Page 128 of What Blooms in Barren Lands

“Fibroids.” Dave nodded, sympathy flooding his warm eyes.

He stood close enough to touch me but knew not to.

“A bad case, by the sound of it?”

“The worst my surgeon had seen in about a decade. And he was the kind of specialist who only ever saw the worst cases.”

Uterine fibroids are benign tumours of the womb and are relatively harmless in the majority of cases. Mine was not a majority case. Not only have mine caused my uterus to swell to the size of a three-month pregnancy, all the while preventing me from actually getting pregnant, but they also gave my periods an alarming, torrent-like fervour, leading to critical anaemia. In other words, I was unlucky to be an uncommonly severe manifestation of a problem that was overall fairly common; most women above the age of thirty-five would develop one or two fibroids before menopause.

“I had thirty of them at twenty-four years old,” I said quietly, wiping a few specks of dust off the tar-like surface with my finger.

A small, horror-infused gasp was the only indication of Dave having heard me.

“I begged my surgeon relentlessly until I convinced him to preserve whatever was left of my uterus, as opposed to taking it out whole. But I think I knew already even then that I had no chance in hell ever to have a baby,” I continued, my voice sounding strangely distant to myself, the empty expanse of the hospital giving it an eerie, supernatural echo as it increased in volume. “To someone like me, a death sentence would have been more merciful than that diagnosis.

“I remember lying on a table like this before my surgery. There were so many people, and apart from my surgeon, I had no idea who they were or why they were there. They all looked the same in their coats, caps, and masks. Everyone was so nice to me, this poor young girl who had been so very unlucky. I would have preferred them detached, professional in a just-another-patient, just-another-surgery manner, but they were brimming with pity. If I had thought before that not being able to have children wasn’t the worst disaster that could happen to a woman, they alone would have convinced me otherwise. It was unbearable. And they kept assuring me that soon I would wake up and it would all be alright ...”

I scoffed, derisively, nastily, the sound suffused with loathing.

“How could they not tell? Iwanted todie,” I enunciated emphatically. “The last conscious thought I had as my head started to spin from the anaesthesia waspleaselet it go terribly wrong. Let me die here.And I meant it at that time, too.”

It was to Dave’s immense credit that he knew not to say anything. Minutes of silence passed us by.

“Renny,” he spoke once the stillness grew oppressive, “it’s always lovely to see you, no matter the circumstances.” He sighed heavily, straightening up, steeling himself with something akin to a premonition darkening in his eyes. “But tell me, why did you come here today? We both know that anythingshort of a mortal injury would never make you set foot into a hospital ...”

I bolted upright in disorientation and panic, my heart hammering wildly against my rib cage. It was still dark, and Einar was beside me in the bed, breathing peacefully. He never snored unless he had a cold. Seeing him calmed me down, but still, I wondered what had happened that woke me up so suddenly.

Did I hear an infected horde approaching? Impossible, there were no more roamers left in Corsica. I strained my ears, hardly breathing, but heard nothing. All was quiet, almost eerily so.

I shot up from the bed and walked over to the window, the wooden floor cool and unpliant beneath my feet. Pulling the curtain aside, its floral pattern oblique in the lack of light, I opened the window wide and looked out. There was only a sliver of new moon in the sky, and it was deeply dark outside, the outlines of other houses barely visible along the road. I stared into the abyss for a minute, willing my heart to slow down.

A nightmare, then, one that evaporated from my memory upon waking?

Then a powerful shiver ran through me, and my heart nearly stopped before racing anew. I tried to roll my nightshirt up with trembling hands, but it kept getting in the way. And so I took it off entirely, throwing it unceremoniously to the floor. My nipples hardened painfully in the breeze. I laid my palms across the bulge of my lower stomach.

And there it was again, deep inside. The tiniest flutter. Like a tentative introduction, a first shy greeting.

My heart threatened to leap out of my chest. The wind’s murmurs danced through the branches of trees along the road like excited whispers.

I looked up at the spatter of stars in the sky. They made me think vaguely of a man’s seed, of its wandering rush through the dark void of the womb, towards demise or glory. Those celestial harbingers of life or death, twinkling splendidly in their endless solitude. How many were there in the skies visible to the naked eye that very night?

One thousand, five hundred and twenty-three, I decided frivolously in reply to my own musings. Because that was the number of days I had spent begging the universe for that very moment.

The Earth ground slowly and strenuously, screeching on its axis during those dreaded days in hospital gowns, days when my stomach bruised with my flimsy administration of hormonal injections, days I was obliged to lie on my back with my legs splayed obscenely. Those days consumed whole by research on how to achieve something that drug addicts managed without trying. Days of ceaseless waiting. Waiting for the next treatment cycle. Waiting for the next monitoring scan. Waiting for test results. Days of staring at a plastic stick, mocked by the stark white of where the second line should have appeared, hurling the test across the bathroom in fury, only to collapse next to it to check if maybe, just maybe, please, the second line had materialised in the meantime.

One thousand, five hundred and twenty-three days that I had spent locked in a prison from which there was no breaking out. The prison wherein life swung on a pendulum between hope and disappointment. The prison of sheer uncertainty first. And then, the prison of certainty that was like a storm impossible toweather, loud in the silence it left behind of a future never to be. The prison that was akin to knowing an ugly truth about myself, a dark, shameful secret that I had carried inside. A secret that grew and grew like a foetus until it made me stoop dejectedly with a weight inconceivably heavy to bear. A secret that turned out to be untrue after all.

So near that I could almost touch it, I had for weeks gazed on as my once hopeless wish made itself known to have become a reality. The life that had taken root inside of me, so very sovereign and irrevocable, had lifted the shadowy waters in which I had been submerged for so long that I had forgotten what it was like to breathe without drowning.

Revealing to me, at long last, the key to my freedom.

44

COUNTING BLESSINGS

“Time to wake up, trouble.” A large hand held me by the shoulder and shook me slightly, pulling me unwilling from my slumber into an upright position.

I groaned, not at all pleased at finding myself vertical all of a sudden.