apologia
Dear Rachel,
I'm writing to apologize. What I did, what I said-- you didn't deserve that. I lost my temper because of other things going on and I took it out on you. That's not acceptable, and I apologize.
I've wanted to apologize for the last three weeks. I'm hoping you'll read this at least, since you're refusing to talk to me on the phone the times I've tried to call
No. Crap. Zippy grimaces at the words she's just written, then taps delete-delete-delete.
I'm hoping that in a letter I can say things to you better than I seem to face-to-face. I know that losing my temper doesn't excuse what I said, doesn't make it okay. It's just that I was feeling pretty damn ganged-up on and then you said what you did and
Argh. No. Zippy puts her forehead into her hand and rubs at her temples. This isn't going well. At least with the letter she can delete this shit before she actually says it out loud.
She erases the last sentence before getting to her feet and heading into the kitchen for another cup of tea. Limp back, not for the computer desk, but the couch, settle herself down on it and close her eyes against the pain.
Her knee's still protesting the winter. There's Tylenol but she's too stubborn. And anyway it's in the bathroom. And anyway anyway it won't do anything for that dull tight chest-pain, the heart-pain that actually is located more in the gut.
It's snowing outside and the snow muffles all the city's noises. No honk and hum of traffic to interrupt the silence in the apartment. The cats are sleeping by the radiator and there is no Ben, there is no Rachel.
She raises her teacup, to sip with a humorless grimace. How many times she's wanted a little peace and quiet from Rachel's bitching? Who knew it was so easy to get-- just destroy your relationship with your daughter with a few stupid words, and there you go.
Zippy stares at the snow that falls past the window, falls and falls and falls, covering the city, covering all sins and all secrets.
My daughter Rachel, she would write, to be read by nobody. My hard-won child. Miriam should have been your first name, not your middle; Miriam-- my bitterness, rebellious blood. Too much like me in all the wrong ways. And yet when you were born I almost called you Atarah. My crown. My victory.
I should have known the battle to bring you into the world was only a taste of things to come.
***
October 30, 1993.
She's refusing the epidural for the third time and wondering just why the hell she is. The reasoning behind that choice doesn't seem so compelling when she has another human being forcing itself out a space between her legs that was not freaking supposed to accommodate something this size no matter what anybody, including Holy Scripture or biology textbooks, tell her.
Ben had been a C-section. Zippy's really, really regretting the decision to have this one naturally. She's wearing a small leather pouch around one ankle, an amulet that is supposed to provide protection from some of the evils of childbirth; she's pretty sure she must have made the damn thing wrong.
She's wet with sweat from back to belly, crown to calves, and each time the doctor says now PUSH she wants to grab his face and tell him she's about to push his head up his ass alright, what the fuck does he know about giving birth, has he ever tried to pass a bowling ball?
Another contraction and the pain makes her throw her head back and howl like a wounded animal.
“She's crowning, keep pushing,” says the doctor. Zippy's eyes flutter open-- then stay that way.
She sees what's in the room with them. And remembers the reason she refused the epidural.
Zippy spasmodically grips the sheets, until her nails are biting her palms through the fabric, and stares down the shedim who are gathered, waiting, around her spread legs.
The tallest waits at the foot of the bed, a human in form but a silhouette, a shadow, that swallows all the light as a black hole might. She is a woman cut out from a patch of starless night. She rests two black hands on the bed to catch Zippy's baby. The doctor passes in and out of the night-black body as he moves, never knowing what it is he stands in the middle of.
“Fuck. Off,” says Zippy, and the doctors and nurses blink. But the queen of the shedim only laughs, like broken bells.
I will have this one. You cheated us of the boy, little witch, cutting him from your body! But this one, ah. Bring her forth to us!
“Over my dead body,” Zippy hisses. “Go away. You get one chance to do it under your own power.”
The medical professionals exchange looks, but Zippy doesn't notice. She's shifted now. The hospital room is thin and colorless, distant, the noises coming from far away. The line between this world and the next is tentative at a birth, and she is straddling that gateway-- behind her the room, before her an endless gray plain where the wind is always blowing and there is no line between sky and earth.
Lilit hisses, and the shedim crowd taller, thicker. Across the plain more are coming to their mother's summons, flying in the shapes of shadow-crows, coming on like a thunderstorm.
