Prologue

Prologue to my novel-in-progress

Stillhouse Road, 1979

Just touching his little body burned Maizy's fingers. As soon as her husband closed the side door, cold morning air slithering in around her ankles, Maizy lowered the infant into the play pen, dropping him the last inch and wringing her hands. 

He fussed, but she turned away. The old ceramic radiator hissed as she stared out the windows etched with snowflakes as finely laid out as German shneirenshnidt paper art, lit pink and green from Christmas lights left out too long, mocking this dark February.

Maizy scratched beneath the collar of her house coat. Her skin was red and dappled purple, all the way down her chest, as it was every time after the baby’s skin touched hers. She pressed her hands into her skin to still her fingers, heat surging from the spaces between them. As she paced, the old floorboards protested her every step, and her slippers on the new harvest gold linoleum squawked.

Feeling her chest squeeze beneath press of her fingers, Maizy banged through the kitchen door, sped through the living room and flung herself out onto the porch, gulping freezing air. She ran down the few steps, the cement roughing up her flimsy house slippers, as she glimpsed the towers of Three Mile Island. She was so close. In two minutes, she could be on the bank of the Susquehanna River. She could be frozen, numb, out.

She let her eyelids plummet to her cheeks. Something had to change. Itching began behind her ears and the back of her neck, and her face felt as hot as if she’d sat in the fireplace’s open flames; but she’d not even struck the match to start the fire yet. Something had to change, and she suddenly knew what she could do.

No one would understand, but she had to do it nonetheless. Just like no one had understood why she believed, before he was even born, that her baby would die, why she’d never expected to bring him home from the hospital, why she’d never even bought anything larger than size three months, the age he was now.  Her husband couldn’t understand why she didn’t cuddle him and want ot hodl him all the time, why she had to steel herself against attachment, why she had to work so hard to protect herself from a scrawny infant not even ten pounds yet. Why she didn’t name him. Her husband gave a name. Asher. Meaning joy. He cooed it to the infant a thousand times a day, but she never used the name.

She strode back into the house, stopping at the mirror on the wall across from the fireplace.  “You won’t be nursing anymore,” she said to the petite woman with wet dark hair, iced over from the outside cold. She said it to calm the welts on her skin. Her doctor would be very concerned; he had impressed upon her from the beginning how such a low birth-weight, malnourished baby benefited from breast milk especially. But she just couldn’t do it anymore. When she held him, her skin crawled, her mind raced, her heart beat so rapidly she couldn’t talk, move or even hardly breathe. She’d thought it was her penance to endure it, like enduring the pain would be absolution for her sins. But now she’d finally married the man. “That makes up for some of it, at least. Right?” she asked the Maizy in the mirror. She’d done what she could to correct things on her end. There was nothing else to do. The baby would die anyway, whether it got breastmilk or not, so why further punish herself?

As she walked back to the hissing of the kitchen radiator, she shivered. The linoleum squawked with each foot-fall—that linoleum Stephen, her first husband, had laid so hurriedly as he anticipated the birth of their child. The walls of the kitchen, wallpapered by Stephen too, seemed to close in on her. It wasn’t just that baby’s telltale little heart, beating out her betrayal—

it was this house too. It remembered everything she wanted to forget.