Savoir

The nightfall was dusty, charcoaled and muddied glints fluttered in the foreground, fronded leaves encircling the window's corner like a salvaged gilt frame. She continued looking into the night, quietly willing the quilted figure to subside, to dissolve into the featherdowned bed never to reshape.

He continued his rhythmic inhaling, comfortable in the unseen land where crops ripened, animals bred, and machines laboured in mechanical happiness with their owner, returned like ships to harbour to sit reliably until morning when they were wanted again.

Married for half a decade, not long in farm terms, yet she was caught in the stands of some classicist labyrinth, minotaurean spun threads silently cocooning her. When was this baby going to come? This stranger child feeding on her from the inside out.

She had grown up on farmstock, the calm pragmatism of straws of DNA-strands, ready to seed the next generation from some unsuspecting accomplice bull already returned to his pastures to eat his way to kingship. She looked at Rod's morphology, ranging its way down the landmass of bed. He was as always, what harm did a donated egg do to him?

She adjusted her nightgown, ready for the weaving sideways descent of the stairs to rock her dark night away in the kitchen, hoping for a few hours before 6am, of blessed oblivion.

She sat, she boiled, she leafed through and listened to the rustle of the trees, a'rattling. A face looked through, finger to its lips gesticulating silence and, shaken, she squinted past the digit to the narrowed eyes of Jake the farmhand. The latch gently rattled, and she rattled in reciprocation, the door undone.

"Still jammed then?" he whispered. Her eyes relaxed into his, and she turned "it seems to be taking its time". A few weeks more and she would be free; ripped, wounded and desolate, but free. Jake slipped hands to her shoulders and guided her to the chair. Kneeling, he covered the bump with his hat, silencing Rod's intruder. "Maynard has been there, righting some wrongs, it's a heck of a place but it's yours when you're ready". She closed her eyes, neck exposed to the imagined patch of sun on her own upland peace. She could smell the hillside, the dusty succulence of ones own cornerstone and she felt sick with relief. She was close to home, to little John and Jake and the stone covered well that never stopped giving. But not yet. The dark night before the dawn of home had become a season of its own, its careless fingers encroaching and she wished to scratch out what she had agreed to. But she had agreed and such it was. A payment in lieu of anyones notice, waiting here to crouch down then go. She railed; "I wish you hadn't come, interrupting, it's too hard. Just let me be til I get back Jake, numbness works.".

A creak upstairs silenced them. But it was nothing. A crackle in the grate called attention to itself, the pop of a knot in the branch punctuating the lines of thought etched in the beams, the shelves, the grooves of silent music on the vinyl records and the oaken faces of the couple.

The bulge stirred, unfamiliar joints pressing their way to the light, knocking the hat off balance to cascade its way over the bumps and came to rest gently on her lap, upside down, makers label exposed and care ticket worn out from the owner's flax hair.

He sank his head, "I'm sorry Kassy, he knew the one way to extract what I owed him and you've almost done it. It's almost there." She nodded.