Synaptic

The final project for this course asked students to compose a story using one of the “shapes” we read and analyzed in the first half of the semester. Emma chose to write a “Last Lap,” which places a character, from the very first lines, near the climax of a series of events. In “Rupture,” we’re dropped into Vera’s harrowing
experience as a midwife for her sister. The present action bristles with tension and Emma skillfully weaves in flashbacks to raise the stakes, highlighting each character’s past conflicts, grievances, and bad decisions. The “Last Lap” strategy, however, doesn’t quite contain “Rupture.” Emma’s writing—the lyric quality of their prose, the strange and vulnerable tone and style, the bold experimentation with form—doesn’t allow for easy categorization, which is a quality all good fiction writers strive for. The result is a narrative that is unflinching and brutally powerful.

Dr. Lance Dyzak

---

“How the fuck does a watermelon head push through a hole the size of a quarter?”

“It doesn’t.” I swish my hand around in the bathtub, watch the ripples that chase themselves into nothing. A bit too cold. I crank the faucet until steam licks at my glasses. “Muscles are a lot more elastic than you think.”

“Not my muscles.” Mandy raps her knuckles against the taut skin of her bulging belly. It reminds me of a circular island protruding from the Atlantic, a brontosaurus hump poking out of the prehistoric lake. “Everything in me is stretched as far as it can go,” Mandy says. “Like I’ve been reaching for the top cabinet with every part of my body for nine straight months.”

“You weren’t even showing until four.”

“But I felt it. From the first day.”

“You’re so full of shit, I’m surprised there’s room inside you for a baby.”

“Yeah, well.” Her stomach flexes, hardens, gleams with sweat. A contraction. I click the stopwatch on my phone. Mandy nestles her temple into the cold ledge of the porcelain tub. “I’m running out.”

***

Holly Markle had a baby. I was seven. I didn’t care until Mom touched her for it.

First Sunday service of the year. I wasn’t tall enough yet to see over the pews. Dad dropped me onto his lap. He always did before leaning his forehead into my back. What are you doing? I’d whisper. His bald skull was like a hot moon eclipsing half my body. Sometimes he said, praying, Vera, baby. Praying. When he was feeling clever, hiding from God in His own house. More often than not, he just snored.

“I’m going to ask Holly how she is before we go,” Mom announced to all of us. Mostly me. Dad’s sleepy breaths dampened the space behind my lungs. Mandy suckled her pacifier into oblivion.

I started to shuffle off Dad’s knees. Mom held up a finger. “Stay here. I’ll come back when I’m done.”

“But I want to see the baby,” I lied. I wanted to follow her, practice my big girl walk, assimilate into the mob of blunt-bob women circling Holly and the pink creature bundled in her arms.

“Oh, please. You hardly even look at your little sister.”

“But—”

“Enough, Vera.” She walked towards Holly. “Be good.”

I was not close enough to hear what anyone said. I was mesmerized by Mom’s hands anyway. They peeled back the baby’s blanket, stroked a tender line down the globe of his tiny cheek. This was expected — the same routine Mom used on Mandy when she fussed in her stroller. But then Mom’s fingers danced up onto Holly’s head, tucked a strand of fallen hair behind her right ear. Holly’s smile crinkled all the way up to her eyes.

Mom never touched me beyond a small prod of my back. Sometimes, if we had three passengers in the
station wagon, she’d shove my stomach aside to buckle the tricky middle belt.

My scalp prickled with envy.

I rocked back, trying to rouse Dad from his comatose state. I needed him to confirm my findings. I needed him to tell me this was not some jealous dream.

“Shh, Vera,” he mumbled. His arm constricted around my waist. “Service will be over soon. Can you hold it till then?”

***

The ledge of the tub bites against my ribs. I stay plastered to it, petting her back in circles.

“I’m gonna kill him,” Mandy pants into the Walmart sack. It breathes with her, crinkling and folding in rhythm. “I’m gonna k—”

Brown bile slaps against plastic.

“It’s alright,” I shush. My hands gather her bangs away from clumps of regurgitated saltines. I swallow my stomach when it rolls up my throat. “I’m going to kill him for you.”

Mandy nods through her next belch.

