Written by D. H. Lane
Art by Laura Chouette
Dewdrops remain in her hair even after she carefully takes a seat inside. Her walk in the winsome courtyard outside the hospital had been a troubled one. Barb recalls stopping in her tracks to trace the round petals of the flowers one last time—chrysanthemums, she thinks—and gasping when a hand got there first. A hand of a person who was not there. And to combat what the nursemaids would likely tell her because they loved dearly to shove their noses in other people’s affairs, the hand was veiny, a thatch of hair on the backside, unlike her own. It wasn’t a benevolent hand nor a malicious one.
She stares at the tile floor below her, mulling it over deeply. The hand was as lost as she was. Probably more, without a body to help it along.
The incessant voices of her husband and the receptionist buzz into her ear, a rather unwelcome melody. Barb resists the urge to sniff in response to the thick distaste she feels, as that would be horrifically unbecoming. Still, she is beyond unhappy to be here. To be at the center of the circumstances that have revealed the fragility of her own mind.
“Yes, it’s rather a relief, actually,” Herman tells the woman at the desk. She’s a fine secretary, with neatly curled ginger hair thrown back and away from her face. A plaid skirt covers all suggestions of her legs and to Barb, she very well couldn’t have them. That’s why they didn’t like her: she was far too suspicious to make a good wife. “She’s been so ill. Last night, she woke me up screaming for not having seen the young boy in the mirror.”
There’s a great disdain in her husband’s voice.
The woman nods sympathetically. Barb contemplates the expression, trying to mimic it. Perhaps if she could school herself into a perfectly neutral, mutable face, she could walk free and intact.
“Forgive me, sir, but I need to ask if she’s ever had a miscarriage, or any children at all?”
Herman scoffs. “What the hell’sat matter to you? We had a son and he went and er, uh…”
Her husband was with grief like snow to the sun. Once under scrutiny, he seemed to abandon his emotions entirely, as if they’d become nothing but trampled, melted things invisible to the eye and better yet, the brain.
Barb clears her throat softly. To do so loudly would surely see her to her deathbed sooner. “He ran into the road, playing.”
“Got himself run over,” Herman finishes. “Don’t speak unless spoken to, Barbara.”
His eyes are hard and voice firm. She nods solemnly, closing her mouth and shutting down the instinct to bite down on her plush bottom lip until she bleeds. Sometimes, Barb thinks, she deserves to bleed. Just drip her failings all over the shiny floors, let her blood ebb into the ground and show the beings below that she would do just this for them and still nobody would listen.
Nodding, the lady twirls a pen between her fingers. Barb believes she looks flirtatious even as she apologizes for their loss. Her Herman isn’t a bad-looking man. She’d even go as far as saying he’s beyond descent. Easy to gaze at and get lost in. He’s blessed by dark hair that goes back nicely with some product to keep it in place and sharp cheekbones to raise the intensity of his eyes even further. When he looks directly at you, you feel seen. It’s natural, she thinks, for the other woman to admire him.
Natural for herself too, to love him even knowing he was sending her away. She’s only made his life harder, what with her fits. He could be cruel, but didn’t all men have that capacity? She was lucky he didn’t use it more, his fists and the falsetto his voice would fall into when he went from angry to furious. She was awful glad she was no Peggy, no ordinary woman trying to shape her life around its violent imperfections. The woman at hand— Peggy, had been seen by her just yesterday, clinging to her outer layers lest the collar of her blouses fail to cover the bruises shaped like a hand around her neck. Barb pities her neighbor, but not more than she’s sure Peggy pities herself. No such life for a woman, to be groped and squeezed as an conduit for a man’s anger.
Barb touches her own neck, applying only a single modicum of pressure. She knew this was a savage course of action, used on those who didn’t deserve it to force them into submission. Hideously inhuman, in fact. But she presses harder. Air slips from her lungs and she gags when she’s unable to pull more in. It’s a rush of feeling, wonderful from the silent numbness she felt, only periodically broken by fear so intense she remembers collapsing on several occasions.
Herman believes it began when their son died. She’s reminded of this when he continues talking to the woman, jarred by it when it’s evidently written down, pen scraping against paper in a fashion that causes Barb to rip her hand from her throat and cover the closest ear. Any sound was often too much. Her head always hurt. She knows this was always fated to happen. Her mother and the women before her lost themselves in their age.
For confidentiality from the man himself, Barb had written down in a note traveling far away to an old friend, that she thinks it had been awoken by her marriage. She loves Herman, sometimes so fiercely it feels like it could burn straight through her and thaw the coldness that so taints him. It, of course, isn’t his fault that in the ceremony of joining together with him, she lost the woman she used to be. Traded her spark of buoyancy and joy for a man’s arms around her every night. Herman brought her unfathomable happiness, and with that, a short-lived son. She had brought worry like he’d never known before into his life. He is so utterly undeserving of her shortcomings, Barb tells herself sadly. She projects the image of her mother, Pauline Wellesley, as she spiraled herself through their household, knocking into her and her father with her hysteric predictions.
Barb’s father had told her that her mother had succumbed to nightmares and anxiety beyond treatment, but she never thought that was the case. She thinks, today, that medicine wasn’t fit for a woman’s feelings. They were too big for any needle or any shot. And what did they spring from?
Every dream unfulfilled by a marriage.
With a different marriage, Barb would have by her side a different son. An alive one. Without her husband, she would have tomorrow.
She inhales, following exhale refusing to come when her face freezes in shock. Holding the needle above her, is a hand without a body. Without a human’s body, that is.
She sees everything, and then she dies.
outlander zine 