Zippy opens her mouth to snap back an answer that will burn like a star, but another contraction hits and she screams instead, the sound of her agony making the winged things come on faster.
Someone a million miles away says hallucinating-- epidural-- and she swears, half panic. No, no drugs, no fucking drugs, even local anesthesia travels through the body to her brain and Lilit will disappear. And she can't attack what she can't perceive.
“No, no fuck you, no epidural, I'm refusing it, goddammit--”
Now you blaspheme, laughs the queen of shadows. Come, come, give us this one. I am so hungry for a little daughter. Let me have her. It will go easier on you, m'kashepah.
“You don't get her,” she snaps back. “Last warning, bitch--”
Another wave of pain, red and raw, threatening to take her back to the hospital room, to blind her. She struggles to keep her eyes open, to stay here despite the ocean-breakers of agony. It's no worse than the desert, no worse than her knee and Mazreel. She can handle it. It's only pain. Put it into the box. Put it away. It can't touch her.
Fucking hell, it hurts.
When her vision clears of the fiery agony, Lilit has her hands there, between her legs, touching the baby's small wet dark head.
Zippy screams and raises her good leg to kick Lilit, savage as any lioness for her cub. “Get away!”
(A nurse dodges the kick and the doctor, who is giving orders for the epidural to be prepped, has to weigh the risks of a sedative as well.)
From the corner of her eye, glancing back into the real world, she sees the glint of the long needle. “No! No! No drugs you bastards, I'll-- I'll sue-- malpractice you into the stone age you sonuvabitch I said no drugs, my brother's a lawyer--”
There's hands grabbing at her, her arms, her legs, and she cannot tell if they are the shedim or the nurses. Lilit has shaken off the kick and is reaching again for her child and the needle is bright and the panic builds, she can't fight a battle on two fronts at once, the shedim are enough without these well-intentioned people fucking her over, giving her their medicines and dooming her daughter, no, no, no--
“My daughter has requested no medication. And her brother, as she says, is a lawyer.”
She almost sobs with relief to hear her father's voice. Heaven knows how he got into the OR, it's supposed to be just the staff and her, even Finn's outside the room but her father is Rabbi Jacob Levine and it's amazing the places he gets into. Papi goes where he's needed.
She tries to focus on him. He is standing behind her shoulder, looking out into the plain with her. Here, at least, he is squeezing her shoulder, whether or not he actually is in the hospital room. In his hand is a bright flare, a white star, the amulet he has taken from her ankle, to be put onto the child once she is born.
But she must first be born.
I have this side, he tells her. Concentrate on what you must.
Zipporah shudders and nods, and turns her attention back to Lilit, who snarls at her and gestures for her children to attack. And they begin to scream and chatter, like monkeys mad with hatred.
They curse and spit and jeer, saying words that writhe through the cold wind of that place in devastating, insidious patterns. Like maggots, like eels. Corruptions of the names of G-d, foulness, twisted inversions of the holy words she must say-- trying to drown them out, prevent her from remembering them, shaping them, speaking them. They clog her ears like mucus, and try to ooze in further.
Lilit smiles, teeth like knives shining in the night-stuff of her face, and takes hold of Zippy's daughter's head and shoulders, tugging, tugging, tugging her out.
She screams something wordless, and then forces the four characters of the Name to being and cracks them back at Lilit like a whip. It hurts as it comes out her throat-- tears at the lining-- she tastes blood. But the Name burns bright.
At forty-three Zipporah is no longer the little witch Lilit calls her, no longer the over-ambitious woman that freed Mazreel in her ignorance. At forty-three, she has earned power with blood and pain.
The Name is letters of fire that fly to the shadow-woman and burn her. Lilit stumbles back, releasing the baby.
Zipporah shows no mercy. Senoy! Sansenoy! Semangelof! she cries, her throat still raw from the power of the Word that had coursed through it seconds before, but the names of the angels still come out clear. Nonsense to the doctor and the nurses. Brands and blows to Lilit, recrimination, fire.
The fallen queen of the world pulls back, keening, and the shedim pause, uncertain, before regrouping around her. They huddle in a black mass, hissing among themselves like oil in a hot pan as they look at her, considering.
