Before it’s over- the paralytic, eye-twitching sleep pulsed with convulsing fragments- my lungs drag in an aching breath. Drenched in my own sweat, lips glued shut with dead skin, feverish and scratched with insanity, she haunts me. They call it the Baby Dream.
I don’t know a woman who hasn’t had it. Skin swollen with a writhing cove beneath the pat of a soft palm, heavy and distant, unused instincts somehow familiar. They come from nowhere, like when I balance something on my hip and that convenient shelf between the rib and bone becomes connected to every woman who came before me. Like needle and thread and the lullaby in my throat clawing its way forward after dormancy as I carry the washing basket up the stairs.
Agony bites through my spread-eagle limbs; it lashes through muscles and tendons and viscera to reach the skin and hairs stood on-end. For a shard of a second I am made of fire. When the pain is gone there is a flood of images I cannot see. I understand, somehow, that this was Birth.
Dusk sinks greyly into dawn and I wake between blurred, hazy eyelids. I sit up, feckless eyes rolling back in their slick, drunken sockets. An old body resonates through the wave of dull pain; her name rattles in my washing-machine skull. Dangled at her side, winter sun catching mottled flecks in radiance, are her hands. Working hands, mothering hands, raised veins running rivulets through silver skin. A great-grandmother I have never met, standing in dream-granted resurrection, sunlight for a face. Dawn of my mother, blood of my child, those heirloom eyes, generational seas.
There is no cry from the Baby. Voiceless arms offer the infant to me. It ails beneath the folds of a drenched blanket, cool and heavy with saturation, the vague shadows and soft planes of a face. The Baby is hardly visible, but I know it is mine. I know it from the iris-grey swell of the ocean; I know it from the quivering of branches, the freckles in the stars. I know it now, shivering and strangled with fever, shrouded with waves of nonsense and sinew. It is my Baby, faceless and veiled, but once they lay her on my chest I know exactly who she is. Flickers of my father’s face cut through my reflection as I look at her, two damaged pairs of eyes seeping into a third, two pairs of footprints to a blank, untouched expanse of snow. I feel her skin against mine and the world sort of fractures. Time is lightning, splintering veins down a tree. A shattered mug- ceramic skidding across the floor like ice, the mechanical slip of a lighter before the flame, the rushing of air before a smack. The sun hits the fragments and I see millions of the same moment reflected into space.
The room is cold when I wake up. Shapes of clutter and panic pile up in the dark. She echoes in my absent gaze, head on my chest as I gasp for air.
– Eva Nisbet
Eva Nisbet is a first-year creative writing student from Peterborough; she typically writes flash fiction and short stories inspired by personal experience. “The Baby Dream” is her first piece of flash fiction, mostly an attempt at putting a fever dream into words, and a growing suspicion that a lot of women have had a similar feeling.