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Emily walked, alone, to the creek at the edge of their claim and washed herself beneath the rose-violet light of sunset.

She couldn’t bear to draw water from the pump and fill the copper bath, couldn’t bear to connect such an everyday domestic chore to something so private and painful. She didn’t even want Henry.

She needed to be on her own.

The creek summoned her. She stripped naked and walked into the frigid water with a gasp.

The intense sting of cold was shocking and sharp, but the sensation soon passed to become invigorating and soothing.

She sank down, spreading her knees wide, not caring for the sharp stones and gritty silt that dug into her skin. Pain was nothing to her now.

Silently, reverentially, she let the creek wash away the last traces of what, for several hopeful months, had been her child. She didn’t weep and wail, didn’t thrash about with anger or despair. She felt safe in the creek, cocooned in its silence.

A sense of peace surrounded her as her body was soothed by the water, a moment of restorative calm after the visceral distress of what had happened.

And then she heard it, amid the ache of her loss: relief.

The lightest of whispers.

She ignored it, turned away from it, too ashamed to even acknowledge it. But it came again, carried in the soft rush of the water. The unmistakable persistent whisper of relief.

They couldn’t raise a child.

Not here.

Not now.

She stood up suddenly, disturbing the silence with the suck and splash of water as she scooped up noisy handfuls to wash herself clean, the russet hue of her blood returning to the muddy sediment beneath.

After, she dressed and walked back to the house.

She scraped out a small hole in a patch of dry ground behind the barn and placed two of her pressed summer wildflowers inside, one for each of the children she would never see in full bloom.

Tiny hopeful buds were all they would ever be.

A promise of something more. Beginnings, ended too soon.

“For you are dust,” she whispered, reciting the lines from the Bible. “And to dust you shall return.”

She sat for a while, alone with her thoughts, the small patch of earth darkened by her tears, as if she might water these two lost souls and bring them back to life.

As darkness fell, she fed the animals, taking a moment to rest her head against the warm muzzle of the horses.

She drew water from the pump then and put it on the stove for coffee.

There was comfort and simplicity in these mundane routines: the squeak of the pump handle, the tinny rhythmic thrum as the water hit the pail, the song of the kettle on the stove, Henry’s boots by the door, the scrape of the butter knife over toasted bread, the cry of an eagle overhead.

These were the sights and sounds of her life. This was what she knew.

Dust.

Dirt.

Life.

Death.

On and on the cycle went, turning with the seasons. She understood the prairie now, understood what was required to survive here.

Like a scattered seed taking root, she would begin again.

Rise from the dirt, once again.