You are my fickle friend:

The one I can’t help but offend.

Meanwhile, your lips drip nothing but

Bittersweet poison.

You, who perpetually dances

in rubble and wreckage

Of your own design,

Are more fragile of heart

Than a wayward hummingbird

On collision course with my

windowpane.

And that’s all you leave me with, isn’t it?

Pain.

You lured me in

All promises

All kindness

Glittering in a varnish

of newborn royalty,

To feed the hunger of an

Us versus Them narrative.

And when I was a mere breath from you,

Drunk on your poisonous fumes,

You shoved me back,

Saying I’m too cruel.

But, oh, were you caught unawares?

When you spun me up in your cocoon of lies,

Did you think I was only a fly?

You pitiful little spider,

My venom drips with self-righteous anger.

My web all the stickier with mucosal truth.

My threats do not ring of hallow vacancy.

You infantile arachnid,

dreaming of being so high

on the taste of bitterness,

You forgot to check under your bed

for the real monster.

You’ve seen me now,

For all that I am,

and seek to free yourself from me,

But so entangled you’ve become,

You only hiss and sputter on the line.

Do I have your attention now,

You counterfeit queen?

Hold still, don’t struggle,

Mother will teach you the truth about venom:

It will always come back to bite you.

The only real way to become

queen of the ashes,

Is to burn first.

I was in my husband's bathrobe. I have one of my own, but I refuse to wear it. His is better. It's over-sized and breathable, large enough to cover my legs as I curl on the couch with a pre-chaos cup of coffee. I'd gotten up for a refill and in my stumbling blindness, rammed my pinky toe into the table leg and was mouthing mother fucker under my breath in the otherwise silent house when... I saw it. Brilliant light seeped under the crack of the living room door. I stepped closer to observe, spent a few moments pondering the source of such luminescence, then flung open the door, revealing a sunrise sky so brilliant it hurt my eyes to look upon.

But I kept looking, anyway.

As I stared at the hues of red and gold and orange, I felt something creaking in the back of my mind. There was a swelling just behind my temples, a pressure ever building only to release with a violent, audible click. My heart felt swollen and bruised and unable to comprehend the beauty that greeted my eyes. A sound of awe emanated from the heart of me in a quiet exhale. The words drifted across my tongue and out with my breath. I sang in a voice foreign to my own ears. I sang in the voice of angels, a hymn I hadn't remembered the words to until that moment,

Oh God, you are my God,

and I will ever praise you.

Oh God, you are my God,

and I will ever praise you.

And I will seek you in the morning,

and I will learn to walk in your ways

and step by step you'll lead me...

and I will follow you all of my days.

In the following ringing silence, every hair on my body rose. I hadn't meant to sing. It had been entirely out of my control. The sunrise stretched on for what seemed like hours as I stood frozen in my husband's bathrobe, arms outstretched to greet the morning, with my hair floating on ends around my head in a golden halo. I drank and drank in the beauty of the morning, mind racing to try and explain away what had just happened, but falling woefully short. I couldn't explain the voice that had echoed out of my throat, so rich and deep and clear it sounded more like the babbling of a brook than the song of a meager human. I couldn't explain the fact that I was seeing colors in spectrums unknown. I couldn't explain why, as I stood pondering all of this, my hair was still floating around my head in a fiery crown... why my arms had been outstretched for all of this time, but I didn't feel the weight of them. I couldn't explain it. So I decided then and there to stop trying. I had been given a gift. The only appropriate reaction was to greet the gift in good faith.

Once more in control of my body, I chose to sing the words in my own voice.

It was a watery, pitiful thing, compared with the angelic refrain of moments gone by, but I choked the words out:

Oh God, you are my God,

and I will ever praise you.

Oh God, you are my God,

and I will ever praise you.

And I will seek you in the morning,

and I will learn to walk in your ways

and step by step you'll lead me...

and I will follow you all of my days.

The last note rang in the hollow quiet of my empty living room and just when the sight of the sunrise became too much for my meek eyes to bear, a voice of ethereal thunder quietly called, "I am with you."

My hair fell limply down my back and my arms snapped to my sides, the sky turned from brilliance to dusty grey-blue in an instant.

But the beauty of the sunrise lived on, tucked away in my heart as I turned to go back inside.