Joseph is an asshole. Joseph is searing slabs of bacon until they scream. Fatty smoke leads me like a bloodhound to the kitchen. He has the audacity to frown at me when I reach around his ribs to switch off the burner.

“They were almost done,” Joseph complains. His lower lip juts into a pout.

“Shut up.” My forehead aches from creasing. I wrench open the window above the farmhouse sink. “Your wife is giving birth and you’re making breakfast?”

“Not just for me.”

A huff of air scurries out of my mouth. “Mandy isn’t in the mood to eat right now.” I’m flapping a dish towel so violently that I almost don’t hear it – nails clicking on the counter behind me.

The hollow space below my stomach goes cold. A phantom ache.

Mom taps a disjointed rhythm. “I didn’t get to eat on my flight.”

…

I asked for a baby doll every Christmas until I stained my lilac bicycle shorts at thirteen. I held the shorts tender, pinching the hips to maximize my fingers’ distance from that crusted black crotch. It was disgusting.

It was as good as proof of God.

“I got my period at the track meet,” I told Mom. “Look.”

She glanced up from the red onion she was mincing, bottom lip strangled between her canines. Mom blinked at me, the blotted shorts I stretched out for her to see.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

I shifted my weight from left to right, considering. “It hurts. But… I’m excited, too.”

“Excited?” Her brows climbed the rungs of her forehead wrinkles. “For what?”

Heat crawled up my face. “I’m a woman now.”

Mom stared at me, considering. “Oh, Vera,” she sighed. She scooped the purple cubes of onion into a hissing skillet, swiped off the bits that clang to her blade with a merciless thumb.

“At least your kids will be cute.”

***

The scar below my navel aches; a jagged line, a hollow pain.

“How are you?” Mom asks.

I clear my throat, fold the dish towel into fourths without looking away. “Fine.” I’m a prisoner to the sad slant of her eyebrows, the pitiful twist of her lips.

She tries again, “Are you really?”

Grit my teeth. Change the subject. “Wasn’t your flight supposed to get in tomorrow?”

A muscle in her cheek twitches. Irritation. “Yes, well. I thought it best if I was here for Mandy’s labor. I knew it would be a hard day.” She glances at my stomach. Even covered by a shirt, I still feel like Mom can see it. Like she always can. “For both of you.”

“Today’s not about me.” The scar is so cold it burns. “Today’s about Mandy. I should be getting back to her now.”

Mom jerks her head, a tense imitation of a nod. “Right,” she says. “Lead the way.”

If I were a better sister, maybe I’d tell our mom that the bathroom is small. That there’s barely room for me, the midwife, and Mandy, the birther. That Joseph will have to squeeze his thick torso behind his wife’s in the tub and it will still be cramped. That Mom must decide between perching on the toilet seat or casting a dim shadow in the doorway.

But I’ve never seen anyone reject Mom. I don’t know if it’s possible. And I don’t think she’s ever wanted anything more than a grandchild – her baby’s baby, a perfect mathematical square I cannot provide.

My stomach goes numb again.

“Yeah,” I say. “Follow me.”

***

In Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, God and his first man do not touch. White sky divorces them, breathes a small, insurmountable distance between the tips of their fingers.

I met my husband in a class spanning the history of the renaissance. I needed an art credit to get my bachelor of science in nursing. Vince didn’t need that class at all. Just took it on a whim. He plopped his heavy body into the seat beside me.

“God and Adam are definitely moving towards each other,” he said as we zipped our backpacks open. “The lines of God’s body suggest forward motion.”

Maybe I should have been wary of this pretentious stranger. I wasn’t.

“Why touch something you’ve already made, though?” I asked. The middle seat belt buckle of the station wagon clicked in the back of my mind. “I think it’s more likely God is pulling away.”

Vince curled his fingers around the scraggly hairs of his chin. He had nice hands, artist’s hands. Stained with charcoal, chipped in yellow paint. My cheekbones felt hot. “I guess it just depends,” he said. He didn’t have to finish the thought. Part of the reason we just worked. Was God pulling away or towards? It all depends on the origin of creation. Whether something is made by touch or by the cessation of it.

I bumped my shoulder against his on the way out the door.

