to speak but lacking strength, “Isso urpar. Isow erpar. Issour.” She lifted her back and painfully stole breath. “It’s…all…part of the ritual.”
And lunged forward like a corpse revived and snatched the flowers from the drain screen.
She bit into the petals. Chews, chews, and swallows.
And the red color returned to her face.
James Jacob Hatfield is a displaced engineer, a painter, and many other contradictions. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Barely South Review, Chaleur Magazine, Havik, and others. His ekphrasis poem “torrents of lahar, No. 36” was anthologized by the North Carolina Museum of Art. He is a Sterling Fellow and a Weymouth Fellow. He is the creator and curator of the Gemini Sessions Substack. He lives in Durham, NC.
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