The Daughters of Eve
Pairings: gen (perhaps Mal/Cobb, though it does seem more gen than anything else...)
Notes: GUYS HELP I have been sitting here for half an hour trying to think of a summary and I CAN'T, not only was I never very good at it, I am also really fucking out of practice, on top of which, this is one of those things that are hard to summarize without giving everything away, so I don't know I DON'T THINK THIS FIC HAS A SUMMARY ;_____; Maybe "This is a story about Mallorie Miles Cobb"???? fhgla;ldk;alghe THAT TELLS YOU ABSOLUTELY NOTHING but let's go with that oh my god I am so sorry.
Summary: This is a story about Mallorie Miles Cobb.
She hates California, chafes at it, at the absurd wholesome fecundity of America, at the perennial spring that plagues her, at the promise the land holds, pulsing and birthing and breeding, proud of its own abundance, ignorant as livestock, she chafes at the sun and the earth, at the anxious buzzing of her own husband as he flits about the house, loving her, thinking of her, caring for her, having fucked her, having poured himself into her, his work done. She leans her head back against the sofa and closes her eyes in irritation, thirsting for blood.
Mal, he says, do you need anything, because it is her first pregnancy and all her rage is new to him, precious and sublime.
She needs blood. She dreams about blood, daydreams, because her nights are blank to her. The slippery iron trickle of blood sliding down her throat, making her choke and gag, making her claw at the bowl of the toilet as she retches up bile. She is thirsty.
Does she need anything? What a question, she thinks. As though she could want anything other than blood, when she is large with child, heavy and hurting and tired from trying to spin this delicate thing to life inside her. How can she make something out of nothing, mold a creature of flesh and blood without flesh and blood to feed on? It takes life to make life. She wants meat, she wants blood, to suck her husband dry until he knows the pain of growing a person where no person fits, carving out space for a body where there is only room for one. The agony of making something out of nothing.
No, Dom, she tells him, too tired to explain, maybe something sour, because that is the pregnancy she has learned from books and movies, the stories that have taught her to be nauseous, to crave fruits, to clutch to her back, to light up when her baby tries to kick its way out of her. Maybe oranges, blood oranges.
Later as she bites into a dark mouthful, her lips and teeth stained with something so far from perfect, Dom tucks a bit of her limp hair behind her ear.
I love you, he says. You look beautiful.
Do I, she says, greedy swallow after swallow like appeasing an angry god, throwing her offerings down the bottomless vortex of her own stomach, swirling, churning, frothing, voracious. Her belly swells in uneasy satisfaction. She is twenty-eight, a child.
+
She takes it holed up alone in the bathroom, when she should be arming herself with pearls, painting on her face. She takes it for Dom, because she wants him to put his faith in something he isn't ashamed of, something more solid to him than what he would call her intuition, apologetic, like the word is dirty. But of course she knows already, the news in her clamoring for attention.
She perches on the edge of the sink, playing at a routine with the plastic stick in her hand, always tiny plastic things built to resemble someone else's life, dollhouse furniture she arranges around herself in the hopes that it will finally turn her a tiny plastic thing. This is the only way she has learned, how she was taught that women waited. But the minutes are unbearable, interminable things, only crawling past to tell her what she knows already, and Dom is outside in the bedroom unsure of which tie to wear, how to look when no one will see him in the dark, being perfectly docile in his appreciation of any one of a thousand Italian operas where a woman dies for love and passion is something noble and holy and wonderful.
She tugs down the edge of her camisole and bares her chest to the mirror. This tube of lipstick is a present from her mother, as most of her arsenal is, hardly touched, still long and deadly when she untwists it out of its scabbard. She crushes it into her skin, forming each waxy letter with care, shavings caked across her breastbone, crimson with glamor.
L'ENFER, she writes, feeling it burn.
How can she carry a child to term, how can she hold it to her breast, when there is nothing inside her but demons? Claws will make for poor mothering. She rests a hand on her still-smooth stomach and calls for the little tadpole in her womb. Do you know what misery you are headed for? Do you know your father has wed a wolf? Would that you had never known me, been mothered by someone with a softer touch.
Dom asks through the door, Honey?
Your poison, she thinks, and says, I'm almost ready. She takes cream and tissues to her chest, smearing out the name she has given herself, capping and tucking away the abused stump of lipstick, one more gift she has ruined for lack of knowing what to do. She looks at her tiny plastic stick. One, two lines dashed off neatly for her, for Dom, for the world that requires filling.
She opens the door and Dom is shuffling in his suit, eager for her approval. He loves her so much. She loves him. It's not the dearth of love that will drive her to ruin him, her unsuspecting husband caught like a fly, blissful and innocent of married life as he is of all things, most importantly of her, of the hell that breathes within her.
You're going to be a father, she says.
He says-- well, what do you think he says.
+
In the Garden of Eden, naked and timorous, Adam ate of the forbidden fruit. Men, look well, this is the coward father of your fathers, created in God's image, whose blood still runs in your veins. This is he who was not strong enough to carry the weight of his own transgression. Whose mouthful of apple caught in his throat as he ate, unable to swallow for the guilt, and there it lies still lodged in your own throats, choking you, undigested. There is the tale of your fear.
But Eve, she chewed. We swallowed. We pushed our sin into our stomachs, deeper inside of ourselves, called it our own and let it ravage us. In penance we matched you tear for tear, but you never knew courage like we did, the nerve to brand yourself a sinner, to fall without being pushed.
We do it still, all we mothers, harboring the festering truth of our disobedience within our bodies. Birthing the mealy flesh of our apples when they have grown large inside us, where we have kept them warm and kept them safe as they swelled for nine long months. The fruit turned fruit again, for us to hold and claim as our own. You would tremble under a bravery like ours. The thought of loving your curse.
+
If she is a girl, her mother says, you must give her a frivolous name.
I don't know what it is, she says, mouth busy with her oranges. I don't want to know.