…

Her hand beats mine to the bathroom door. Mom raps her knuckles too quick, too light.

“Mandy, honey.” The pet name stings my eyes. She only ever called me that a few times. Only when my stomach was round as my sister’s. “It’s Mom. Can I come in?”

I anticipate an annoyed, no, go away. Maybe, ask again later. Something petulant and funny. Mandy makes good use of the dry wit inherited from Dad.

But she doesn’t answer. I press my ear to the wall. There’s only the whir of the exhaust fan, the polite stream of the faucet.

“Mandy?” I call. Wait, but nothing happens. The sweat of my palm slickens the doorknob when I grasp it. “Okay, I’m coming in.”

***

The boy’s head didn’t even come up to my waist.

I peered down the crimson cavern of his throat. White stones like geodes glinted back. Tonsillitis. I was sure of it.

“Alright, kiddo.” I clicked off my flashlight, ruffled his buzzed hair. He blinked back at me, miserable and feverish. “Sit tight. The doctor will be in soon.”

“Thank you,” his mother said. She averted her eyes the second I nodded, returned to the vigorous study of her child’s pale face. I could not be offended. My own hand traveled to my bump of a belly in sympathy.

At seven months pregnant, my feet became invisible. All floors were obscured by the globe protruding from my stomach. The sky seemed easier to reach than the ground. Vince spent three minutes every morning wrangling my ankles into compression socks, five in the evening tearing them off.

I should have been more careful. Should have spun in my chair. Should have glanced around, made sure my walkway was clear. Should have taken the day off. Should have worked somewhere else. Should have been someone else.

Should have laid in a white room made of mattresses until my baby plunged himself outside of me, until I was sure he was a separate creation, a being that could be without me, a person that could reach for me as Adam reached for God.

My foot caught on the mother’s purse.

I don’t remember falling.

I remember the wet heat that painted the insides of my thighs. Boiling blood soaked through my scrubs. The muffled sound of something ripping inside of me. The scream of a boy with no voice.

***

Red.

Everything is red. The bath water is a small lake of thick red wine, the tub’s ledge streaked in ketchup-colored handprints.

It’s all red except for Mandy. The white bones of her face glow through her skin like moons in a burgundy sky. Her eyes are wild, bloodshot things bucking around, twin desperate horses. It takes a moment before they find me, another to settle without rolling back.

I’m paralyzed until she whimpers my name.

“What’s happening, Vera?” Mom cries from behind us, muffled by her hand. “Why is there so much – ?”

My fingers dive beneath a bloody pond, yank the drain stopper out of its socket. I gag at the hot clots of uterus accumulating there.

“Is the baby okay?” Mom demands, voice trembling. “Should we go to the hospital?”

“Yes,” I bark out. Bath towels make decent temporary gauze. I stuff one between her legs, wince at Mandy’s falsetto cry. “Hold it there. Apply pressure,” I order Mom.

Hands soaking in red, I stumble out of the bathroom. Blood drips off me onto the linoleum. It sounds like rain.

“Joseph!” I yell from the doorway. “Mandy needs the ER!”

“What‘s going on?” he shouts back. “Is she okay?”

“No!” The scar beneath my belly sears. Mandy whimpers for me again. Mom shushes her. “Uterine rupture — we have to go. Now!”

***

pullin g g g pull i ng          latex hands     cold latex     hands were p

u

     l

l ing

someone’d     got me hey honey sweetheart hey

baby hey mama hang in                there

i                                                  cold                                                  i          blue blue caps blue gowns blue

four units          o positive                                                                           deep tear it all must come           out cold hands cold

face cold belly cold belly cold belly  i cold    i

toward the sun                     i         nurse pulled i   arm down                                  i arched towards

the sun and the sun                             was just a light                         a blue surgical           light

tilt back tilt

back                         blood run up over                        hips       get my bab y ou t

ma’am, please relax we’re doing everything we ca—                  geT

MY

BA BY OU T

squelch slice tug on the belly the cold sun watched                     i thought of adam i thought of icarus i

thought                     put her under i thought

for what?                                 Blue blue blue blue

  skin. Baby had blue

skin.

i knew              that meant nothing meant      nothing

that dead thin g outside me.                                     cold sun became cold moon

i                   open wound i              wanted to follow       blue     baby i                             i

swallowed the                   planets i

nothing              at all.

