She created something with a conscience last night. She didn’t mean to, but she was old enough and decent enough to accept responsibility for her mistakes. How was she to know that every mark on the graph plotted a similar pattern above her head, that the diametrics on her computer screen were at that moment rivalling a nine month gestation period in the sky?   

Her mind had been elsewhere last night, heavy with real life, creating abstract images instead of the sales charts she was paid to draw up. She missed Lee, ached for him. She had been counting the days till his return, counting down the number of times she woke up in the night and missed the rattle of his snoring, the way he always pinched the covers, the way he never offered to make her a cup of coffee in the mornings. This, the first time they had been apart in four years of marriage and she found herself missing even the things that normally infuriated her, whilst the the things that didn’t usually bother her had become momentous in their gravity. 

She had been drinking. Just a little red wine from an already-opened bottle. Enough to stain her thoughts to a slightly damp carmine. Enough to push loneliness to the side a little. Draw the curtains, pour the wine and raise the stakes. Tapping at keys, figures, digits, an eternity of co-ordinates, the numbers becoming more like Chinese characters or Egyptian hieroglyphs as her ideas sloshed into being. Crosses and dots and curves becoming cyrillic and maybe she was looking to crack a code all along. But it was so quiet. The inherited grandmother clock reminded her of her solitude, her heart beat competing, almost as loud. Together they punctuated the silence and when she heard the sudden single cry of a baby she leapt out of her seat, sending the wine over the keyboard in a splash of dark red. Damn it, damn it. She switched off the machine and climbed into bed, which hadn’t made it back into its other self as sofa since Lee had gone. Fully clothed, a cigarette still smoking in the ashtray, the keyboard still dripping, the sound of that cry ringing in her ears like she had tinnitus. Cells dying, sound distorted. 

It was still dark when she woke, shivering. Usually she found the dark a comfort, when she had someone to share it with. But now it was just a hole too deep to climb out of. It was too early for bird song. Too late for drunken revellers out on the street. It was just her and the universe, battling it out. She climbed out of bed and noticed the streaks of water on the skylight. Even the rain was silent, smudged against the glass. It was open, just a little, a crack, enough to let in the cold. She reached up to close it, arms bare white and goosebumped, and that’s when she saw it, up there, staring at her. She stared back for a moment, just stared, and when it blinked her knees gave way and she fell to the floor. 

She cried. She couldn’t help it. The tears just came. The room was heavy with the vinegar smell of wine, the floor full of crumbs, strands of hair, dirty clothes strewn. She could smell herself as she curled into a ball and hugged her knees. She could smell unwashed skin, old blood caked under fingernails, greasy hair plastered onto wet cheeks. She must have fallen asleep there. 

In the morning things are better. The light diffuses everything. She was stiff, but she had made it through another night alone. Today Lee would be back and he would make everything right.  

It was still looking at her, through the skylight. This time she didn’t fall. She didn’t even break her gaze for a long while. They looked at each other, its eyes dark brown and wet, the pupils huge. It looked sad. It was… she didn’t know what it was. A planet? It looked like a planet, or a moon, a fat yellow disc taking up most of the sky and a corner of her skylight. It had no other features, no mouth, no body. It was just a body in itself, a being, and she was sure she was the one who had created it. She sat down and let her mind stutter over the simple facts. She could find none. She could find nothing more than voodoo or sheer will or some kind of uterine stream of consciousness. Something miraculous. And now what? It seemed to be waiting for her to do something. But she was at a loss. 

She decided to get dressed. Pretty much for the first time in two weeks. She went to pull her nightshirt over her head and released a foul reek of sweat, old and new. It buzzed around the room joining something more sour that may or may not be emanating from inside her. But when she glanced up and saw those wretched eyes watching her every move she became self-conscious. So she scooped up some clothes from the floor and bundled herself into the bathroom, pushing the door to, slowly, looking at it looking back at her. The door closed quietly and she looked in the mirror. She wasn’t too appalled. When one hasn’t bathed or combed their hair or even stepped outside for two weeks, one can expect to look like a more transparent version of their former self. She was ex. She knew that. She was no longer what she had once been. She had gone through countless metamorphoses in her thirty three years. What difference did one or two more make? She cleaned her teeth and scrubbed at her yellowy tongue until it was raw. Spat blood into the grimy sink and then pulled on her clothes. They billowed on her like ship’s sails, her hips like a rack, but her breasts hard white cushions, the areolae large and brailled and slightly sticky. She didn’t bother with underwear. She didn’t want to go into the bedroom to retrieve any. The door had remained closed for two weeks and some kind of instinct told her she didn’t want to be going in there.     