Don't weigh her down with your grief, her mother says. Like you could teach her guilt every time you call her, atone for my agony, you who pained me, you were hell on the mother that bore you. She'll have enough of that in her own time. You'll see.
Is that what you did? she asks. Is that how you named me?
Yes, her mother says. It's how your grandmother named me.
It seems innocuous enough, Marie, Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu. A million little girls trailing after the virgin mother, she of the immaculate heart, the seven sorrows. But the skin across her mother's cheeks are dry and drawn and Mallorie can't imagine her in her youth, fresh-faced. Born already shriveled and ready for suffering.
None of the pleasure, all of the pain, her mother says. Being a virgin mother is nothing more than that. Mary would have refused, if she'd known better, if they'd let her.
What about me? she asks. What about my name?
Mallorie, ma malheureuse, her mother says, and dabs away the juice at the corner of her mouth with her thumb, a tender, impoverished gesture. Ma malchanceuse.
+
She honestly believes it, that she will be the most terrible mother, that she was never meant to be entrusted with anything so valuable. She will shatter her child. She does not know how to love it, she thinks.
But after hours of cursing and thrashing and Dom's face draining pale with worry, they finally allow her to touch her baby, they tell her, It's a girl, and she starts to cry, not because of the exhaustion in her bones, not because it still hurts, even after the shot and the numb flood of excitement. She starts to cry because her baby girl is so soft and small and beautiful in her hands, and she knows she would never break her, and she is going to be a good mother, she is going to be a wonderful mother, she feels violence coursing through her at the thought of being allowed to protect her. She touches her nose to hers, to the wrinkles in her pink skin. She wants to lick her clean and carry her home, her cub, her child, her baby girl, bite-sized miracle, nine-month apple, the price of her sin, the love of her life. Do you know your father has wed a wolf, she thinks, euphoric. I would kill for you.
They are crying together, shutting out the insignificant jabber of the world around them, the hubbub of intruders, crying because they have no words between them yet, still so raw and together and in love. She may be bad at being a woman, may always be, but for this daughter with her crumpled face, this tight cotton bundle of her own flesh and blood, she will be a good mother. With all her fury against the wide-open world and all its empty spaces, the task of being fruitful, the dark soil, the ritual of multiplying, still she can fold away her rancor for a moment to wrap her arms around her child.
It's not your fault, little girl, my love, she whispers against the tufts of her daughter's hair. You and I, we are stranded together. We will burn together. It's not your fault.
+
At times the infinitude of her duty suffocates her, filling her up like concrete poured into a mold, pinning her to her bed, unable to breathe. She has been taught to be responsible, to fulfill the demands made of her, and Eve's task is now her own. Her children are made examples to her. See what you are capable of, Mallorie, you have been doing so well. Open yourself up and work a little harder, for the insistence of the earth, for your mothers who listened and did the same.
When she can force herself into motion again, she stumbles to the nursery where her children await her. These are her treasured moments. Phillipa is two years old, all hers, though the cornsilk bob of her hair is from Dom. She is a busy squirrel, running across the walls, always her hands full of something to present to her mother, a certain affectionate enthusiasm that will trouble her in age, too eager to please those who please her.
This, too, is your father's doing, she says, brushing the crushed remnants of a pansy petal off of Phillipa's palm. Thank you for the gift, my dearest.
James begins to cry, in envy or in petition, and she leans into the sweet pocket of air above his crib, his diminutive throne. She rests her elbows on the fence that keeps him still, stirs the mobile suspended over him, birds and clouds, stars and suns and moons plucked out of the sky, brought down to appease his hunger.
Perhaps in this, you are more like me, she says. You are also my dearest, little one, you are also my most beloved.
His sobs nestle into quiet hiccups, face unscrunching. He reaches for her with his aimless hands, impossibly perfect, knowing her, wanting her. She scoops him into her arms and Phillipa winds herself around her leg, and Mary, she feels loved. She seeks refuge from her burdens in what reminds her of them, the dimpled bodies of her children a summons, an intimation that there are more of them lying patiently in wait inside her. It pains her, it does, but she has never loved anything so much.
You will grow to be a man, she tells James, hushing him, tracing the baby-fat folds in his neck, and she isn't sure whether she means for it to be benediction or accusation. She loves them both, but of course, he will never understand her any better than he does now. She looks into his face, hopeless, at the beautiful incomprehensible foreigner in her embrace. He is already parting from her, and she is in love.
+
Had she not known dreaming, she would have broken years hence, flattened under her load, she who feels it so keenly. But she ran to dreams like she ran to her children's nursery. Searching for consolation, finding it there in the endless folds that sleep allowed her.
For Dom, the dream is another thing to peer at and take apart, to get his hands on, to touch and define, the way her father understood it. They want to measure what they can feed it, what it will spit back out at them. But she knows there is no mathematics here; the dreaming is a fathomless, unreasonable and generous place, no quid pro quo to speak of, just the abandon of creation with no commensurate cost.
It's what she was born to do. Create, create, take the indifferent seed of your husband and coax it to fruit. He will spill himself inside you, and it is your work to prepare the ground, to water and tend to the sprout, letting its roots take hold in the hot cavern of your body, to feed it with all the blood there is in you, hurting for it, screaming for it, to push it out of you with more sweat than your husband ever shed in harvest, to love it against all odds. And then to do it all over again, as many times over as your brittle life will allow.
Only in dreaming can she manage anything at all like it. There in the underworld she can let loose to breed, like parting the burning skin of her chest. Down below, there is more in her than fire, suddenly capable of the charge that Eve appointed her. Even she is adequate here, vibrant with potential, with grass and vines, with flowering trees, free to shape entire worlds out of nothing, unlimited and bountiful, fertile as the goddess she was ordered to be. Flocks of birds burst from her ribcage, a deer springs from the pit of her stomach, and it takes nothing out of her. She exults. Down below, she could bring forth a kingdom of her own brood.
