Eve

A barn wasn’t the ideal spot for giving birth, but Maggie’s water had already broken and contractions were setting in by the time she reached the homestead. It was early morning but already warm. Dust coated her legs; muddy rivulets appeared where fluid leaked with each step she took. She'd tied her sweatshirt loosely around midsection, above her bump. Her Impatiently, she shoved back a few sweaty strands of hair. She'd given the farmhouse only a passing glance before heading for the mammoth red barn beyond it. Something about ushering new life into the world right next to a corpse seemed wrong.

The large doors on the barn’s face were closed tight, but the man door off to the right stood ajar. Entering, she stiffened instinctively, sniffing the air for the telltale odor of decay. The tang of manure hit her right away, along with live animal flesh, dust and hay; nothing dead. She sneezed and another contraction gripped her. Bracing her small frame against the the doorframe, she let the waves come. It was dim and cool inside the barn. Soft light filtered through the dust motes and the greasy film of a high window. Quite nearby, a cow lowed. Large animals were stirring. When the contraction had passed and her eyes had adjusted to the dimness, Maggie slowly explored the space.

A cow pen comprised the entire left side of the barn. There weren’t more than twenty beasts total, and they were restless, probably hungry. She grabbed a few slices of hay from a palette that stood in the center of the barn and threw it to the cows, then slid a large metal locking bolt out of its carriage, giving them access to the outdoors. Another contraction stole her breath and she leaned back against the hay bales and breathed through it. A mechanical click and the unmistakeable sound of water trickling reached her ears. A small black cow had triggered an automatic waterer on the side of his pen and was guzzling happily. At least here was running water. The pens on the far side of the barn was sectioned into smaller stalls. Two contained horses, one stood empty. Once the contraction had passed, she tossed a few bales to the horses as well.

Maggie wasn’t the first new mother to give birth in a barn. She smiled wryly at the thought. Her baby's conception story was somewhat less immaculate than the famous story she knew from her childhood, the story of the mother of God who gave birth to her unwanted baby in a barn. Maggie's circumstances somewhat different. —Or maybe they weren’t that different after all. Supposedly, Mary had been on the run, with no place to go, and an uncertain future ahead of her. Maggie sighed. She was bone-tired. She'd never realized that a person could actually be bone-tired until she contracted bone cancer and spent a few months pregnant and on the run. One day, not so many months ago, she and Jack had been hiding out in their apartment on the west side of the city, quarantining, as they’d been told to do by the news stations before the televisions stopped working and the power went out. The next morning, she’d woken to find Jack dead in the bed beside her.

For a few precious moments the night before, they had enjoyed each other, stubbornly sidestepping the massive trauma of the spreading Sickness to indulge in the fantasy that they just might be the last few people on earth, that their love was so powerful, not even the spreading Sickness could stop it. Maybe their union would start something new and pure that, a love that not even death could destroy. Maybe, just maybe, they would both beat the Sickness. Ha! -Maggie knew better. She knew the cancer in her bones was the only thing keeping her alive. Before the radios and TV networks have gone silent, they’d broadcasted the odd phenomenon; no one with cancer had yet died from the Sickness. Not one cancer patient had even become ill.

Perhaps the Sickness, whatever it was, had no interest in those who were already dying. Jack didn’t have the double-edged “get out of jail free” card that was hiding deep inside her, aching in her bones, choking out her ability to make blood. Somehow she’d know before she rolled over that morning in the apartment, that Jack had already left her. The radiant heat of him and his soft snoring had vanished, but the form of his body hadn't. She slid her toe across the bed and brushed his leg. The apartment was deathly quiet. She'd heard the phrase deathly quiet before, but didn't realize it, too, was a real thing. She rolled over in bed and her breath caught when she saw him. She’d closed his clouded eyes and stayed there, frozen beside him for a while, not knowing what to do. In that stillness, something miraculous happened. She felt a tiny life bloom inside of her. Conception is a rather ordinary miracle, one that happens everyday around the world, but Maggie just happened to be quiet enough, on that day, to take note of it. From that moment on, she never doubted, and just knew. Jack had left a little piece of himself, alive, with her.