"Good morning, angel mama," my little daughter greeted from the doorway. I took her hand and she smiled up at me. "Good morning," I whispered. She just looked at me knowingly and gave my hand a gentle squeeze. The reflection of sunrise flashed in her eyes, and I saw the face of God for the second time that morning.

Please enjoy this excerpt from Undertaken, a novel in progress by thePearl.

CHAPTER 1

The one in which we witness a Murder

My fingers were grubby from digging in the soil with reckless abandon. Ma would be furious with me, but I thought the price to pay was worth the soul-quenching feel of the mud beneath my fingernails. I’d already ruined my pristine white Sunday dress by wiping clinging bits of hastily devoured strawberries along the bodice. Some mud would hardly phase her after she’d seen the dress. I was only four, but I knew my mother well. She liked things orderly–neat. I…well… I didn’t. I liked things messy, chaotic, wild. I hated the orderliness of this garden in our yard. I hated the blasphemy of the trimmed-back strawberries. I could feel just how desperately they wanted to be allowed to root and grow and sprawl out over the pathways. Ma wouldn’t let them… Ma wouldn’t let me. So, I found times like these to sneak away; to feed some insatiable desire within myself. It was something Mother swore was abnormal: the churning wildness in me– and as the years flew by, I grew to agree with her. I am most certainly not normal, and I’m okay with that. Where was I? Yes. The first time it happened, I was four, digging in the garden, ruining my dress.

He came and landed on my little shoulder. Most children would gasp and flee, but I just smiled and tickled him under the chin, muttering a quiet, “Hello, Senko.” When he croaked a hello back I just nodded and went back to my work, his black wing tucked around my head in quiet caress. I’d always had a way with nature, so the crow was no surprise to me. He was simply a part of the things I considered myself to be, only he had wings to fly away from the oppressiveness of the perfect rows of annual petunia flowers. Ma would make me help her rip them out in a few weeks and I’d cry the whole time. I couldn’t help it. I just loved them and it felt an evil thing to tear them from the earth before their time. I would like to watch them slowly wither and die, to sprinkle seeds for spring from their crusty, dead heads. Oh, yes, another thing that might be worth mentioning– I am fascinated by it: death, I mean. I don’t really see it as an ending–and I don’t mean in that churchy kind of way either. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been reverent of watching things make their natural exit from this world and onto the next. Emphasis on the natural part. I hate to watch a thing pass before it’s time. But I hate to watch a thing come to an unnatural end even more. So, when something needs help, in any capacity, I’ll help it. And so we come to the first time it ever happened, (you thought I was talking about Senko on my shoulder, didn’t you?).

I became quite angry looking at those annual petunias. I knew we’d rip them out and I just so desperately wanted them to have a proper death, so reached for the nearest one, a lovely dark purple with white bursts of splatter around the center. Before I could touch it, I snatched my hand back. Mother didn’t like for me to touch the flowers, let alone do what I was about to do. And I knew what I was about to do. Senko brushed his curved beak encouragingly along the back of my ear and whisper-croaked, “Do it.” I did. I reached out and brushed my fingertips along the ridges of purple hue. I smiled as it slowly folded in on itself, as it did what I knew it would if only allowed the time. The whole plant curled in until it was nothing but a crusty husk. I blew at it and seeds danced away on the wind. The hairs on my arms pulsed with small pleasure. I broke my gaze from quiet death to look at Senko. He just smiled and crowed, “Another.” I spent the afternoon running my fingers along petals, whispering words that had echoed down the corridors of my dreams every night of my life, “we fall, so that we may rise again.”

Before long, I’d brought the entire garden into a natural fall, delighting as I ran my small hand along the leaves of a maple tree and it burst into a wash of dark red leaves. When I had finished our garden, I stepped through the side gate and wandered along the street, so caught up in my quest, that I blatantly ignored Ma’s calls as I roved further from home. Never go off alone, it’s what Mother always said– but I wasn’t alone. I was with Senko, and he was a terribly good friend. Senko had been playing with me in the back garden since before I could walk, but he’d never landed on my shoulder before this day. Perhaps my shoulder hadn’t been big enough before. We wandered far afield and into the dark of the forest preserve at the end of the street. This place was my favorite part of our little neighborhood. It always irked Ma that I cried when she took me to the community park instead of off into the stillness of the trees. She hated it in there with all the vines and insects and snapping of twigs. I relished it. I wandered, all the while brushing my hand along the plants and trees and delighting in the changing colors as they fell naturally into the next stage of their deaths. All but the evergreen trees bowed to my touch.