Occasionally Dom is exasperated with her, though he tries not to let it flit to his surface. He wants to prod the dreaming and force sense out of it, to make it bend to him, and he pins the blame on science and believes himself, but she knows better, of course. It's only Adam's urge to hold dominion. She has courted science, knows its reach well. Far as it may stretch, it can't pull her back from filling the dreams with herself. She crowds a flat land with groves of pomegranate trees, shoved up against one another, thick, lush and impenetrable. A forest, the fruits suspended like gorgeous full lanterns for her.
She cracks a pomegranate open. Maybe it's this she should have named her craving, not oranges. Each kernel is ripe to bursting, teeming with life, dark and private in its fullness. Their blood fills her mouth, runs down her wrists, staining the front of her shirt. A bright gush of flavor. The branches murmur in the breeze.
Mal, calls her husband, his voice strangled thin by the leaves, where are you?
I am Persephone, she thinks, running. Hide me, Hades, my mother cannot call me to the surface yet. She will have to suffer alone, for I have eaten of your feast. I am yours for fifty summers.
Dom tracks her down like game, by the trail of her bare footprints in the soil. We have to go, he says. James is almost done with his nap.
She lets the husk of the pomegranate drop to the ground, wiping her lips with the back of her hand. Her children, yes. Were it not for them, she should sleep forever.
+
In the blink of one careless afternoon, fifty years pass inside her. She wakes an old woman.
Unexpectedly, it seems, she has kept her promise to the dreaming. She locks herself in the bathroom and watches herself breathe until Dom pounds on the door, alarmed. She can't recognize herself. Her skin is smooth, unblemished, and her limbs are young and strong.
What have you brought me back to? she thinks, desperate.
Her children are cross and hungry. She and her husband prepare for dinner in silence, afraid to look at each other, at themselves, to hear the unclouded voice rise from their throats.
He pulled her up in the same old way, invoking her children above. By the close of fifty years she was happy to have forgotten, deep down in the dreaming where she could create everything she needed, raising mountains, houses to lie down inside. And it didn't matter much that in time, steel and glass took the place of untamed vegetation, because even the steel and glass was of her own making, her creation. She made as she was made to, and it felt right. She was home.
But for the children she once brought forth, wringing them out of her body with an anguish long lost to her. In limbo she had no need for birthing, the turmoil of her fertility sated into silence by the thousand other things she could summon to her fingertips. But when at the close of fifty years Dom told her what he knew, that they were dreaming, asleep on the floor of their living room, threaded through with IV lines-- she threw it all aside to return to her cubs, didn't she? She loved them, the moment she was allowed to remember them.
I am a mother still, she thinks, as James finishes feeding and drifts into a doze, as Phillipa climbs out of her chair and runs back upstairs, leaving their parents alone at the kitchen table, older than ever, still shell-shocked, and Mallorie once again a woman who must pay for her womanhood somehow.
+
Fifty years' worth of memories fade into dust, as dream-years invariably do. But the words of her husband as he beckoned her into waking, they keep creeping back to her, insidious as a serpent, beguiling as the temptation of knowledge. If this is reality, Mal, if you're awake, then where are James and Phillipa?
A week after shaking the stiffness from her back, she still ponders the same question. Where are James and Phillipa? She clutches them to her chest until James begins to fuss, until Phillipa squirms for air, like she could press them back inside herself if only she wished it hard enough. Taking them back into her, like when they needed her, when she was all the world they knew, their warm sweet ocean, lulling them to sleep by the distant thrum of her heart.
It occurs to her; this chaos can't be what her life was meant for. If limbo was too imperfect to hold her for long, then if she keeps swimming upwards through the layers, casting aside one onion-peel dream at a time, won't she eventually surface at Eden? Breaking free of the river, stepping out from the water naked and immaculate, into some existence better than this crooked, unfair thing? Where she won't need to go to war with her own treacherous body, the unborn voices in her womb demanding, Let us out.
Somewhere above this is a better waking, where she'll only be asked to give as much as she's been given. That's where she needs to be. That's where her children need to be, that's where they must have been all along, where James never grows into a stranger, never grows to puzzle over her, at the baffling creature his mother is to him, only barely recognizable as the shape of a person at all, across the chasm he has placed between them.
And Phillipa, for Phillipa, for her daughter, the heiress of her tribulations, she needs to make it back to paradise. To set Phillipa free, to allow her the luxury of coming to age where she can withhold herself as she pleases. Somewhere above this is her daughter, woman enough without having to prove it, wild and proud, unshackled.
I know it, Dom, she tells him under the covers. I know we are still dreaming.
He startles when he hears it, jerking away from her. Wide-eyed, he stares down at her, his face ashen in the moonlight.
Ah, she thinks. I have found you out.
+
Her husband tries to tell her she is wrong, and she pities him, until it tires her. He grips her by her arms, fingers digging blue into her flesh, holding her in place like he always has, and says something about limbo and what he placed in her strongbox.
Dom, it's all right, she says, soothing at first. You've planted things inside me before that didn't belong there.
She laughs at her own joke, and he looks horrified, doesn't mention it a second time. That sours her; she only meant to make fun.
Just let me talk to my mother, please, she tells him. But he says, Why your mother, and Let me call your father, he'll know what to do, and He's the expert, which stokes her rage and makes her tear his hands off of her.
My father, she spits, expert of my own body?
This isn't about your-- about your body, Mal, he pleads.
And isn't that just like him to say, like her father, all of them so willingly deaf to her. It breaks her heart to think that once, they too breathed nothing but the air their mothers gave them, that this too is what her little boy will grow into, the lord reigning over his bedlam of silly, raving sows. Mary, she needs to wake.
You're not dreaming, he says.
I don't want you to tell me that, she shouts, of course you would say that. Bring me my mother. Let me talk to my mother.