“Bring it on,” Zipporah snarls, blood flecking her words.
Lilit spits. A black nastiness that arcs for the child, so weak, so unprotected-- but suddenly the star is there, blazing hot as a wildfire, and the poison sizzles to nothing mid-air. The rabbi has slipped the amulet around Rachel's tiny neck, back in the hospital room, and now steps out of the doctor's frustrated path.
The dark queen screams in fury, but it's pointless now; she can do nothing more than the wind and they both know it. Zippy permits herself a she-wolf's grin as she slumps back against the pillows and soiled sheets.
They give her her child, once the doctor is satisfied she's not such a stripe of insane that would pose a danger to the baby. Rachel is a small red thing, wrinkled and scowling, but Zippy feels a surge of love and pride as strong as a tidal force. Her daughter. Hers. She fought for her; she has won her from the lion's jaws.
There is a birthmark on top her head, a dark splotch. Zippy knows it is where Lilit touched her. But that touch was all she had. She's protected now.
Rachel will be strong. Rachel will be her inheritor of these things, the sacred names and the power of the pot-shard that dangles now in the little bag around her neck. She'll teach her, and the tiny infant will grow to a wise woman, someone who will right wrongs, protect others, serve G-d.
Confident of these things, Zippy is smiling when she finally sleeps, exhausted but triumphant.
***
...I fought for you, Rachel. In ways you'll never know. Because you've decided you don't want to know anything about that part of your heritage.
I have to respect that, but it hurts. Oh, it hurts, my girl-child, my daughter. It hurts to see you making the choices you are, and know that every time I try to change your path I'm doing nothing but driving you further away. I don't know how to talk to you.
I'm sorry for that, too.
Her tea is cold. Zippy will get up and pour another cup. Soon. The sky is getting dark outside the window, the white snow becoming gray.
Soon she will get up, make dinner for one, make more tea, feed the cats, get the Tylenol. Soon she will go back to the computer and try again to write her apology.
Soon.
For now, it's easier to stay in the past, to think of old victories rather than current defeats.
ooc- probably only a few weeks after this... just took me... er... 1.5 years to write? oops
I'm writing to apologize. What I did, what I said-- you didn't deserve that. I lost my temper because of other things going on and I took it out on you. That's not acceptable, and I apologize.
I've wanted to apologize for the last three weeks. I'm hoping you'll read this at least, since you're refusing to talk to me on the phone the times I've tried to call
No. Crap. Zippy grimaces at the words she's just written, then taps delete-delete-delete.
I'm hoping that in a letter I can say things to you better than I seem to face-to-face. I know that losing my temper doesn't excuse what I said, doesn't make it okay. It's just that I was feeling pretty damn ganged-up on and then you said what you did and
Argh. No. Zippy puts her forehead into her hand and rubs at her temples. This isn't going well. At least with the letter she can delete this shit before she actually says it out loud.
She erases the last sentence before getting to her feet and heading into the kitchen for another cup of tea. Limp back, not for the computer desk, but the couch, settle herself down on it and close her eyes against the pain.
Her knee's still protesting the winter. There's Tylenol but she's too stubborn. And anyway it's in the bathroom. And anyway anyway it won't do anything for that dull tight chest-pain, the heart-pain that actually is located more in the gut.
It's snowing outside and the snow muffles all the city's noises. No honk and hum of traffic to interrupt the silence in the apartment. The cats are sleeping by the radiator and there is no Ben, there is no Rachel.
She raises her teacup, to sip with a humorless grimace. How many times she's wanted a little peace and quiet from Rachel's bitching? Who knew it was so easy to get-- just destroy your relationship with your daughter with a few stupid words, and there you go.
Zippy stares at the snow that falls past the window, falls and falls and falls, covering the city, covering all sins and all secrets.
My daughter Rachel, she would write, to be read by nobody. My hard-won child. Miriam should have been your first name, not your middle; Miriam-- my bitterness, rebellious blood. Too much like me in all the wrong ways. And yet when you were born I almost called you Atarah. My crown. My victory.
I should have known the battle to bring you into the world was only a taste of things to come.
***
October 30, 1993.