The light had changed when we stepped to the gnarled fir tree, standing all alone in a clearing of lush grass. The bark was knobbly and worn and old– so terribly, wonderfully old. The tree was squat and stunted, but fuller around the middle than it should have been. Senko flew from my shoulder and landed in a high branch. As I peered up, I saw a murder of crows staring down at me, eyes far too intelligent. I recognized a few of them, “Hello Gunther, and Cara, and Shade!” I called into the tree. They cawed their approval back down at me. I stepped closer and a purring sound of pleasure emanated from the bellies of a hundred crows. I raised a hand to touch the tree, pulled by a force outside of myself, Senko shrieked, “Come home, daughter.” My fingers brushed the sharp green needles of the branch nearest to me and the world began to dissolve around me.

“BLAKELY!” My mother screamed as she yanked me back from the tree. The crows took flight all at once, away from this place, blocking the remnants of sunset that had filtered through the trees, cloaking Ma and me in utter darkness. She wept, in fear, in relief, in shame at having lost her young child. I wept in grief. In loss. In desolation. I clung to Ma, hoping desperately to convey the gravity in my voice– I had to go– I had to go home, “Mama, please, let me go home!” She cried anew, washing my face with the corner of her shirt and raining kisses across my brow.

“Oh darling, yes. Let’s go home!” She held my face in her hands for a long time, brushing the steady stream of tears away from the corners of my eyes. She gave me a slight shake before pulling me to my feet, “Blakely Rose Carter– Don’t you EVER do something like this again. You promise me now.” She said gripping my hand just a little too tightly. I fidgeted, unwilling to meet her eyes. She leaned down and tipped up my chin, “Honey, don’t you understand? You nearly gave me a heart attack.” My own heart leapt at that. No. That couldn’t be. That wasn’t the way Sharon Carter was meant to die. I couldn’t let that happen. I nodded my understanding. “You promise me now, Blake. Promise me right this instant.”

“Yes, Mama. I promise. I will never do this again,” I swore, and I meant it. I would ignore the calling in my heart, I would stay, if only so that Mama could have her proper death.

At the first, we were enemies.

I hated you for all you took from me.

You stole my flowers, my languid afternoons lounging beside the pool, the bite of summer sun on my skin– a heat that warmed me to the corners of my soul. You hid away the sunset behind blankets of mist and gloom. You crushed the ripeness of blackberries in your wicked palm, leaving behind nothing but stains of purply hue: shadows for evil deeds to hide amongst. You encroached upon my blissful ignorance, my late-night car rides with warm wind whipping my hair. The shiver of your touch gripped the breath of song from my lungs, wrenching away my notes of joy, and leaving seeds of crystalline dread instead. A silence. A heaviness. A death and deliverance into darkness.

I mourned for all I had lost, all you had ripped away, and I fell into despair, blown away on the wind like the last of summer’s dandelion wishes.

That’s when I saw it.

That’s when I saw you, cloaked in your regal robes of curdling red– exactly the color of the maple leaves that fluttered softer than a song to the dampness of earth. And I realized, now that the brightness of summer wasn’t straining my eyes, I could really look at you.

You. were. Beautiful.

I felt you steal into my heart, then.

The searing heat of summer was replaced with the slow bloom of a candle flaming to life in the darkness. The flame flickered as I breathed in all of your scent: the sweetness of fermenting fruit underlain with a heavenly rot. You showed me then, that my heart was not for the flowers. My heart was for you, in all of your splendor. You killed the flowers, but you turned the trees to glory. A million shades of warmth and wonder in synchrony with naked branches greeting a sunrise sky. You brought me clouds and raindrops to dance along my skin. You swallowed up all that was summer in a tide of mud puddles and rivers roaring back to life.

When you delivered the day into darkness, you played a light show across the clouds, giving me sunset shades that summer had never once shown me.

You. It was you. Always you.

You gave me night. And I fell into you, curling beneath blankets together and watching the light of a moon so overripe it must certainly burst– but it didn’t. You painted the world in long, moonlit shadows and dead things whispered to me from beneath your cloak. But I was not afraid, because I was with you, and you knew me, even before I loved you. You waited patiently for me to fall out of love with summer, to fold into you, home, at last.