What her mother says is, Ma malheureuse, ma malchanceuse, it's not your fault, but then she tucks her a little tighter under her arm, and whispers, hushed and frantic against her temple, Don't go, don't leave me here alone.
Oh, maman, Sainte Marie, thinks Mallorie, but I must, Mother Eve.
+
Why must Dom be so stubborn? Can't you let me help you? she asks him. Wouldn't you like to see our children? And then, when she realizes what is giving him pause, she strokes his cheek and says, It's all right, Dom, I will still love you, even after we wake up, even when you do not own me anymore. I promise.
But even that won't clear the clouds from his face, and really, is sovereignty so difficult a thing to surrender? Is it so calamitous to no longer hold court over the world, every man a king, every man a rooster among his hens, the wise benefactor, the protector of his womenfolk? As though it were an insult to stand beside her instead of towering over her, the way they used to before they tasted the fruit, before they covered themselves in shame.
Deeper down in the dreaming, she could give her duty her all, and once she thought it Eden, a home for her to rest. But that was keeping a sinking ship afloat with nothing but her hands, cupped to bail the saltwater out. Futile in the end. All this is no better than a nightmare, besieging her with the illusion of her own fecundity, asking her still to make something out of nothing.
Twenty years, thirty years here in sleep, and time will come for this Phillipa to wed. Dom will walk her down the aisle, offer her trembling neck upon the altar. He will smile at her, dance with her, and give her away, give away what he never really had, what he never understood, all the while as Mallorie watches, taught to rejoice in the death of her daughter.
You will have me stay for a beggar's fate, she says, and Dom will not look at her, helpless, useless.
+
Cast out of her only home, Eve stood in the wrath of the Lord, awaiting her punishment. Legs were then taken from the serpent, Adam then made an enemy to the land, cursed to toil all his days to break it under his will. To her was given the agony of childbirth, the indignity of enduring her husband as her master.
But she might have accepted this penance, silent as a stone, were it not for the vastness of the world before her. Were it not for the lonely clamor of the unpeopled wilderness, reaching out to her in supplication, in command. And the pain foretold for her was just an afterthought in the face of the real task that fell to her, filling the world with her young, her body a vessel, the only plot of land in all of creation that would willingly bear fruit for Adam, who had no more to do than spend himself inside her and walk away.
The world outside Eden was wide and empty, Havilah and Ethiopia, beyond the banks of the Hiddekel and the Euphrates. Eve, la mère de tous les vivants, looked out over the Earth and wept.
+
On the anniversary of her own death, when her father smiled at her and danced with her and gave her away without ever really having had her, Mallorie waits for her husband, perched four seconds above the ground. This is not the way she has learned, how she was taught that women left; but she can't bear the prospect of walking into water, of yielding herself to its embrace, when it will fill her lungs like rebuking her, tireless mother that it is, chiding her for being unable to birth as the ocean birthed.
Please, Dom shouts from across the chasm he has placed between them. Come back inside, please listen, Mal--
No, for heaven's sake, she shouts back at him, leaning as far forward as she can with her hands still wrapped around the ledge. You listen to me, for once, can't you allow me that? Can't you listen to me?
You're not going to wake up, he says, you're not dreaming, you're going to die, don't--
She always meant to take him with her, because he loves her, because she loves him, of course, but mostly because she loves her wolf-cubs too much to return to them alone. But he's looking at her like she's the one who needs convincing, moving slowly, patiently, like shooing a child away from sugar, and it infuriates her that he is still so determined to cross her, that he still thinks her a little fool. She is tired of dreaming.
Here is your goddamn train, she says, leaving with or without you.
Mal, he begins, choked, stretching a hand out to her.
She shakes her shoe loose, slipping it from her foot. They chase it down with their eyes, both of them, watching it light the way down for her. Well, it's not so far, when they've done it all before, from higher up than this. They've fallen from the grace of God into perdition, and wasn't that a plunge to commemorate? After that, what's a few stories onto asphalt, Dom?
The air brushes across her legs. Something itches under her skin, and absently she rubs at her bare heel with her leftover shoe-- but no, isn't that odd, it's not flesh she finds there, callous with years of being bent and boxed in. She looks down, and there are feathers at her heels, midnight dark, straight and strong and sharp, growing out of her wretched bones, vicious and magnificent, pushing their way out of her other shoe, stretching into the air like a sapling toward the sun.
Dom, she calls, look, can you see them? Can you see the feathers?
He might answer, he might not, but she can't wait for his equivocation, unclasping her earrings from her ears, letting them drop into the abyss. And there they unfurl again, feathers behind her ears, pushing through her hair, their tips fluttering in the wind, so full of the promise of flight. They stir and her heart stirs with them, starting to beat for the first time in years, sending the blood tingling through her.
Only now you allow me this, she thinks, with a dash of bitterness. Only now you allow me to fly.
But even so, the feathers are there, glinting like knives, and she could pierce the skies with them, carrying herself away, all the way back home. She searches her arms for budding wings, but they remain smooth, disappointing-- she must find something to cast off, something that must be binding the wings, something holding them back, some trinket on her shoulders, on her arms, on her fingers--
Her wedding ring. It's her wedding ring. You, she thinks, wrenching it off of her finger, triumphant. It was you. Immediately feathers burst from her elbows, lining her skin, springing unbidden. And before it's too late, her fingers already starting to flatten into pinions-- she takes the ring in her hand and hurls it at her husband.
Take this back, she tells him.
On instinct he fumbles for it, arrested by that flash of gold. He catches it against his chest, losing it from sight for a moment of fitful panic, and in that moment -- while he is busied with the trappings of their union -- Mallorie spreads her wings and soars off the ledge, finally beautiful. A night-bird as she always was, before the flaming sword, before exiles and apples and snakes, older than her name, sculpted from the same majestic clay that formed Adam, too grand to confine to a single rib, vast, free of God and legacy, unblessed and uncursed-- Mary, oh, look at her, a night-bird again at last.