***

Vomit and blood plaster my shirt to my chest. I heave my own share of bile into the waiting room’s trash bin.

“When you’re done with that, I want it” is all Joseph says. He’s been staring at the fluorescent lights for a while. I think it’s a genuine attempt to burn the last hour from his retinas.

Mandy’s body went limp when he hoisted her from the tub. She looked like a reverse camel, red and hemorrhaging in the backseat of my car. By the time our tires screeched into the parking lot and Joseph threw Mandy on the stretcher, her skin was an absolute dichotomy. Either bright blood or pale flesh. Stark contrast. No blush, no transient colors. Only red. Only white.

Mom emerges from the bathroom, shakes water off her hands. Besides a smidge of black crusted to her cardigan, she’s unscathed. Made clean again by the sink and a wad of wet paper towels. I watch her for too long, too open. I can’t explain it. I just need to see her be human. I need to see her shake.

“Wipe your face,” she says, gesturing to the corners of my mouth. “You look terrible.”

***

I could live with shag carpet. I could live with weak water pressure, a small cellar spider infestation, kitchen cabinets that never quite closed. I could live in my shitty apartment. Vince made it livable. He would swirl his feet on the floor, chase me with a protruded finger, doing his best impression of a static E.T.. He scooped every bug beneath a glass jar and cardstock, goosebumps jumping off his skin. It was funny. He was funny. I could have lived anywhere with him.

But not there. Not that apartment. Not anymore. Not a haunted place. Not where I imagined a baby boy with his blond hair, his small hands, his big eyes, would stumble the first few steps.

I perched on a moving box. It was full of books. Or photo albums. Or the Holy-Fucking-Grail. I couldn’t give less of a shit.

“What the fuck is this?”

Frida Kahlo’s unibrow was a darker brown than the deer’s body it furrowed from. Her centaur form sprawled across the painting, galloped into the refuge of the forest. In my opinion, too late. Arrows plunged between the vertebrae of her furry back, the exact center of her chest.

I glared at the postcard-sized print Vince had pressed into my lap. The Wounded Deer.

Vince sniffed, possessing the good grace to look embarrassed. “I just… I’ve been thinking about her a
lot recently.”

“Yeah?” I asked, but I’d already lost interest. I wanted to go back to my staring. I was fascinated by our popcorn ceiling. Since I came home with no baby, the white asbestos seemed so much bluer. The blank space also gave me ample room to consider the voicemail Mom had abandoned on our landline. Vince told me what happened. Her silence translated to radio crackles; delicious, painful pops. I was going to come down when he was born, but… I suppose I can just cancel my flight.

“Yeah,” he continued, oblivious to my inattention. “She got in an accident when she was eighteen. The bus driver fucked up. An iron handrail went through her pelvis. It cracked three of her vertebrae, busted her collarbone, her leg in eleven places.”

I blinked. “That sucks.”

He paused for a moment, tapped the pads of her fingers together. His eyebrows pulled his whole face down. Made him look so much older. Made him look like my dad doing his taxes.

“It also punctured her uterus,” Vince said, tone solemn. “So she couldn’t have kids.”

I gritted my teeth. The staples holding together the hollow space beneath my stomach strained to stay in place. “Get out.”

He sighed, palmed the left side of his head. It was the half he got migraines at most often. “Vera.”

“Get the fuck out.”

“I lost a baby, too, you know!”

My hands didn’t hit him. They didn’t touch him gently, either.

They dragged, raked, scraped, ripped at his shirt, his hair, his skin. I pushed him off our bed, slammed him down the hall, ran him out the door. All the while, someone was crying. Someone was making these awful, guttural moans. It wasn’t human. I’d tell anyone that asked it was Frida.

I’ll never tell myself it was me.

***

No one knows when Mandy will wake. The rupture was severe, a lemon-scented obstetrician informs Joseph, Mom, and me. Tubes and medical machines crawl out of Mandy at every artery. They tell us the same thing in fewer words, longer beeps. Joseph can’t stand it. He beelines for the cafeteria. I listen until the doctor’s done speaking. Mandy lost a lot of blood. An organ, too.