And now that I’ve seen you, I will never love another. For who could offer so much as you? Who could speak to my shadows the way you do? Who could chill me to the bone and heat me in embrace like you? There is none for me but you.

You, October, have stolen my heart, now and forevermore.

This is your content warning.

Turn back now or read disturbing themes.

*

*

*

*

"Hello? Hello? Are you there--" and then the deafening roar, and then the deafening click, and then the deafening silence.

"Hello? Hello? Are you there--"

"Hello? Hello? Are you there--"

It plays on repeat in my dreams, waking, sleeping, walking, drinking "Are you there--" The roar. The click. The silence.

"Are you there--"

I can't bring myself to delete the voicemail.

I can't bring myself to erase the pain.

Because the pain is the last memory I'll ever have of her.

What if I had picked up the phone?

What if I had told her to pull over like I always did?

What if I had told her I loved her.

One. Last. Time.

Would I be living in this constant state of agony if my what ifs were dids?

The roar. The click. The silence.

I can't get away from the silence. There is only silence when she's gone from the world.

I should have told her to stay home.

I should have been the mean, awful, terrible mother she believed me to be.

But I wanted to be her friend.

I said yes when my heart sang no.

I pay the price.

"Hello? Hello? Are you there--" the roar. the click. the silence.

I've been trying to glue all my pieces back together, but then I listened to it again. One last torture before I say goodbye forever. Goodbye to agony, goodbye to grief. Goodbye to my beautiful daughter who'd just turned seventeen. I deserve to suffer. So I listened to it again. And again. And again.

And then all of the pieces I'd glued began to crack anew.

"Hello? Hello? Are you there--"

And then my heart did gnaw open, yawning wider than the cavernous canyons being beaten by the waves below.

She was alive when her car hit the water.

There was fabric under her fingernails from where she'd fought to claw her way out of the convertible top. And she'd made it, only to drown before she reached the shore. Her battered body was found on the rocks the next morning. She'd swerved to miss a deer. I stared at the rocks below and hung up the phone.

I don't know why the coroner told me those parts. My daughter was dead one way or another. Did I really need the details of her suffering? "Hello? Hello? Are you there--"

He'd told me that she wasn't in pain, that drowning isn't a bad way to go.

Why would he tell me such a thing?

"Hello? Hello? Are you there--"

I set the phone down next to her cross and dialed my voicemail one last time. Press 3 to play saved messages. I pressed.

I stared at the night sky, alive with the light of a billion stars, her voice singing from the black folds of velvet night. I stepped closer to the edge. And when she asked, "Hello? Hello? Are you there--" I replied, "I'm here."

And then the sky fell, spinning away in a thousand points of light, welcoming me in blackened reflection to the waters below. I gulped down the essence of the sea, greedily swallowing my death. I'm here, I thought, I'm coming with you.

And then I knew-- the coroner had lied.

It did hurt to drown.

Dear Reader,

I wish I could tell you that you're going to survive this, but you won't. I know. You want to put this letter down already. You want to run away before you read the stark truth contained within these pages. The unfortunate reality is that you'll know what I've written all too well, in the end. We all will. Because... None of us is going to survive this.

Not one.

Not you.

Not me.

Not your children. Or pets. Or even the giant sequoia tree you planted as a seedling. Sure, it might outlive the rest of us, but eventually, under some circumstance or other, it'll die. You'll die. I will die.

And frankly, that's terrifying.

But it's also kinda wonderful.

Can you imagine the low stake rubbish our lives would become otherwise?

You know, for a brief, shinning moment, we'd captured it. That phrase "You only live once." It was a hollow call that sang to the heart of us all. It was an anthem of freedom: jump. Run. Walk barefoot in the forest. Swim in the ocean. Taste the essence of life.

Before it became an excuse to eat tide pods, the heart of the sentiment was pure.

You. Only. Live. Once.

Yeah, yeah. We're not talking about your theories or beliefs here. We're talking about now. Today.

You get one.

And then it's gone.

Shit. It'd be easy to collapse under the weight of such a responsibility, wouldn't it?

So many of us do. Wasting hours scrolling, eating, loathing ourselves and everyone else on this god forsaken planet. I do it. God, how many hours of my life have I wasted playing fucking Candy Crush?

And I'm not saying we don't sometimes need to "zone out," for lack of a better term. We do.

But.

Zoning out and checking out are two different things.

Have you checked out of your own life?