Notes: GUYS HELP I have been sitting here for half an hour trying to think of a summary and I CAN'T, not only was I never very good at it, I am also really fucking out of practice, on top of which, this is one of those things that are hard to summarize without giving everything away, so I don't know I DON'T THINK THIS FIC HAS A SUMMARY ;_____; Maybe "This is a story about Mallorie Miles Cobb"???? fhgla;ldk;alghe THAT TELLS YOU ABSOLUTELY NOTHING but let's go with that oh my god I am so sorry.
Summary: This is a story about Mallorie Miles Cobb.
She hates California, chafes at it, at the absurd wholesome fecundity of America, at the perennial spring that plagues her, at the promise the land holds, pulsing and birthing and breeding, proud of its own abundance, ignorant as livestock, she chafes at the sun and the earth, at the anxious buzzing of her own husband as he flits about the house, loving her, thinking of her, caring for her, having fucked her, having poured himself into her, his work done. She leans her head back against the sofa and closes her eyes in irritation, thirsting for blood.
Mal, he says, do you need anything, because it is her first pregnancy and all her rage is new to him, precious and sublime.
She needs blood. She dreams about blood, daydreams, because her nights are blank to her. The slippery iron trickle of blood sliding down her throat, making her choke and gag, making her claw at the bowl of the toilet as she retches up bile. She is thirsty.
Does she need anything? What a question, she thinks. As though she could want anything other than blood, when she is large with child, heavy and hurting and tired from trying to spin this delicate thing to life inside her. How can she make something out of nothing, mold a creature of flesh and blood without flesh and blood to feed on? It takes life to make life. She wants meat, she wants blood, to suck her husband dry until he knows the pain of growing a person where no person fits, carving out space for a body where there is only room for one. The agony of making something out of nothing.
No, Dom, she tells him, too tired to explain, maybe something sour, because that is the pregnancy she has learned from books and movies, the stories that have taught her to be nauseous, to crave fruits, to clutch to her back, to light up when her baby tries to kick its way out of her. Maybe oranges, blood oranges.
Later as she bites into a dark mouthful, her lips and teeth stained with something so far from perfect, Dom tucks a bit of her limp hair behind her ear.
I love you, he says. You look beautiful.
Do I, she says, greedy swallow after swallow like appeasing an angry god, throwing her offerings down the bottomless vortex of her own stomach, swirling, churning, frothing, voracious. Her belly swells in uneasy satisfaction. She is twenty-eight, a child.
+
She takes it holed up alone in the bathroom, when she should be arming herself with pearls, painting on her face. She takes it for Dom, because she wants him to put his faith in something he isn't ashamed of, something more solid to him than what he would call her intuition, apologetic, like the word is dirty. But of course she knows already, the news in her clamoring for attention.
She perches on the edge of the sink, playing at a routine with the plastic stick in her hand, always tiny plastic things built to resemble someone else's life, dollhouse furniture she arranges around herself in the hopes that it will finally turn her a tiny plastic thing. This is the only way she has learned, how she was taught that women waited. But the minutes are unbearable, interminable things, only crawling past to tell her what she knows already, and Dom is outside in the bedroom unsure of which tie to wear, how to look when no one will see him in the dark, being perfectly docile in his appreciation of any one of a thousand Italian operas where a woman dies for love and passion is something noble and holy and wonderful.
She tugs down the edge of her camisole and bares her chest to the mirror. This tube of lipstick is a present from her mother, as most of her arsenal is, hardly touched, still long and deadly when she untwists it out of its scabbard. She crushes it into her skin, forming each waxy letter with care, shavings caked across her breastbone, crimson with glamor.
L'ENFER, she writes, feeling it burn.
How can she carry a child to term, how can she hold it to her breast, when there is nothing inside her but demons? Claws will make for poor mothering. She rests a hand on her still-smooth stomach and calls for the little tadpole in her womb. Do you know what misery you are headed for? Do you know your father has wed a wolf? Would that you had never known me, been mothered by someone with a softer touch.
Dom asks through the door, Honey?
Your poison, she thinks, and says, I'm almost ready. She takes cream and tissues to her chest, smearing out the name she has given herself, capping and tucking away the abused stump of lipstick, one more gift she has ruined for lack of knowing what to do. She looks at her tiny plastic stick. One, two lines dashed off neatly for her, for Dom, for the world that requires filling.
She opens the door and Dom is shuffling in his suit, eager for her approval. He loves her so much. She loves him. It's not the dearth of love that will drive her to ruin him, her unsuspecting husband caught like a fly, blissful and innocent of married life as he is of all things, most importantly of her, of the hell that breathes within her.
You're going to be a father, she says.
He says-- well, what do you think he says.
+
In the Garden of Eden, naked and timorous, Adam ate of the forbidden fruit. Men, look well, this is the coward father of your fathers, created in God's image, whose blood still runs in your veins. This is he who was not strong enough to carry the weight of his own transgression. Whose mouthful of apple caught in his throat as he ate, unable to swallow for the guilt, and there it lies still lodged in your own throats, choking you, undigested. There is the tale of your fear.
But Eve, she chewed. We swallowed. We pushed our sin into our stomachs, deeper inside of ourselves, called it our own and let it ravage us. In penance we matched you tear for tear, but you never knew courage like we did, the nerve to brand yourself a sinner, to fall without being pushed.
We do it still, all we mothers, harboring the festering truth of our disobedience within our bodies. Birthing the mealy flesh of our apples when they have grown large inside us, where we have kept them warm and kept them safe as they swelled for nine long months. The fruit turned fruit again, for us to hold and claim as our own. You would tremble under a bravery like ours. The thought of loving your curse.
+
If she is a girl, her mother says, you must give her a frivolous name.
I don't know what it is, she says, mouth busy with her oranges. I don't want to know.