She's refusing the epidural for the third time and wondering just why the hell she is. The reasoning behind that choice doesn't seem so compelling when she has another human being forcing itself out a space between her legs that was not freaking supposed to accommodate something this size no matter what anybody, including Holy Scripture or biology textbooks, tell her.
Ben had been a C-section. Zippy's really, really regretting the decision to have this one naturally. She's wearing a small leather pouch around one ankle, an amulet that is supposed to provide protection from some of the evils of childbirth; she's pretty sure she must have made the damn thing wrong.
She's wet with sweat from back to belly, crown to calves, and each time the doctor says now PUSH she wants to grab his face and tell him she's about to push his head up his ass alright, what the fuck does he know about giving birth, has he ever tried to pass a bowling ball?
Another contraction and the pain makes her throw her head back and howl like a wounded animal.
“She's crowning, keep pushing,” says the doctor. Zippy's eyes flutter open-- then stay that way.
She sees what's in the room with them. And remembers the reason she refused the epidural.
Zippy spasmodically grips the sheets, until her nails are biting her palms through the fabric, and stares down the shedim who are gathered, waiting, around her spread legs.
The tallest waits at the foot of the bed, a human in form but a silhouette, a shadow, that swallows all the light as a black hole might. She is a woman cut out from a patch of starless night. She rests two black hands on the bed to catch Zippy's baby. The doctor passes in and out of the night-black body as he moves, never knowing what it is he stands in the middle of.
“Fuck. Off,” says Zippy, and the doctors and nurses blink. But the queen of the shedim only laughs, like broken bells.
I will have this one. You cheated us of the boy, little witch, cutting him from your body! But this one, ah. Bring her forth to us!
“Over my dead body,” Zippy hisses. “Go away. You get one chance to do it under your own power.”
The medical professionals exchange looks, but Zippy doesn't notice. She's shifted now. The hospital room is thin and colorless, distant, the noises coming from far away. The line between this world and the next is tentative at a birth, and she is straddling that gateway-- behind her the room, before her an endless gray plain where the wind is always blowing and there is no line between sky and earth.
Lilit hisses, and the shedim crowd taller, thicker. Across the plain more are coming to their mother's summons, flying in the shapes of shadow-crows, coming on like a thunderstorm.
Zippy opens her mouth to snap back an answer that will burn like a star, but another contraction hits and she screams instead, the sound of her agony making the winged things come on faster.
Someone a million miles away says hallucinating-- epidural-- and she swears, half panic. No, no drugs, no fucking drugs, even local anesthesia travels through the body to her brain and Lilit will disappear. And she can't attack what she can't perceive.
“No, no fuck you, no epidural, I'm refusing it, goddammit--”
Now you blaspheme, laughs the queen of shadows. Come, come, give us this one. I am so hungry for a little daughter. Let me have her. It will go easier on you, m'kashepah.
“You don't get her,” she snaps back. “Last warning, bitch--”
Another wave of pain, red and raw, threatening to take her back to the hospital room, to blind her. She struggles to keep her eyes open, to stay here despite the ocean-breakers of agony. It's no worse than the desert, no worse than her knee and Mazreel. She can handle it. It's only pain. Put it into the box. Put it away. It can't touch her.
Fucking hell, it hurts.
When her vision clears of the fiery agony, Lilit has her hands there, between her legs, touching the baby's small wet dark head.
Zippy screams and raises her good leg to kick Lilit, savage as any lioness for her cub. “Get away!”
(A nurse dodges the kick and the doctor, who is giving orders for the epidural to be prepped, has to weigh the risks of a sedative as well.)
From the corner of her eye, glancing back into the real world, she sees the glint of the long needle. “No! No! No drugs you bastards, I'll-- I'll sue-- malpractice you into the stone age you sonuvabitch I said no drugs, my brother's a lawyer--”
There's hands grabbing at her, her arms, her legs, and she cannot tell if they are the shedim or the nurses. Lilit has shaken off the kick and is reaching again for her child and the needle is bright and the panic builds, she can't fight a battle on two fronts at once, the shedim are enough without these well-intentioned people fucking her over, giving her their medicines and dooming her daughter, no, no, no--
“My daughter has requested no medication. And her brother, as she says, is a lawyer.”