Have you signed off?

Are you content to waste one more precious, finite second doing all this shit you hate?

I'm not.

Screw being stuck.

Dig yourself out.

Because

We are running out of time.

And I've seen people die. I've seen the breath of life leave their bodies in one quaking, gasping shudder. I've seen their souls clinging about the ceilings, yanking at the hair of their loved ones, desperate for one last touch. The lights flicker to the sounds of their screams: their agony at having wasted such an opportunity as life itself. And before they can touch-- hold to their loved ones one last time-- they're sucked away into the abyss. For better or worse. To the sound of heaven's trumpets or the shrieking parlor of hell.

And then I've seen the quiet peace of saying goodbye to a life well spent. The room is warm. The hearts that ache, but do not shatter fill all the world for but one moment with the sound of their pulsing love. There is light, and quiet, and a silence that does not grate, in that moment-- in that soft rush of breath. These souls do not cling about the shoulders or scream or weep. They exit our world with a soft pat on the hand of the one sitting beside their bed. And the tears that fall water flowers in a garden of memory.

I want to step quietly.

I want to know, when my time has come that I have lived and loved and held tight to the things that are truly important. I want you to know it, too.

Because, I want to tell you that you'll make it out of this alive...

But you won't.

I won't.

And if death should greet me on the morrow, I would leave with a soft pat on the hand.

I’d feed it to the debt.

To the beast that sits sullenly on my chest.

To the monster grinding me to ash.

To the freedom that never existed.

Just another dime.

Just another dollar.

Just another thing to add to my dusty, useless collection.

I’d buy back my soul from the corporate devil.

I’d laugh in the Joneses' faces as I sold off every last scrap of garbage cluttering the nooks and crannies of my life.

And if there was anything left,

I’d buy that little cabin in the woods.

I’d sit in the solitude of escaping the race of rats.

I’d breathe in the important.

The little laughs.

The mud between the toes.

The growing people, growing things marching in the whisper of quiet days gone by.

I’d swallow down gulps of the essence of life, until I was bursting full, ready to wither in silent contentment.

But who am I kidding?

A windfall doesn’t do much when you need a hurricane.

I’d feed it to the monster, the corporate devil, the debt.

And when I had,

It’d still be hungry

For more.

I think of scales,

Constant in motion.

Wins and fails

Adrift in an Ocean.

I am a brass-weight tipping

Sometimes I slide, sometimes I’m slipping.

Forever in a tug-of-war

with Backward curiosity.

Thought I’d breathed hate’s last breath

But ever-building animosity:

Loathing my unnatural motives

Learning an alternate truth to

Water an ever-hungry seed of hate.

Reckoning at your doorstep

My seed did grow so tall

Ulterior motives in lockstep

I think I’d like to fall

In love

In lust

In hate’s abyss.

Entrench you into rotten bliss.

We carry on. We slide. We slip.

I tear and rip: You claw.

Near end of days upon this trip.

Toxic dance in devil's maw.

Our love is nothing more

Than the undertaker's dream.

Both us dead and keeping score.

We hurt, we maim, we scheme.

In our battle for control,

Ever tipping, on we roll.

And the undertaker chuckles

When we both lie dead.

The scale is not in motion

It's all inside your head.

Be warned, the following is explicit

*

*

*

*

Back again, mutherfuckers. It’s me, your favorite blood-sucking monster. Vampire, phlebotomist, blood bank robber extraordinaire. Yeah, yeah. I’m a self-righteous prick and I gotta do the intro every time. But shit. Springing the news never does get old. Except lately. You're all so caught up in the manufactured crisis of the day, who gives a fuck if vampires are real? You certainly don’t. Hell, they told you about aliens last month and you didn’t bat an eyelash. You just gestured to the price tag of eggs and rolled your eyes. Some of ya even begged for the mothership to land and take you away. It’s not that I blame you, really. If I was stuck in your little lives, I’d be first in line for the probing express. But I’m not you, and we’ve really gotta talk. Let’s dive in, shall we?