Don't weigh her down with your grief, her mother says. Like you could teach her guilt every time you call her, atone for my agony, you who pained me, you were hell on the mother that bore you. She'll have enough of that in her own time. You'll see.
Is that what you did? she asks. Is that how you named me?
Yes, her mother says. It's how your grandmother named me.
It seems innocuous enough, Marie, Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu. A million little girls trailing after the virgin mother, she of the immaculate heart, the seven sorrows. But the skin across her mother's cheeks are dry and drawn and Mallorie can't imagine her in her youth, fresh-faced. Born already shriveled and ready for suffering.
None of the pleasure, all of the pain, her mother says. Being a virgin mother is nothing more than that. Mary would have refused, if she'd known better, if they'd let her.
What about me? she asks. What about my name?
Mallorie, ma malheureuse, her mother says, and dabs away the juice at the corner of her mouth with her thumb, a tender, impoverished gesture. Ma malchanceuse.
+
She honestly believes it, that she will be the most terrible mother, that she was never meant to be entrusted with anything so valuable. She will shatter her child. She does not know how to love it, she thinks.
But after hours of cursing and thrashing and Dom's face draining pale with worry, they finally allow her to touch her baby, they tell her, It's a girl, and she starts to cry, not because of the exhaustion in her bones, not because it still hurts, even after the shot and the numb flood of excitement. She starts to cry because her baby girl is so soft and small and beautiful in her hands, and she knows she would never break her, and she is going to be a good mother, she is going to be a wonderful mother, she feels violence coursing through her at the thought of being allowed to protect her. She touches her nose to hers, to the wrinkles in her pink skin. She wants to lick her clean and carry her home, her cub, her child, her baby girl, bite-sized miracle, nine-month apple, the price of her sin, the love of her life. Do you know your father has wed a wolf, she thinks, euphoric. I would kill for you.
They are crying together, shutting out the insignificant jabber of the world around them, the hubbub of intruders, crying because they have no words between them yet, still so raw and together and in love. She may be bad at being a woman, may always be, but for this daughter with her crumpled face, this tight cotton bundle of her own flesh and blood, she will be a good mother. With all her fury against the wide-open world and all its empty spaces, the task of being fruitful, the dark soil, the ritual of multiplying, still she can fold away her rancor for a moment to wrap her arms around her child.
It's not your fault, little girl, my love, she whispers against the tufts of her daughter's hair. You and I, we are stranded together. We will burn together. It's not your fault.
+
At times the infinitude of her duty suffocates her, filling her up like concrete poured into a mold, pinning her to her bed, unable to breathe. She has been taught to be responsible, to fulfill the demands made of her, and Eve's task is now her own. Her children are made examples to her. See what you are capable of, Mallorie, you have been doing so well. Open yourself up and work a little harder, for the insistence of the earth, for your mothers who listened and did the same.
When she can force herself into motion again, she stumbles to the nursery where her children await her. These are her treasured moments. Phillipa is two years old, all hers, though the cornsilk bob of her hair is from Dom. She is a busy squirrel, running across the walls, always her hands full of something to present to her mother, a certain affectionate enthusiasm that will trouble her in age, too eager to please those who please her.
This, too, is your father's doing, she says, brushing the crushed remnants of a pansy petal off of Phillipa's palm. Thank you for the gift, my dearest.
James begins to cry, in envy or in petition, and she leans into the sweet pocket of air above his crib, his diminutive throne. She rests her elbows on the fence that keeps him still, stirs the mobile suspended over him, birds and clouds, stars and suns and moons plucked out of the sky, brought down to appease his hunger.
Perhaps in this, you are more like me, she says. You are also my dearest, little one, you are also my most beloved.
His sobs nestle into quiet hiccups, face unscrunching. He reaches for her with his aimless hands, impossibly perfect, knowing her, wanting her. She scoops him into her arms and Phillipa winds herself around her leg, and Mary, she feels loved. She seeks refuge from her burdens in what reminds her of them, the dimpled bodies of her children a summons, an intimation that there are more of them lying patiently in wait inside her. It pains her, it does, but she has never loved anything so much.
You will grow to be a man, she tells James, hushing him, tracing the baby-fat folds in his neck, and she isn't sure whether she means for it to be benediction or accusation. She loves them both, but of course, he will never understand her any better than he does now. She looks into his face, hopeless, at the beautiful incomprehensible foreigner in her embrace. He is already parting from her, and she is in love.
+
Had she not known dreaming, she would have broken years hence, flattened under her load, she who feels it so keenly. But she ran to dreams like she ran to her children's nursery. Searching for consolation, finding it there in the endless folds that sleep allowed her.
For Dom, the dream is another thing to peer at and take apart, to get his hands on, to touch and define, the way her father understood it. They want to measure what they can feed it, what it will spit back out at them. But she knows there is no mathematics here; the dreaming is a fathomless, unreasonable and generous place, no quid pro quo to speak of, just the abandon of creation with no commensurate cost.
It's what she was born to do. Create, create, take the indifferent seed of your husband and coax it to fruit. He will spill himself inside you, and it is your work to prepare the ground, to water and tend to the sprout, letting its roots take hold in the hot cavern of your body, to feed it with all the blood there is in you, hurting for it, screaming for it, to push it out of you with more sweat than your husband ever shed in harvest, to love it against all odds. And then to do it all over again, as many times over as your brittle life will allow.
Only in dreaming can she manage anything at all like it. There in the underworld she can let loose to breed, like parting the burning skin of her chest. Down below, there is more in her than fire, suddenly capable of the charge that Eve appointed her. Even she is adequate here, vibrant with potential, with grass and vines, with flowering trees, free to shape entire worlds out of nothing, unlimited and bountiful, fertile as the goddess she was ordered to be. Flocks of birds burst from her ribcage, a deer springs from the pit of her stomach, and it takes nothing out of her. She exults. Down below, she could bring forth a kingdom of her own brood.