Dressed. As pointless an exercise as it had seemed, she would at least be a little more kin to the wife Lee had said goodbye to fourteen days ago. The wife who had pleaded with him not to go, or to take her with him. The wife who was going stir-crazy being stuck at home, who missed her job, her colleagues, the cigarette breaks, the god-awful coffee from the machine in the staff-room. 

Dressed, she could greet him with a kiss. He could put a hand on the axis of her hip and ask her to walk towards him one more time. Sway for me, baby. Like you used to. Before. He would be tired, jet-lagged. She would loosen his tie, run him a bath, pour him a whisky. She would look after him, as was her desire. She would mother him a little, and then love him with her body. It was one of those things you never forgot how to do. 

She sat on the chair by the computer, beneath the skylight. She tried to comb her hair but ended up yanking out whole clumps in a screech of agony and frustration. In the end she flung the comb across the room and waited. She would wait for him. He would see her. 

“What do you want?” It didn’t answer, because it couldn’t. It could only stare. “I don’t know what to do,” she told it. Or him. “Stop looking at me.” But it wouldn’t. She tried turning away, swivelled around in the chair so her back was to it, but she could still feel its burn and her eyes kept rolling up to meet those above her. Like she was drawn to it, helpless. She decided to accept that fate and sat until dark, when the planet changed its hue from the pale warmth of sour milk to a dandelion-yellow in the glow of the moon. And it blinked and it gazed and it did nothing more. 

She didn’t move until the sound of a key turning in the door made her jump. She was wet. Beneath her bottom, her crotch, her jeans were piss-soaked. She didn’t remember doing that. When she rose the odour of urine rose with her. Lee came through the door, his eyes heavy with grey shadows and his chin covered in rough dark stubble. 

“You’re up,” he said. “It’s late, it’s after two. I thought you’d be asleep.” He put down his bags and held out his arms. She didn’t look at him. Just sat back down and looked back up. “It’s okay,” she whispered, tears beginning to trickle down her face. 

“Liz?” He came over. Strode over in four easy steps. He kissed the top of her head, noticed the smell and his nose wrinkled in disgust before he could stop himself.  

“Hey honey, I’m home,” he whispered. “Are you okay sweetheart? Where’s Ryan?” 

She pointed, a fleeting hand, a whispery bare finger reaching upwards towards the dark. “Look what I did,” she said. “I didn’t mean to. Isn’t it amazing? At first I hated it but now, I think, I’m quite proud. It has my eyes, don’t you think?” 

He looked up, squinted. “Liz, honey, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Where’s Ryan? Is he asleep? Has he been good?” 

She didn’t answer him. Goddammit. She just ignored him, just kept staring up at empty sky. And what was that rotten smell? And then suddenly, he felt a stab in his heart. A pain, like he’d never felt before, the surge of something being ripped out, expunged in an instant, loss, the worst possible death. He looked at his wife once more, before striding, running, over to the closed door. He threw it open and yelled “No. No no no no no.” 

The violence of that time was very real and not so long ago. Her body had retained the memory. The bloody mess on white sheets, the way her body had trembled and ripped and fought against the baby so goddamned hard when all she wanted to do was let the thing loose, to push it from her womb to everything else. Almost as violent as conception, when their two bodies had slammed together and will had ceased to dictate. She had opened up willingly like all those times before but she had still felt sacrificial, victim to his stabs and release. Of sounds let loose through clenched teeth and howling in the last respite and the way he moved her body this way and that as though, no really, she didn’t want to be fucked like that. She did of course. This was only playing. All of it was only playing. It wasn’t a reality until the tiny pink and white slippery emanation nine months later started to scream… more violently than anything she’d heard before… that she realised none of it had been a game after all. It’s never obvious until you lose. 

But now, there was silence. 

And some awful chaotic stench coming from that room, that probed her gut and she dry-heaved a couple of times as it, that thing, watched sorrowfully from above and the clock chimed the half hour. 

He was in there a long time. The wife knew what to expect so when he came stumbling out, snotty and teary and blank, holding that blue-black dislocated stinking bundle in his arms, she couldn’t even act surprised. Simply, she turned to her computer, switched it on, and began to chart the new numbers that were crawling nimbly in her head. 

Rachel Kendall has published in magazines and anthologies including Nemonymous, Connections, Thieves Jargon, 3AM, Dogmatika, Straight from the Fridge, Darkness Rising 5 and others. She edits the literary zine Sein und Werden : http://www.kissthewitch.co.uk/seinundwerden/sein.html