She almost sobs with relief to hear her father's voice. Heaven knows how he got into the OR, it's supposed to be just the staff and her, even Finn's outside the room but her father is Rabbi Jacob Levine and it's amazing the places he gets into. Papi goes where he's needed.
She tries to focus on him. He is standing behind her shoulder, looking out into the plain with her. Here, at least, he is squeezing her shoulder, whether or not he actually is in the hospital room. In his hand is a bright flare, a white star, the amulet he has taken from her ankle, to be put onto the child once she is born.
But she must first be born.
I have this side, he tells her. Concentrate on what you must.
Zipporah shudders and nods, and turns her attention back to Lilit, who snarls at her and gestures for her children to attack. And they begin to scream and chatter, like monkeys mad with hatred.
They curse and spit and jeer, saying words that writhe through the cold wind of that place in devastating, insidious patterns. Like maggots, like eels. Corruptions of the names of G-d, foulness, twisted inversions of the holy words she must say-- trying to drown them out, prevent her from remembering them, shaping them, speaking them. They clog her ears like mucus, and try to ooze in further.
Lilit smiles, teeth like knives shining in the night-stuff of her face, and takes hold of Zippy's daughter's head and shoulders, tugging, tugging, tugging her out.
She screams something wordless, and then forces the four characters of the Name to being and cracks them back at Lilit like a whip. It hurts as it comes out her throat-- tears at the lining-- she tastes blood. But the Name burns bright.
At forty-three Zipporah is no longer the little witch Lilit calls her, no longer the over-ambitious woman that freed Mazreel in her ignorance. At forty-three, she has earned power with blood and pain.
The Name is letters of fire that fly to the shadow-woman and burn her. Lilit stumbles back, releasing the baby.
Zipporah shows no mercy. Senoy! Sansenoy! Semangelof! she cries, her throat still raw from the power of the Word that had coursed through it seconds before, but the names of the angels still come out clear. Nonsense to the doctor and the nurses. Brands and blows to Lilit, recrimination, fire.
The fallen queen of the world pulls back, keening, and the shedim pause, uncertain, before regrouping around her. They huddle in a black mass, hissing among themselves like oil in a hot pan as they look at her, considering.
“Bring it on,” Zipporah snarls, blood flecking her words.
Lilit spits. A black nastiness that arcs for the child, so weak, so unprotected-- but suddenly the star is there, blazing hot as a wildfire, and the poison sizzles to nothing mid-air. The rabbi has slipped the amulet around Rachel's tiny neck, back in the hospital room, and now steps out of the doctor's frustrated path.
The dark queen screams in fury, but it's pointless now; she can do nothing more than the wind and they both know it. Zippy permits herself a she-wolf's grin as she slumps back against the pillows and soiled sheets.
They give her her child, once the doctor is satisfied she's not such a stripe of insane that would pose a danger to the baby. Rachel is a small red thing, wrinkled and scowling, but Zippy feels a surge of love and pride as strong as a tidal force. Her daughter. Hers. She fought for her; she has won her from the lion's jaws.
There is a birthmark on top her head, a dark splotch. Zippy knows it is where Lilit touched her. But that touch was all she had. She's protected now.
Rachel will be strong. Rachel will be her inheritor of these things, the sacred names and the power of the pot-shard that dangles now in the little bag around her neck. She'll teach her, and the tiny infant will grow to a wise woman, someone who will right wrongs, protect others, serve G-d.
Confident of these things, Zippy is smiling when she finally sleeps, exhausted but triumphant.
***
...I fought for you, Rachel. In ways you'll never know. Because you've decided you don't want to know anything about that part of your heritage.
I have to respect that, but it hurts. Oh, it hurts, my girl-child, my daughter. It hurts to see you making the choices you are, and know that every time I try to change your path I'm doing nothing but driving you further away. I don't know how to talk to you.
I'm sorry for that, too.
Her tea is cold. Zippy will get up and pour another cup. Soon. The sky is getting dark outside the window, the white snow becoming gray.
Soon she will get up, make dinner for one, make more tea, feed the cats, get the Tylenol. Soon she will go back to the computer and try again to write her apology.
Soon.
For now, it's easier to stay in the past, to think of old victories rather than current defeats.
ooc- probably only a few weeks after this... just took me... er... 1.5 years to write? oops