Occasionally Dom is exasperated with her, though he tries not to let it flit to his surface. He wants to prod the dreaming and force sense out of it, to make it bend to him, and he pins the blame on science and believes himself, but she knows better, of course. It's only Adam's urge to hold dominion. She has courted science, knows its reach well. Far as it may stretch, it can't pull her back from filling the dreams with herself. She crowds a flat land with groves of pomegranate trees, shoved up against one another, thick, lush and impenetrable. A forest, the fruits suspended like gorgeous full lanterns for her.
She cracks a pomegranate open. Maybe it's this she should have named her craving, not oranges. Each kernel is ripe to bursting, teeming with life, dark and private in its fullness. Their blood fills her mouth, runs down her wrists, staining the front of her shirt. A bright gush of flavor. The branches murmur in the breeze.
Mal, calls her husband, his voice strangled thin by the leaves, where are you?
I am Persephone, she thinks, running. Hide me, Hades, my mother cannot call me to the surface yet. She will have to suffer alone, for I have eaten of your feast. I am yours for fifty summers.
Dom tracks her down like game, by the trail of her bare footprints in the soil. We have to go, he says. James is almost done with his nap.
She lets the husk of the pomegranate drop to the ground, wiping her lips with the back of her hand. Her children, yes. Were it not for them, she should sleep forever.
+
In the blink of one careless afternoon, fifty years pass inside her. She wakes an old woman.
Unexpectedly, it seems, she has kept her promise to the dreaming. She locks herself in the bathroom and watches herself breathe until Dom pounds on the door, alarmed. She can't recognize herself. Her skin is smooth, unblemished, and her limbs are young and strong.
What have you brought me back to? she thinks, desperate.
Her children are cross and hungry. She and her husband prepare for dinner in silence, afraid to look at each other, at themselves, to hear the unclouded voice rise from their throats.
He pulled her up in the same old way, invoking her children above. By the close of fifty years she was happy to have forgotten, deep down in the dreaming where she could create everything she needed, raising mountains, houses to lie down inside. And it didn't matter much that in time, steel and glass took the place of untamed vegetation, because even the steel and glass was of her own making, her creation. She made as she was made to, and it felt right. She was home.
But for the children she once brought forth, wringing them out of her body with an anguish long lost to her. In limbo she had no need for birthing, the turmoil of her fertility sated into silence by the thousand other things she could summon to her fingertips. But when at the close of fifty years Dom told her what he knew, that they were dreaming, asleep on the floor of their living room, threaded through with IV lines-- she threw it all aside to return to her cubs, didn't she? She loved them, the moment she was allowed to remember them.
I am a mother still, she thinks, as James finishes feeding and drifts into a doze, as Phillipa climbs out of her chair and runs back upstairs, leaving their parents alone at the kitchen table, older than ever, still shell-shocked, and Mallorie once again a woman who must pay for her womanhood somehow.
+
Fifty years' worth of memories fade into dust, as dream-years invariably do. But the words of her husband as he beckoned her into waking, they keep creeping back to her, insidious as a serpent, beguiling as the temptation of knowledge. If this is reality, Mal, if you're awake, then where are James and Phillipa?
A week after shaking the stiffness from her back, she still ponders the same question. Where are James and Phillipa? She clutches them to her chest until James begins to fuss, until Phillipa squirms for air, like she could press them back inside herself if only she wished it hard enough. Taking them back into her, like when they needed her, when she was all the world they knew, their warm sweet ocean, lulling them to sleep by the distant thrum of her heart.
It occurs to her; this chaos can't be what her life was meant for. If limbo was too imperfect to hold her for long, then if she keeps swimming upwards through the layers, casting aside one onion-peel dream at a time, won't she eventually surface at Eden? Breaking free of the river, stepping out from the water naked and immaculate, into some existence better than this crooked, unfair thing? Where she won't need to go to war with her own treacherous body, the unborn voices in her womb demanding, Let us out.
Somewhere above this is a better waking, where she'll only be asked to give as much as she's been given. That's where she needs to be. That's where her children need to be, that's where they must have been all along, where James never grows into a stranger, never grows to puzzle over her, at the baffling creature his mother is to him, only barely recognizable as the shape of a person at all, across the chasm he has placed between them.
And Phillipa, for Phillipa, for her daughter, the heiress of her tribulations, she needs to make it back to paradise. To set Phillipa free, to allow her the luxury of coming to age where she can withhold herself as she pleases. Somewhere above this is her daughter, woman enough without having to prove it, wild and proud, unshackled.
I know it, Dom, she tells him under the covers. I know we are still dreaming.
He startles when he hears it, jerking away from her. Wide-eyed, he stares down at her, his face ashen in the moonlight.
Ah, she thinks. I have found you out.
+
Her husband tries to tell her she is wrong, and she pities him, until it tires her. He grips her by her arms, fingers digging blue into her flesh, holding her in place like he always has, and says something about limbo and what he placed in her strongbox.
Dom, it's all right, she says, soothing at first. You've planted things inside me before that didn't belong there.
She laughs at her own joke, and he looks horrified, doesn't mention it a second time. That sours her; she only meant to make fun.
Just let me talk to my mother, please, she tells him. But he says, Why your mother, and Let me call your father, he'll know what to do, and He's the expert, which stokes her rage and makes her tear his hands off of her.
My father, she spits, expert of my own body?
This isn't about your-- about your body, Mal, he pleads.
And isn't that just like him to say, like her father, all of them so willingly deaf to her. It breaks her heart to think that once, they too breathed nothing but the air their mothers gave them, that this too is what her little boy will grow into, the lord reigning over his bedlam of silly, raving sows. Mary, she needs to wake.
You're not dreaming, he says.
I don't want you to tell me that, she shouts, of course you would say that. Bring me my mother. Let me talk to my mother.