The last eleven months had seen the death of billions of people on planet Earth. Billions. The Sickness hit on a Thursday, in Greece, and less than a week later, half the world’s population was dead. A few scientists had time to search for a virus or bacteria that might be responsible for the Sickness, but none was found. A researcher in Greenland, living with chronic leukemia, had discovered some protein abnormalities in blood samples retrieved from the first few Sickness patients, but the radio stations has gone silent soon after that initial announcement was made.

The cities quieted first as survivors moved quickly out into the countryside in search of food, water, and space. There was no guarantee that living in isolation would stop the spread, but one could always hope. Most homes, at least every home that Maggie had entered, now housed corpses. There was no one left to deal with the dead and dying. There was almost no one left to care. Maggie had seen a few survivors as she journeyed out of the city, but approached no one. It was too soon to know who was Sick, who was well, or well enough to keep going, and who was safe. So here she was, alone in a barn, giving birth to a new life. --For what? How ironic. She didn’t have the bandwidth to wonder if it was safe, yet, for this baby to be born, or if he or she would die just as soon as they lived. What was the point in wondering or worrying? The child was coming today. Now. There was no stopping it.

The empty pen in the corner seemed like the best spot for birthing. It was relatively clean and empty, with only a few bales of straw stored there. She employed the friction method of orange twine on twine to break the bales open, then spread them around to make a pallet. Snagging a few saddle blankets from the tack room, she found a bin of grain that had some edible pieces in it, along with a half bag of stale molasses-apple-oat horse snacks. Her empty stomach growled. She hadn't eaten in nearly a day. A few twists of bailing twine hung on the wall near the tack, along with a pair of scissors and a box of rags. She brought all her finds back with her to the stall. Settling in on her pallet, she chewed the snacks carefully while humming and huffing her way through a few more contractions. The last thing she needed was a broken tooth. The twine worked well to tie her long dark hair back and out of her face. The horse in the next stall over watched her curiously with large chocolate eyes. She shared a few snacks with him, and drank out of his automatic waterer. It was well water, clear and cool enough to make her teeth ache. She wedged her head in the trough and let it flow over her face and down her neck. Another contraction hit, and she returned to her pallet to weather it.

The baby came quickly after that. She moved onto her hands and knees, felt the head move low and the burning began as her tissues stretched. The irresistible urge to push overtook her. Moments later, the child was born. A small girl. The child didn’t cry right away. She was peaceful and seemed to be sleeping, still connected to the umbilical cord. Time slowed, and Maggie memorized the moment, feeling it imprint into the deepest part of her heart. Tiny eyelashes, tiny fingers. Limbs encased in a waxy covering meant she was a few week early, as her one of her baby brothers had been. Her eyelids were almost translucent. After a few minutes of gazing, Maggie tied twine in two places around the umbilical cord and used the scissors to sever the cord between, just like she’d done when she helped her grandfather birth foals. The baby cried then, loudly, startling the horse who had been glued to the action, head over the stall wall, as if it were his favorite daytime drama.

There was blood, but it didn’t seem like too much, at least as far as Maggie could tell. The placenta came right after the baby and seemed to be in one piece. She wrapped the baby in the largest of the rags, and watched her face relax. She seemed to enjoy the rag cocoon. The contractions continued, and Maggie massaged her own belly, helping her womb shrink back down to its normal size and quell the bleeding. She couldn't stop staring at the little girl, this little piece of Jack and her all rolled into one impossibly fresh package.

“Welcome to your world, Eve,” Maggie whispered.

She hadn't really chosen the name. It just came to her, all at once. This baby's name is Eve. Maggie couldn’t think of a single name that conveyed more hope. A new kind of love awakened inside her; equal parts terrifying and titillating. It numbed the pain of the afterbirth contractions and the deeper ache of cancer in her bones. She held Eve close to nurse, and a powerful wave of connection flooded the two of them. The horse nodded his shaggy head in approval. Perhaps this little creature was born not only of her and Jack’s union, but of their combined hopes. Pushing the after mess of childbirth aside to deal with later, the two settled onto a fresh horse blanket in a fresh bale of straw. There, Maggie slept peacefully for the first time in a very long time.