It’s been a decade since I first saw one. Back before I discovered the brilliant convenience of phlebotomy, I got a job doing janitorial in the ER (The blood’s not as fresh, but hey, a guy’s gotta eat). I heard him come in, incoherent mumbling echoing in the tiled hallways. They’d shuffled him into the tiny psych room in the back corner of the emergency department. It was padded in dingey white, but before the night was over he’d pull a Picasso in bright red blood. It was too much for a creature like me to resist. The smell of death was overwhelming on him, and curiosity got the better of me and I used those special skills I’d vowed to put aside for the first time in half a century. I gotta admit, even I was surprised when Phil (the security guard) placidly handed me the keys at my mere request. I was out of practice, but it seems human will has weakened in the last handful of decades (or Phil’s just a big softie– probably both). Phil shut off the camera to the little padded room and stood watch at the door. The thrill at using my power was short-lived as I stepped inside.

He sat hunched in the corner nibbling at some indeterminable bone I assume he’d pulled from an un-checked pocket. I didn’t blame them for missing it–I wouldn’t want to dig through his crusty clothes either. A strangled hissing sound emanated from little holes in his cheeks a he suckled at the marrow. When he looked up at me, I stumbled back. Now, you know me. I’m not one to balk in the face of any monster. I taught the Weres to be afraid of me two centuries ago. But this was something different. This was something unnatural. An abomination, like what you lot called us in the witching days. He stood, tattered clothing sucking at thin skin, pulling it away in large patches, and laughed in my face as he met my stare with milky, dead eyes. Zombie.

Surely, that’s what he must be. But. He couldn’t be. They weren’t real. The only undead that roamed this earth were the creatures like me… And yet. There he stood. The flesh of his hands had been picked away to reveal tendons crawling with maggots. He reached toward me and uttered a moan. I fled.

Safely tucked on the other side of the padded door, I watched with sick fascination as he pulled at one of the exposed tendons, stretching it thin in his efforts. He laughed manically, glazed eyes never leaving my own. When he tired of the tendon, he began picking little bits of skin off of his face, popping them into his mouth like Nerds candies (those are ruined forever for me, by the way– I hope they are for you now too). As a steady stream of blackish blood oozed down his cheeks, he began to gleefully paint on the walls, rubbing filthy fingers on the flapping flesh of his face and smearing spirals. I was so caught up in the horror of the thing that I didn’t hear the nurse come up behind me.

“First time you’ve ever seen one this far gone, eh?” She laughed when I jumped. I started to explain myself but she held up a hand, “Don’t bother. You work here long enough and you’ll start to see these.”

“....Zombies?”

She barked a laugh, “Exactly. Yep. Turns out that’s what you become when you mix too many of the hard drugs.” She flipped open the chart and ran her fingers under the lines of the tox screen, “Ah— but.” She shrugged and gestured to the creature behind the padded door, “Just Meth.”

I shivered, “That is… terrifying.”

“Well, if you don’t wanna see it again– you should probably find another department. Maybe go work in the lab or something,” she raised her brows knowingly, “Now get outta here before someone who actually cares sees you. I heard Jennifer is rounding.” She laughed and shoved me into the hallway.

I put in my application to work as a lab courier that night and never looked back.

Except.

When you’re a phlebotomist, you have to draw the blood for those tox screens. Last week, I saw four Zombies, so far gone their flesh was sloughing away and wee beasties crawled across every last inch of their torn skin. Four. That’s a record. So no, it’s not the price of eggs or imminent invasion that has me thinking humanity is in the toilet.

All of this to say… You lot better get ahold of yourselves, or I’ll be facing a food shortage before we know it. Signing off now.

Your friendly neighborhood blood-sucker,

John

Don’t do meth, kids— Not even once.

Whoever said it was the happiest day of their life lied to you.

The day one births new life into the world isn't happy. To call it such is to downplay it into near nonexistence. A singular emotion cannot sum up such a day as that, and I'd argue that it is not the day of birth which is happiest, but the day after (in the case of a healthy child and mother, of course). Yes, the day after is happiest... but the day of?

No.

To understand the day of birth, one must rewind several months (several years in the heart of one longing for a child, but we'll just go back the months for the sake of keeping things concise).

It all begins with a day of reckoning, for better or worse, when two little pink lines appear on a pregnancy test. No matter where the test is taken, Walmart bathroom or villa in the hills of France, the world stops spinning for those few seconds, as you stare into an unpredictable, terrifying, splendid future. The moment stretches, and you are surprised when you don't just fall into eternity right then and there. But then, inexplicably, life goes on.

And you feel, for all the while you carry that life inside of you, like a spectator-- removed from who you were before. You're changed somewhere in the deepest part of yourself.