What her mother says is, Ma malheureuse, ma malchanceuse, it's not your fault, but then she tucks her a little tighter under her arm, and whispers, hushed and frantic against her temple, Don't go, don't leave me here alone.
Oh, maman, Sainte Marie, thinks Mallorie, but I must, Mother Eve.
+
Why must Dom be so stubborn? Can't you let me help you? she asks him. Wouldn't you like to see our children? And then, when she realizes what is giving him pause, she strokes his cheek and says, It's all right, Dom, I will still love you, even after we wake up, even when you do not own me anymore. I promise.
But even that won't clear the clouds from his face, and really, is sovereignty so difficult a thing to surrender? Is it so calamitous to no longer hold court over the world, every man a king, every man a rooster among his hens, the wise benefactor, the protector of his womenfolk? As though it were an insult to stand beside her instead of towering over her, the way they used to before they tasted the fruit, before they covered themselves in shame.
Deeper down in the dreaming, she could give her duty her all, and once she thought it Eden, a home for her to rest. But that was keeping a sinking ship afloat with nothing but her hands, cupped to bail the saltwater out. Futile in the end. All this is no better than a nightmare, besieging her with the illusion of her own fecundity, asking her still to make something out of nothing.
Twenty years, thirty years here in sleep, and time will come for this Phillipa to wed. Dom will walk her down the aisle, offer her trembling neck upon the altar. He will smile at her, dance with her, and give her away, give away what he never really had, what he never understood, all the while as Mallorie watches, taught to rejoice in the death of her daughter.
You will have me stay for a beggar's fate, she says, and Dom will not look at her, helpless, useless.
+
Cast out of her only home, Eve stood in the wrath of the Lord, awaiting her punishment. Legs were then taken from the serpent, Adam then made an enemy to the land, cursed to toil all his days to break it under his will. To her was given the agony of childbirth, the indignity of enduring her husband as her master.
But she might have accepted this penance, silent as a stone, were it not for the vastness of the world before her. Were it not for the lonely clamor of the unpeopled wilderness, reaching out to her in supplication, in command. And the pain foretold for her was just an afterthought in the face of the real task that fell to her, filling the world with her young, her body a vessel, the only plot of land in all of creation that would willingly bear fruit for Adam, who had no more to do than spend himself inside her and walk away.
The world outside Eden was wide and empty, Havilah and Ethiopia, beyond the banks of the Hiddekel and the Euphrates. Eve, la mère de tous les vivants, looked out over the Earth and wept.
+
On the anniversary of her own death, when her father smiled at her and danced with her and gave her away without ever really having had her, Mallorie waits for her husband, perched four seconds above the ground. This is not the way she has learned, how she was taught that women left; but she can't bear the prospect of walking into water, of yielding herself to its embrace, when it will fill her lungs like rebuking her, tireless mother that it is, chiding her for being unable to birth as the ocean birthed.
Please, Dom shouts from across the chasm he has placed between them. Come back inside, please listen, Mal--
No, for heaven's sake, she shouts back at him, leaning as far forward as she can with her hands still wrapped around the ledge. You listen to me, for once, can't you allow me that? Can't you listen to me?
You're not going to wake up, he says, you're not dreaming, you're going to die, don't--
She always meant to take him with her, because he loves her, because she loves him, of course, but mostly because she loves her wolf-cubs too much to return to them alone. But he's looking at her like she's the one who needs convincing, moving slowly, patiently, like shooing a child away from sugar, and it infuriates her that he is still so determined to cross her, that he still thinks her a little fool. She is tired of dreaming.
Here is your goddamn train, she says, leaving with or without you.
Mal, he begins, choked, stretching a hand out to her.
She shakes her shoe loose, slipping it from her foot. They chase it down with their eyes, both of them, watching it light the way down for her. Well, it's not so far, when they've done it all before, from higher up than this. They've fallen from the grace of God into perdition, and wasn't that a plunge to commemorate? After that, what's a few stories onto asphalt, Dom?
The air brushes across her legs. Something itches under her skin, and absently she rubs at her bare heel with her leftover shoe-- but no, isn't that odd, it's not flesh she finds there, callous with years of being bent and boxed in. She looks down, and there are feathers at her heels, midnight dark, straight and strong and sharp, growing out of her wretched bones, vicious and magnificent, pushing their way out of her other shoe, stretching into the air like a sapling toward the sun.
Dom, she calls, look, can you see them? Can you see the feathers?
He might answer, he might not, but she can't wait for his equivocation, unclasping her earrings from her ears, letting them drop into the abyss. And there they unfurl again, feathers behind her ears, pushing through her hair, their tips fluttering in the wind, so full of the promise of flight. They stir and her heart stirs with them, starting to beat for the first time in years, sending the blood tingling through her.
Only now you allow me this, she thinks, with a dash of bitterness. Only now you allow me to fly.
But even so, the feathers are there, glinting like knives, and she could pierce the skies with them, carrying herself away, all the way back home. She searches her arms for budding wings, but they remain smooth, disappointing-- she must find something to cast off, something that must be binding the wings, something holding them back, some trinket on her shoulders, on her arms, on her fingers--
Her wedding ring. It's her wedding ring. You, she thinks, wrenching it off of her finger, triumphant. It was you. Immediately feathers burst from her elbows, lining her skin, springing unbidden. And before it's too late, her fingers already starting to flatten into pinions-- she takes the ring in her hand and hurls it at her husband.
Take this back, she tells him.
On instinct he fumbles for it, arrested by that flash of gold. He catches it against his chest, losing it from sight for a moment of fitful panic, and in that moment -- while he is busied with the trappings of their union -- Mallorie spreads her wings and soars off the ledge, finally beautiful. A night-bird as she always was, before the flaming sword, before exiles and apples and snakes, older than her name, sculpted from the same majestic clay that formed Adam, too grand to confine to a single rib, vast, free of God and legacy, unblessed and uncursed-- Mary, oh, look at her, a night-bird again at last.