TAPESTRY OF SCARS

TAPESTRY OF SCARS
by Holley Cornetto

“It is perfectly normal for a woman at your stage in life,” the doctor said, wringing his gnarled hands as he revealed to Esme the secrets of being a woman. As if the letters MD after his name had taught him everything there was to know about womanhood. As if he understood her body better than she did.

On the way home from the doctor’s office her husband, Terrence, took a detour to the garden center. “Let’s start a garden! Grow new life.” He seemed so optimistic, eyes brimming with hope for what could be, that she couldn’t tell him no.

Her stomach clenched as he led her through rows of flowers and herbs and vegetables. Terrence loaded up a cart with soil and fertilizer and tomato plants, all the while mumbling that it would be good for her. She’d see.

Terrence loaded his purchases into the back of the car, tucking them in the back corner of the hatchback. They looked as if they were huddling together for safety. The car filled with the scent of damp soil. He talked about raising the plants, how they’d grow and sprout, and about the right levels of sunlight, water, and fertilizer.

When they arrived home, Terrence placed the seedlings into the ground.

Esme spread fertilizer across their newly sown garden. This, at least, was something she could do. A life she could cultivate. 

+++

In bed beside her, Terrence snored, unaware of the cruel combination of time and hormones that crept in each night to steal away parts of her as she slept. She wondered how much of herself would be taken, and if she’d be the same person when it was all over.

Esme tossed and turned, feeling like a stranger in her own body, but eventually sleep came. In her dream, it was sunrise, and she walked barefooted to the middle of a barren field. The damp earth squelched between her toes with each step until she arrived at a small hole with a pale bulb inside. It had not taken root in the soil. It lay on top, bare and exposed.

For the first several nights, she wrestled with her dream-self, willing her to cover the hole with the dew-damp earth, but her dream-self knew things that her waking mind could not accept. The bulb remained uncovered in the middle of the field, staring accusingly at her.

The nights wore on, hot, then cold, then hot again. Terrence grumbled as she kicked the blankets off, then pulled them back on. She yearned to go back into the dream, to stand with her muddy feet on the earth and feel whole and real and connected to the world.

+++

Outside, the tomato vines were brown and sickly, folding in on themselves as they withered. Terrence offered her the trowel, but she shook her head and retreated back into the doorway.

That night, she found herself in the field again. When she approached the hole in the earth, a small, wriggling thing lay inside, swaddled in the dirt. It had two arms and two legs, a head, and a face. It was helpless, innocent, and perfect.

She peered into the hole, studying the squirming thing. It looked so like a child, and she’d always wanted a child, but careers and life and plans had always gotten in the way. It was never quite the right time, and then, before she knew it, time had taken away her choice.

She glanced at the knife she held in her hand. A knife, she was certain, that hadn’t been there previously, but she knew what it was for. She dug the blade into the soft tissue below her belly. The pain was bright and sharp, reds and yellows, reminding her that she was in a dream. Blood poured from her wound, running down her groin and thighs, watering the ground. The mewling thing that lay inside the earth grew quiet.

She woke with blood on her hands.

+++

“The dreams are your mind’s way of reconciling the changes happening with your body,” the doctor said, as if she were simply changing her shoes, and not the entire fabric of her being.

On the way home, Terrence brought her to the nursery again.

The woman behind the counter rubbed her chin and tsked. “Check the soil and sunlight levels, make sure you are watering enough, but not too much, and try again. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, the plants won’t thrive.”

The woman’s words cut as sharply as the knife from Esme’s dream. She felt an ache low in her belly.

Terrence left with another flat of tomatoes.

Later, at home, she watched as he planted the new seedlings into the earth. “Don’t you want to help?” he asked, patting the soil around their roots as he tucked them into their beds.

She shook her head and stepped away from the garden.

+++

She lay in bed, staring at the ceiling.

“At least you won’t have to deal with that time of the month anymore,” Terrence offered. “That must be a relief.”

She felt a stabbing pain low in her abdomen. In that place. With each sharp pulse, she thought about how easy it would be to snap at him and say it wasn’t only menstruation that she was losing, it was something more. To tell him a man could never understand that loss.

The doctor told her it was mood swings or hormones, but never explained why. Only her dream-self seemed to understand what her body was beginning to learn.

Night after night, when waking gave way to the day’s exhaustion, she found herself in the same field. She’d come to think of it as a safe haven, one where she didn’t have to bear the constant humiliation of being a woman. Each night, in this field, she tore another cut deep into her flesh.

Each night, she bled.

Each day, Terrence spoke soft and encouraging words to his seedlings, and Esme watched as the ground did what she could not.

“Depression is a common side-effect of menopause,” the doctor said at the next visit, speaking to Terrence as if Esme weren’t there. He prescribed sleeping pills and told Terrence to make sure she was getting enough rest.

+++

Beneath the weight of her husband’s watchful stare, Esme swallowed the pills each night. She no longer needed to stare at the ceiling for hours, waiting for sleep to come. She slipped off quietly, letting time and hormones come and take what they would while she went to the field where, nourished by her blood, the tiny, squalling bulb had begun to grow.

She sat beside the hole and sang sweet lullabies and whispered words of comfort as she sliced into her skin, cut by cut, creating a tapestry of scars.

In the waking world, the daily indignities of life continued. Terrence spent most of his time in the garden, tending to his plants. He gave her updates about how healthy they were, and how large they’d grown, and never seemed to notice she wasn’t listening anymore.

Her male coworkers no longer looked her in the eyes. Some irrational part of her thought they must know what she’d lost. She felt herself grow thin and translucent.

Is that what time did to women? Erased them?

+++

“There will be an adjustment period,” the doctor said, but didn’t say that this was more than a physical adjustment. He didn’t say that her body wasn’t the only thing changed, but her life, and the way other people treated her.

Terrence hadn’t bothered coming with her this time. He’d needed to weed the garden, where tiny white flowers had started to sprout along the vines. They sprung effortlessly from the earth under his touch.

He gardened alone; Esme could no longer bear to watch.

The squirming, squalling bulb in her dreams had grown large. She lifted it from the ground with a mother’s tenderness and put it to nurse at her breast.

She’d been told no greater bond existed than that between a mother and child. Looking down at the little bundle in her arms, she felt betrayed by time and by her own body. She laid the bundle back into the hole that was its cradle.

“Bleed,” she said, pressing the knife into her skin. “Bleed.”

But now, even in her dreams, the blood didn’t come.

With one quick slice, she opened herself, making room in her belly. She lifted the bulb from its hole in the earth, and nestled it deep within her body. 

+++

In the morning, her husband found her in the garden, her bare feet caked with mud. She grasped a trowel in one hand, and a chef’s knife in the other. A large gash in her lower abdomen had created a crevice large enough to plant his healthiest vine, heavy with swollen fruit.

Though Esme lay cold and pale in the dirt, life sprouted from her womb.

Fiction © Copyright Holley Cornetto
Image by Jane Lund from Pixabay