The Apocalypse

Chapter 44

Julia

Rome, Georgia



Julia was of two minds. One part of her dwelled on the feeling of contentment, the like she had never known. The baby was hers! She was a real mother. It was a sensation that couldn't be described, beyond the meager concept of being complete.

When she had heard the news that she was barren—a word that was horribly appropriate when dwelt upon—she had allowed herself to be fooled into thinking that it didn't matter. After all, men weren't judged on whether they could procreate, but only on whether they could get an erection. When it came to babies they fell all over themselves to keep it from “happening to them”, while men with a vasectomy walked around as if they had won the lottery.

Julia's contemporaries, other professional women, were quick to point out how good it was for her career that she couldn’t conceive. These same women looked down their noses at stay at home moms, saying that these were the women who were incomplete.

Ha! What a joke her friends were. They scorned God and worshipped evolution, conveniently ignoring their own teachings. Evolution wasn't about racking up degrees and lording them over anyone with only a bachelor's degree; it was about the continuation of the species. And evolutionarily speaking Julia was a dead end.

But not anymore.

She bent over the portable car seat and rubbed her cheek against the softest skin in the whole world and knew all of that was just junk. Julia had been blessed with this tiny person even if she hadn't come from her, and now she was a mother and now she was complete.

And also aggravated. Cassie took up the other part of her mind and it was no wonder. Julia blamed herself for Cassie's attitude, at least partially. What had she said wrong? What had she done, or didn't do? These were the questions that came to her mind as she watched the black girl swinging in a tire that hung from a huge shade tree in the back yard of the house.

Eve drew her mind back to what was important by making a little noise—a sigh—and Julia smiled, feeling her soul like a hot breath inside of her. And when she looked up again there was Cassie with Neil's axe raised above her head and murder in her ferocious eyes.

“Not the baby,” Julia begged in a whisper, her new motherhood coming out in full force as she leaned forward putting her arms out to cover the car seat. This left her dreadfully exposed with no way at all to defend herself, however, love spoke and overrode her sense of self that her friends had always dwelled upon. There were things so much larger.

The three words held the axe at bay, momentarily. “I coulda been her mom,” Cassie hissed. “But you wouldn't let me.”

“I'm her mother,” Julia said. “Do what you want to me, but please don't hurt her.”

Cassie's eyes flicked to the baby. “Uh-uh. You gonna see her die and you're gonna live with that.”


The girl glowered in a sudden rage, and brought the axe back as though she were going to split a log when she was really aiming to hue the baby in two. Julia could've leapt back, instead she lurched forward with the cry that had Ram stirring, throwing herself over the car seat, protecting her baby and feeling the bite of the axe and knowing in that second of death that she was a real mother.