What Should Be Wild
Julia Fine
The Weight of Those Who Made Me
Deep in the wood there is a dappled clearing, a quiet, carved space between two hills heavy with trees. A prickling bower joins the fists of land, letting through a single shaft of dusty light. Muffled birdsong can be heard, if you are quiet, carried on the whispering breeze. Old oaks cast heart-deep shadows. Alders bow their branches low.
Naked, but not cold, a young girl lies in a crude wooden casket at the center of the glade. Her eyes are black and blinking. Her glossy hair is wreathed with bone, her small fingers heavy with rings: a wedding band, a tarnished emerald, a dirtied family crest. A promise ring, scratched with the letters H and S. A brooch of hammered iron. On her wrist, she wears a bit of braided wire. At her throat, a silver necklace, marked with E.
She cannot move her slender arms, her legs, cannot twist her neck to see all of the women gathered around her, the women in whose jewels she’s been adorned. She senses them, but all she sees is Lucy, bending over her, stroking her hair with sharp fingernails, blue lips forming a kiss.
“Do not be afraid,” coos Lucy.
As if the black-eyed girl could know fear.
Part
I
1
They grew me inside of my mother, which was unusual, because she was dead. I developed in a darkness that was not the eager swaddle of her enveloping organs, a heat that was not the heat of her heart-pumped blood. My mother’s life burst like a fruit in its fecundity and it was only after, once she was rotted and hollow and still, that I was born.
SHE HAD BEEN keeping me a secret, so you can imagine my father’s response when the doctor approached him to discuss the viability of the fetus.
“The fetus?” I can picture Peter in this moment, face rendered expressionless by shock and grief, socks likely sagging and mismatched under his pant legs. He had been jolted out of an idyllic and coddled existence by the sudden collapse of my mother, and it would be years before he truly grasped that fact. “There must be—I’m afraid I don’t—”
“It seems strange to even be discussing, given the recentness of your wife’s pregnancy, but in this case the circumstances do appear to be . . . miraculous.”
“Miraculous,” I am told Peter repeated, swaying slightly in the saccharine light of the emergency waiting room. He was steadied by a kindly, gray-haired woman who had witnessed the scene and risen from her hard-backed chair to help him. This was Mrs. Blott. Within thirty-two hours her own husband, one Harold T. Blott, aged sixty-seven, would be pronounced dead from cardiac arrest. Mrs. Blott did not yet know this.
She patted Peter’s back and said, “There, there, my dear, it seems you’ve had a shock,” and led him to a vacant chair before turning to address the doctor. “Please continue.”
The doctor scratched his temple. Behind him, the hospital doors continued to swing as his colleagues rushed from one patient to the next. Peter could hear the high-pitched beeps of the medical machines and smell the iodine.
“Yes,” said the doctor. “Right. Remarkably, the fetus seems so far to be unharmed, despite the cessation of your wife’s vital activities. With your approval, we would like to continue to monitor its growth. There is a small chance we can provide the proper nutrients and simulate the role of the mother until the fetus becomes viable outside of the womb.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Blott, squeezing Peter’s shoulder. “Well, isn’t that the sun just now coming through the clouds?”
PETER DID NOT know how to be a father to a little girl. He showed up every day of those thirteen months in hospital once I was freed from the corpse of his wife, but when they took me from the incubators, bundled me and placed me in his arms to bring home, he was at a loss. We were lucky to have Mrs. Blott, who by the end of their first meeting had taken a vested interest in our plight, and who would check in on my father to be sure that first he, and then the two of us, were fed and cleaned and rested. Peter was not conventionally handsome, but there was something charming about his unkempt hair, the way his cheeks colored when he was excited. He had a way of blinking his hazel eyes and adjusting his glasses that inspired the women around him to take pity.
I had, for lack of a better term, been born prematurely, and as such there existed an impenetrable medical bubble around me during my first few months of life. The nurses had worn gloves at all times; even the small kisses Peter planted had been through layers of first incubator glass and then waffle-patterned blankets. Afraid their interventions might endanger my fledgling immune system, the doctors took no chances with their miracle, would not have me infected or exposed to human germs. Consequently luck and science conspired to hide my true affliction until I was safely at home. Not until Mrs. Blott laid me on my back to show Peter how to refasten my diaper did it happen: she’d unpinned the one side and was starting on the second when her bare fingers brushed against my thigh. She froze, suddenly, and swayed to the side. I continued gurgling and kicking.
Peter, eager pupil that he was, blinked at us both for a moment before stepping in to catch her. Ignoring the mess I was making as I wiggled my way out of my soiled diaper, he turned Mrs. Blott one way, then the other, pinched her arm, searched for a pulse. When she did not react, he propped her stiffened body against the changing table. A housefly buzzed over me. My father stood, smacked it between his hands, and watched it fall onto my changing pad. My foot brushed against its body. The buzzing resumed.
The nursery was painted pale pink, with little stenciled flowers on the trim up by the ceiling, and must have been a strange place for Peter’s first supernatural encounter. This did not faze him. He brought my fluffy teddy, the cream-colored one with the giant red bow that had been a birthday present from the nurses, and touched it lightly against the bare skin of my stomach. Nothing happened. He touched his hand against my layette. He watched the flattened housefly veer across the nursery, searching for a window through which to escape. I could not yet smile, but Peter swore that if I could, I would have beamed at him.
Standing directly behind Mrs. Blott, Peter took hold of her arm at the elbow and stretched it out until the fingers grazed my leg. Immediately she coughed and stepped back, almost tripping over his feet in their fawn-colored slippers.
“Ah,” he said.
“What is it?” asked Mrs. Blott, expelling bits of afterlife from her recently roused lungs.
“We’ll just be careful not to touch her, then, I think.”
And so they were.
STILL, I KILLED my father three times before the age of eight, and caused the demise of over a dozen small animals. We lived at my mother’s old family home in the country, far from our nearest human neighbor, but the forest around us was filled with wild beasts. I generally managed to avoid the larger—squirrels, rabbits, deer—yet found no way to spare gnats, midges, or houseflies.
Even the plants could not resist me. This I learned early on, toddling barefooted outside our house, leaving a comet tail of crackling, yellowed grasses where there once had been lush green. Peter, in his odd, dreamy way, simply placed his gloved hand in my chubby one and led me to retrace my steps, watching the color seep back into the landscape.