Elise Stephens -- Suspension

Content warning: Miscarriage and depression

If the proper balance of sorrow (tears) and hope (blood) are mixed in the correct quantity and potency, then for one hour the donor may glimpse the lost dream and where it went before it died. 

Thus read the website’s descriptive text of the Remembrance Spell. The potion was meant to revive the spirit of someone or something you had wanted very much, then watched slip away forever. 

“A lot of women claim it helped them,” her husband told her, gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles, as if this would keep him connected to the hope that, at the bottom of all this loss, something remained to be found.

(She’d silently chanted a different mantra for the entire drive: “It won’t work.”)

Hoping it would work wasn’t an option. That road had burned her more than once. Three times, to be exact. Then, when they stood together at the storefront with its three electric candles doing their fake flicker under a hanging bunch of rosemary, it took every drop of her self-control not to laugh and then shatter to bitter pieces. 

Rosemary, for remembrance. 

Remembering was the problem. And forgetting was both wrong and impossible. 

She shivered inside the trench coat that she’d thrown on over sweats and a three-day-old T-shirt and leaned against his shoulder. No answer came to his knock. 

Three candles in the window. One for each pregnancy. 

This was a mistake. 

She turned to go and braced herself for the moment he’d catch her arm and plead with her, but he didn’t. He’d promised he wouldn’t force her to come here. When he called her name softly, she turned back and fell against him again. He smelled like anxious habits: bourbon and licorice.

The first two times, she'd shed enough tears and lost enough blood from within the deepest parts of herself that she could have painted every wall of their house with them. 

Hoping hurt worse for every try after the first. Like falling from a cliff that kept rising higher, cracking her soul open on impact with a brutal, mounting thoroughness. Then, when the third—

The door opened. The potion maker/witch/woman’s face bore lines like signposts, each one a testament to lived paths of pain. 

The witch nodded, then took her gently by the hand. “Just you. You’ll come alone.” 

She was surprised by the relief that fell across her shoulders, making her somehow lighter. She thought she’d wanted to cling to her husband with fingernails and desperate gasps for air, yet now as she stepped into the beckoning darkness, she almost rushed toward the isolation, into a sanctuary where women grieved alone in ritual and mystery. 

She wanted to speak to her lost child without him eavesdropping. A mute part of her grief already brimmed inside of her, almost overflowing. The grief of two parents would drown her. 

The potion maker drew her into a warm room that thrummed with a steady beat. Like a giant womb. As if she were the little life cradled by loving flesh, not the mother who hated the flesh that had refused to nurture life.

The potion maker led her to a cushioned seat and wrapped her in a quilt. Then she brought a wooden tray with a lamp, a glass bowl, and a glinting knife. 

Sets of three, again. 

She closed her stinging eyes and drew a shaky breath.

The third miscarriage had broken her, splintering the bridge back to the light. This time, her husband had noticed her dry eyes and touched her bloodless face and known she'd crossed to a place beyond tears and that all she wanted was to enter the void where pain couldn't touch. 

That was when he’d vowed to keep vigil beside her as she drifted in the in-between of not-yet-dead, but wishing she were. That was why he always smelled of licorice and bourbon now.

She looked down at the articles on the tray while the potion maker gave instructions. 

Shed just the right tears, bleed in just the right way, concentrate her emotions ever-so-carefully so that her grief became spices to flavor her sorrow and her hope. 

Sorrow suspended in tears. Hope suspended in blood. 

All to rouse a fleeting echo of that dream she’d wanted more than anything. But all that wanting hadn’t been strong enough to make it stay. 

Three. She just wanted to say those three small words that all hearts yearned to hear. And this child never got that chance.

She pressed the glass bowl to her cheek and thought of the cramping pain, the rage, the emptiness of standing witness to ultrasounds with no heartbeat, the cards from friends who had nothing useful to say.

She sliced her palm and spilled blood as she thought of the child she would have held to her neck, to whom she would have sung lullabies and given her best counsel.

I just want to say it once.

She swirled the suspensions in the glass bowl and watched steam rise as the witch simmered them over a burner.

This was ridiculous. She almost laughed. She smothered a scream. Why torture herself with mind games? This was going to rip all the wounds open again.

But if she could say those words today, maybe she’d start to heal. Then again, if she had to swallow them again, they’d poison her. 

She shook her head, stood, and closed her eyes. She felt light again, almost like floating, as if she too were suspended in fluid along with her blood and tears.

The pulse of the room deepened and flowed up through her feet, to her thighs, and into her abdomen. She opened her eyes to see all three candles now glowing like stars, true and strong and real. 

Her breath caught in her throat.

A small voice murmured, “…Mama?”

And she knew exactly what to say.

END