THEY HAVE FORGOTTEN me for a moment, left me to my ruined body, blood soaking across the floor of this other, in-between place that is not my nothingness nor my totally conscious state. She is keening in some far off place that I cannot see, waiting for her baby to appear. He is consoling her, telling her that their babe will come, they only must continue the course, continue my torture.

The bulge across my abdomen is back. The life inside is making small movements that feel like the tiniest of earthquakes. Tiny, yet they rip my world asunder. For they are everything. What I want and cannot have, because I am not a living, breathing woman. It is impossible to hold a living being within the ashen wasteland of my womb.

Still, with my battered hands, colored crimson from their attention, I stroke the stomach and I whisper to the baby blooming in me—everything will be fine, I promise. I’ll protect you.

But I cannot protect the babe who is no more real than I am. The ghost with the stomach turned inside out could not shield her child from wrongdoing. What chance do I have?

The wailing of the woman intensifies, reaching a crescendo that makes my ears bleed. I feel trickles of wetness run down the sides of my face.

Footsteps. I hear them, yet know they make no sound at all.

“Give me back my baby,” she cries as she comes back into view. He is behind her, face grim.

“We must keep the course,” he mutters. And there’s almost an apology in his words. Almost.

The woman falls to her knees, ghostly tears appearing and then disappearing in the same breath. “Give me back my baby,” she says, and it must be the millionth time I’ve heard those words. But this is the first time her clawing hands at my belly break skin. This is the first time she seeks to rip me open, well and truly, and get at the baby that has never been there before.

And now it is me crying for my child. “No!” I scream. My voice is lost in the quiet thunder around me. The disharmonious void of the shadows. “No!”

But she claws.

And tears.

And ruins.

I close my eyes until I hear a baby’s cry ring out, greeting my ears. The sound is wrong though. It is too sharp. Too panicked. I try and sit up, but I cannot. I lift my head as far as my neck will allow and I look down the length of my body and I find her.

Holding a grey and withered thing, with sunken eyes and a shriveled mouth. When it looks at me, I see all the sadness of the world in its face. I cannot even tell if it is a girl or a boy.

I close my eyes to forget.

Even as the giggling of the demon children sounds again and urges me to remember.

***

~1833~

I AM SITTING IN MY room, huddled near the fire listening to the screams of the slaves above. On nights like this, I try to be as quiet as I can so that my mother will, hopefully, forget that I exist. I remember a dog my father brought home as a gift to me for my sixteenth birthday. It was a small, noisy thing, a bulldog imported from France. A female that I named Delphi, thinking it would please my mother.

It hadn’t.

And when the dog had run off in the night and come back weeks later pregnant, my mother had called her a whore and a bitch. She’d taken the dog from me, saying the evil thing would pollute my mind.

That night, we’d dined on a meat pie. It had been flavorful, packed with herbs and vegetables and a meat I could not quite place. The pastry had been warm, buttery, flakey.

It wasn’t until we’d finished eating that my mother had told me the pie was a new recipe. A new recipe she’d coined ‘Delphi Pie’. I’d barely made me out of the dining room before I’d expelled every bite across the hardwood floors.

This house holds such bitter memories for me. I cannot wait for the day when I can escape and put it all behind me, but I worry that will never happen.

Especially now that Richard is gone. I know my mother devised his death. I know it in my heart. She will never let me leave. She will never let me love anything.

Not a man. Not a pet dog. Not a little slave girl with the spirit of a bird.

The attic falls into silence. Will I always have demons above me? Must I always live in fear?

“Borquita!” Her voice sounds down the stairs, riding on the backs of black birds. “Borquita, come out here girl.”

I rise on shaking legs and move towards the door. I wish I had a lock to keep her out. But there is no lock, made by man’s hands, that would be strong enough.

“Borquita!” Her voice is getting angrier. I have to move faster.

“I’m coming, Mother.” I do not yell but raise my voice only a fraction louder than my normal whisper. Ladies do not yell. Yelling is something you get punished for. She secretly loves it when you yell and give her a reason to pull out her whips. I wish the slaves would understand that. The louder they were, crying for mercy, the more they stoked her desire to rip flesh from bone.

When I have opened the door and walked out onto the second-floor landing, I look up to see her still descending. She is wearing one of her best ivory dresses, one normally reserved for church-going or city meetings. It is now splattered with drying blood, various shades of bright red to dark brown.

“I want every stain out of this dress, girl,” she commands, joining me on the landing and turning around so that I may begin to untie the corseted back of the dress. “Every stain.”

I know why she is bidding me clean the dress. She cannot send it to the dressmaker. She cannot bid one of the servants who are not contained in the torture chamber of an attic to do it. The secret of her gruesome desires must be kept well-hidden within the walls of this house.

And I will pay dearly if this dress is not made, once again, as virginal as fresh-fallen snow.

When the dress is draped over my arm, my mother stands before me in her undergarments. She’s fuller around the stomach than I remember, but it has been some time since I have seen her so sparsely dressed.

She catches me looking at her abdomen and I am knocked nearly senseless by the back of her hand landing like an anvil against the side of my face.

“What are you looking at, girl.” It’s not a question.

“Nothing. I’m sorry, Mother.”

“You should be. Looking at my belly like I carry the devil’s spawn in my womb. What I carry here is none of your concern and will be gone before a week’s time.”

“Yes, mother.” But my mind is reeling. She is far past the age of pregnancy, or so I thought. And it cannot be my step-father’s. He has been impotent for a long time. Beaten into submission... castrated in his sleep for raising his voice against her. She’s going to get rid of it, of that I’m sure. It is not only her words that tell me, but her past actions. But even so, the child is better off. My mother, who has already bore five children who she mistreats, neglects, and twists to her own desire; should have never been a parent in the first place.

“Now get to cleaning, girl. And there’s a body upstairs that could use your attention.”

I repress the shudder that wants to rack my body. There has been another death in the attic. It seems to happen weekly now. I wish someone would stop her. I wish I had the strength to stop her.

My mother heads towards her room. My step-father is absent; he left to tend some rich patron on the other side of town. I head towards the kitchen, to prepare the coldest water I can imagine and hope the ivory material chooses to be kind and releases the dark memory of the blood spilled this night.

I work through the night, my hands cold and stinging. The dress will never be what it once was. Even Nelly, the kitchen slave, has tried to help me. She knows as well as I what punishment I will be in for if I fail. My back already bears the scars of so much failure.

“My life is not worth living,” I tell Nelly.

She strokes my hair, so much kindness in her ancient, weathered frame. “There is always something worth living for,” she responds, but she does not sound like she believes the words. I lean against her, the wet dress hanging over the wood counter that is still covered in flour from the evening baking. It doesn’t matter now though. The dress is beyond salvation. Much like the woman it so often clothes.