Photographic Memory #9 (Nocturne)

She was told to deliver to him a son.

And so it was to become in the young wife’s final year. A day passed, a week, a month. After the announcement of her condition, there was a lightness throughout the great house in Busan that the young wife had never seen. She heard the maidservants murmur of the joy that had consumed their master. How he’d become well natured and hardly beat them, how he seemed to hum when he strolled the courtyard. He summoned his nursemaid from the mountains in preparation for his child’s approaching birth, and the old woman brought the infant photograph of him at his dol, along with a series of orders not to be broken.

No longer is he to visit her at night.

No longer is she to feel his desire.

For the sake of the child. For her womb’s well being.

The words reassuring the young wife of safe harbor in her quarters. But now, always, a soreness within her limbs that will not falter, swelling against the bones until she cannot rise from her bedding without a groan, the life of him deep within her, sprouting from its shell with its persistent roots, tight against her stomach in the slow stretch of a pumpkin’s roundness.

Other voices the young wife has heard.

The nursemaid whispering to soothe the sickness. The pain of the first is always greatest. It will seem more than you can bear.

She places a cool rag upon the young wife’s forehead and massages her bulging wrists. A sleepless night, her ceaseless moaning. Seven months deep into this season. In the halo of candlelight, there, in that corner, a constellation of silver spiders calls to her. Their legs hold soft gossamers woven for her midriff. Wrap it around her to take away the pain.

Be courageous, the nursemaid whispers again, you speak nonsense. It is natural what you feel.

But other voices as well.

The maidservants muttering how odd it is. So early, her moaning. The awful cries that awaken them in the doldrums of darkness each night while they clutch their hair to their ears. She is too young. She is too frail. Remember what happened last time?

As the maidservants scrub the hallway floor before her quarters, the spiders again weave these words into a tapestry above her bedding. They stare at her with octets of crimson eyes, chanting incessantly in their delicate voices. Holder of his child. Coffer for his treasure. Names bestowed upon her as they caress her belly with their bent legs. Eat more for his child, it is your duty. She implores them to stop, to leave as they melt back into the body of the nursemaid. Can’t she see how full her middle already is?

And yes, the voice that still visits her in fever. The faceless shadow before her door, smoking his tobacco. Hear the grating puffs, inhale, constant. She thrashes against his blood in her body and yearns to be done with it, done. But it is impossible, any relief from the knowledge of him in her veins. She can only scream to be left alone. To have them all leave. He places his hands upon her belly, and she spits.

Madness, the nursemaid tells the master, who’s grown irritated wiping his brow. Do not listen. She is too young to know what she does.

But no one sees the truth. That it isn’t truly madness. They can’t see what the young wife has seen, and really it bears no consequence. What matters, what is at the heart of it all is something else, the squeezing on the borders of the belly, incomprehensible to anyone who does not know, who has not sensed the coming implosion of walls and tissue and blood, so much blood why won’t it stop, why won’t it cease and finally heal the emptiness that is too much for the body to understand?

What she means is, to never speak of this at all betrays the only madness.

Now the last night. Everyone has gone to sleep, everyone, and the air has grown quiet, blanketing its coolness against the young wife’s skin. She struggles to her feet, and away she goes. She’s free. She steps through the maze of hallways, past the celadon sentries, the broad wood chests and landscape scrolls, and finally to the front terrace that leads outside.

Underneath a sidereal sky, she lies by the fishpond in the courtyard, stares. The stars the only ones to witness the quickness that has caught her breath, seizing her chest in its grip. And the vise inside her womb, that’s there too. She can’t escape it. She feels it begin to turn again, its jaws biting into her sharply, and she breathes rapidly until the throbbing subsides. The nursemaid was correct about it. This pain. She can hardly bear it. But she will not weep blindly, she refuses. One tear falls, that’s all, and it is finished.

Then the terrible rake pulls through her insides, and she groans deeply. She curls into a ball, unravels. Again, and her back arches sharply with each collapse of muscle, and now she is opening. Splitting. Her once-child body, his line inside her, her ruined insides. She raises her fists and brings them down savagely upon her belly, shrieks into the night.

The hallways stir, and the front terrace awakens in the glow of floating lanterns. She screams again, her wail plummeting like a shell, whistling louder and louder until the last moment the nursemaid appeared by the young wife’s side, staring as the darkness bled into the earth beneath her legs.