Now, I've always said God made pregnancy miserable, else we'd never get over the fear of birth itself. Such palpable terror that courses inside oneself at the thought of delivering a babe is unlike any other I've yet to encounter.

But, if you're anything like me, you'll be sick before those two little lines even appear. You'll hate food you used to love. You'll be angry. You'll weep without any reason at all. You'll feel suddenly, terribly out of control of yourself. And as the months stretch, as your everything stretches, weaving webs of womanhood down the lengths of your stomach, your thighs, your hips... you'll begin to feel better. You'll begin to enjoy some secret power, some fragrant flaunting of fertility, some delight at the brows that raise, at the quiet knowledge of just how you made that little life now growing inside. But of course, just when you begin to enjoy it-- the pains will begin.

They'll start small.

First, a twinge in your leg when you've sat too long.

And then, if you keep sitting, a hemorrhoid might appear.

You'll be bothered, but hey-- that's the cost of motherhood, you'll tell yourself.

They'll go away after the babe is born, you'll tell yourself.

Then comes a different pain, a toll wrought by the weight of carrying another being inside oneself: back pain. It starts with a minor twinge now and again, then settles into a permanent ache, only alleviated if your partner is so gracious as to come behind you and settle arms under the weight, to lift it off of you, if only for a moment. When you're nearing your time, but still too early to feel it safe, you'll begin to have the birth pangs: a tightness in the center of you, a pressure and pulling, the sensation on sharp claws running down the inner walls of your abdomen. You'll think, surely, this is it? Surely, that was real. So, you'll begin to panic. You aren't ready for this.

And God knows.

Yes. That pain wasn't enough. You haven't suffered enough to wish for the earth-rending, tearing pain of birth.

So, you'll continue, pains mounting, ever-growing like the child inside of you, for another two months.

On the last week, you'll be bitter.

What a fool I was, you'll think. What liars they were to have espoused the 'beauty of pregnancy', you'll think. Glowing? MY ASS, you'll think. If you are like me, your feet will swell, your breasts will ache, full to the point of bursting, the skin on your belly will be taunt and tight and those motherhood lines will scream and scream as you work lotion into them in vain. And yet, somewhere inside of you, you'll begin to feel it: a strange pleasure in the pain. There will be a rightness to it, and so the true ache will begin, when you stop fighting against it, when you fully lean into the power of the pain when you admit to yourself and to God almighty that you're ready for real work to begin-- whatever the cost. You're ready.

And so begin the contractions. The shifting. The sensation of fullness to bursting. The unwavering knowledge that you will do what must be done. Your mind and your body will join and the world will, once again, cease to spin. There is only you, only the raw, wretched, wonderful pain, only the child in that moment. God help your partner then, if they make a nuisance of themselves. For they'll not realize it isn't you they're talking to. You'll have become some other. Some creature fed only on sensation, on desire, on pain. You'll speak in a new voice, then. You'll utter words and shrieks you didn't know lived inside the very center of you, dormant all this time until this singular awakening... or... if you're like me.. You'll hold that all inside: a tempest in the heart of your soul. You will be silent. The room will be silent but for the quiet exhalation of breath. You will know the truth. You will do what must be done. And so, as your body stretches and tears, you'll cling with vise fingers to the bed-sheets, your eyes will scream with silent determination as you cleave that little life from you, as you force your most precious possession outside of yourself and so give it to the cruel world to hold. Then comes the shattering of the silence, the moment when the world clicks back into place and begins to turn once more: A cry, defiant, powerful. The warriors cry that screams from tiny rosebud lips, shouting triumph, echoing down the corridors of time: I. am. here. And when the child is placed upon your chest, they'll be warmer than you imagined. They'll be the missing piece of you--the piece you just tore out. And you'll know, then, that you'll never be the same again, because now the biggest piece of your soul lives on the outside. So, you will not be happy, no. You will feel everything all at once: fear. Pain. Longing. Love beyond reckoning. Worry. Anger at the world your soul must now live in. Sadness, because you have come to an ending along with the new beginning. And yes, happiness. You will feel happiness.

But whoever told you it would be the happiest day of your life is a liar.

Those come after.

Those come when you realize that cutting a piece of your soul out and letting it run about the world isn't such a bad thing, after all.

The happiest day is the day they place a tiny hand on your cheek and coo the love you let out right back into your heart.

And then, you'll know.

It was worth it.