It feels like there’s a rope pulled taut between my sister’s body and my own. The gravitational force of planets orbiting each other, of a twin destiny realized.

This baby will be her only one. This peach-fuzz baby nestling into the crook of my left arm, pink and raw, will be Mandy’s only daughter. My only niece.

Mom’s only grandchild.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Mom croons, stroking a tender line down the little girl’s face. “What a perfect angel you are.”

I stare down at the newborn. Her button nose twitches like a bunny. The motion swirls around the soft features of her face, transforming her into a different person that I don’t recognize, can’t know.

My chest is empty space. I feel nothing for this creature. She is another baby doll on Christmas. Something I wanted just so I could be seen wanting it.

“You did so well.”

Even in my catatonic state, I spare a glance toward Mom to make sure she doesn’t dislodge Mandy’s oxygen cannula on accident.

But she doesn’t touch Mandy.

Mom’s fingers lace through my hair, shift my bangs back. Her palm cradles my cheek. She’s warmer than I imagined. Softer, too. Heated silk soothing away my frown lines, the sharp edge of my jaw.

It feels good.

I press my face against her hand, shut my eyes, steep myself in the moment. Even the band of her wedding ring is blissful – a sweet piece of ice cooling my face. It’s too much. Everything I longed after, lost after, lived after for three decades is smoothing the angry indents of my eyebrows.

Her laugh is wet with joy. “I couldn’t be more proud of you.”

It all sours in an instant.

I jerk my head back out of her hold. I become aware again of Mandy’s pale, wired body, the vertical parenthesis incision that will haunt her each time she zips her jeans. Shame blisters through me.

“Take the baby,” I choke. When Mom just blinks, I lose patience. I thrust the squirming entity away from my chest and towards hers. “Take it. I’m not kidding.”

After a split second of pause, she does. Mandy’s daughter curls into Mom’s arms, whining. The noise wrenches my stomach, reminds me of Mandy’s pitiful whimpers from the bathtub.

As soon as I’m separated from them both, I bolt.

I don’t know. I don’t know where I’m going. I walk. I bash shoulders with strangers and hallway corners until red, green, yellow light bathes me. A stained glass Jesus extends both wrists. The door clicks closed behind me.

The chapel. I’ve gone to the chapel.

I stare at my feet. Feel a bizarre anger flare in my chest, the heat of the betrayed. It fizzles so quick it’s pathetic. I’m too tired to keep anything alight.

I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m not here to pray. I don’t believe. I’d like to say I lost faith over my baby, the rupture, the lost fawn. But that’s not true.

I stumble to the pews, collapse my body onto the hardwood.

No, I lost faith at a Sunday service. Mid-April, a few months before Mandy came into the world. The snow wasn’t sticking to the ground anymore. Father Michael paced the podium, thumbing his penguin collar.

A lump had knotted in my little throat. I can’t recall what made me so upset. Maybe I didn’t eat enough of Mom’s egg and hashbrowns breakfast. Maybe the dingy fluorescents were flickering. Maybe my sock slipped in my shoe. Whatever it was, salt water streamed down the curve of my cheek, stinging the seismic cracks in
my lips.

“Mom,” I croaked. I tried to crawl across the pew into her lap, but a heavy purse occupied the space. I tugged at her shirt. “Mom. Hold me.”

She didn’t turn – eyes still fixed on Father Michael. I tugged her shirt again.

“Mom, hold me. Please, I – ”

“No, Vera.” She shook her head. Her lower lip quivered. She bit down on it. Like our house cat on a bird’s heart. “You’re too big.”

Oh. The stone in my throat became a boulder. I felt like everything in my body doubled its weight in an instant. Still, I was selfish. “But I just want –”

“I’m not strong enough, alright?” Mom snapped. She jabbed a hand at the bulge of her stomach. “I’m pregnant, for heaven’s sake. Just… just go sit with your father.”

I don’t think a real God would have ever let anyone outgrow their mom.

There’s no one to sit with now. It takes some shifting, but the pew is comfortable enough if I lay on my side. I get to sleep without trying. I don’t know. I don’t know.

In my dreams, we are all deer.

In my dreams, I’m faster than the bow.