Winner of the Winter Short Story & Fiction Contest: Damaged Goods - Anne Merritt

The day the coyote appears at the edge of their property is when it all begins. Clara doesn’t believe in curses but as he cocks his head and unleashes an aggressive snarl, she meets his gaze and feels in her bones that things are about to change.

She tucks her knees into her chest to stay warm. Thunder grumbles from the storm that rolled off the sea that morning. Sheets of rain billow across the lawn. Main Street is flooding. The church parking lot is closed. Her teeth chatter. Clara rocks her pelvis back and forth on the splintering planks and counts the ghosts of children she never had.

One, two. The fog is so thick she can’t see her fingers. But she can see them: raindrops in white cloaks with dark eyes popped open, liquid bullets racing down to the dirt. Three, four. Her fingernails are bleeding. Her hands look small, no wrinkles, one cigarette-shaped freckle on the knuckle of her right thumb. Five, six. The misshapen heads of her ancestral line scream her name as they ambush the last of the pink blossoms on the cherry tree, then bury themselves in the mud. Seven, eight. School begins next week. She still needs to pay the electric bill but hasn’t told Justin. Nine. A family of mice just moved into the attic. Rock-a-bye baby, she whispers, as a large branch from the cherry tree cracks, then smashes to smithereens on the front walkway.

Their last embryo was injected into her uterus yesterday. They didn’t speak on the long car ride back to Rockland after the procedure. She and Justin had poured everything they had into making a baby. Sixty thousand dollars. Ten years. All of their life savings and hundreds of trips down to Portland for blood work and ultrasounds but worst of all—possibility. With each failed attempt, the mantra in her head grew louder until it drowned out everything else: You must will an embryo to survive. You must will an embryo not to die.

Justin’s voice, which started as a whisper, now booms through the open window. “I’ve used this dental floss for the last ten years and I’m telling you, there must be a manufacturing defect. It hurts like hell. My gums are bleeding. I want to talk to your supervisor.”

Their first kiss happened on this very porch. It was Justin’s childhood home. His parents had lived on the ground floor until last year when his father passed away and they moved his mother into a nursing home. They first made love on that porch in high school, their bodies entwined in the dark shadows under the sycamore tree so that his parents wouldn’t suspect anything, as Johnny Carson blared through the bay window.

If the porch was the bed where they bruised their spines, whispered in the heat, and twisted their tongues into vows before they were ready, then the third floor was where they built their marriage. A small room in the attic that had no name. It housed an oak crib that lay on its side, obscured by cobwebs and moving blankets. An afterthought of a departure gift from their neighbors when they relocated to Pittsburgh. The broken, angular arms of a pelican mobile jutted out between the slats. Clara had thrown it across the room after her first miscarriage. There were other trinkets—old family photo albums, an enamel jewelry box from Clara’s grandmother, an entire porcelain tub full of children’s books, and a handful of silk scarves from China.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you.” She can hear Justin pacing back and forth in front of the couch. “I understand you don’t make it anymore, but I want a refund. Thirty dollars plus tax. Yes, I ordered it in bulk for the discount. This is ridiculous.”

Before the procedure, the nurse handed her an image of an eight-celled creature on shiny ultrasound paper. A slice of her child in her palm. Two dimensional, black and white, hanging in the balance of what was real and what was not.

All the others, she stuffed into the side pocket of her purse and waited to start bleeding. Then she would crumple it into a ball with the rest of the month’s receipts and ditch it in a garbage can at a nearby gas station. She didn’t want Justin to find them when he was digging through the trash. And then she’d spent the rest of her month’s paycheck to buy flowers from the drugstore, which she would tidy and trim and place in a vase on the kitchen table. A bouquet was better than a funeral.

But number nine was different. She crumpled it into her fist and tossed it into the trash can right in front of her obstetrician. “I took a picture with my phone,” she lied. The doctor, a burly balding man with bright red spectacles, raised his eyebrows. When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.

Justin put his arm around her like a wounded animal and shrugged his shoulders. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. That he found the need to apologize for her made the hairs bristle on the back of her neck, but she stayed silent.

She watches a sea of slender gray bullets plummet onto their crumbling stone walkway. When the front door bursts open, she jumps out of her skin.

“Clara,” he shouts. “Do you have the receipt for the dental supplies I bought last month?”

“No. Why would I?”

“I left it on the counter and now I can’t find it. You throw everything out, just like my passport. Did you see it anywhere?”

The passport incident happened seven years ago, and she hadn’t thrown it out. It was misplaced, buried in a box in their closet. He’d convinced her that in her haste to clean she had been irresponsible, whimsical, a child. Even then, she wondered if his rage was her fault. He wasn’t wrong that she had a love for discarding things, but she wasn’t as mindless about it as he liked to believe. His anger poured into the empty spaces in their home. Today she is too tired to correct him.  “Not that I remember.”

“Great.”

He slams the door shut. She can hear him rummaging through the garbage can in the kitchen. A pastime he has taken to more and more, looking for what she can’t be sure. Receipts, broken light bulbs, yesterday, lost pieces of himself.

Clara busies herself with driving, blood tests, sleepless nights, washing the dishes. It is all part of her routine. Justin is busy at the restaurant this month, which makes things easier. She doesn’t tell him about the scrubbing and eczema and lotion she applies to her cracked hands every night. They become red and raw from the warm suds. It is nice to embody grief like this.

Two weeks after the embryo transfer, school begins. It brings in money, which is tight, and takes her mind off things. At the end of the day, she packs up her textbooks in a large canvas bag, flings a poncho over her cabled sweater, and places a small case of pills in her back pocket before heading to the parking lot. As she inserts the key into the door of her Wrangler, she feels the gush of blood between her legs. Her body quivers. Like some kind of insidious organ rejection, her uterus’ contractions send strong pangs through her abdomen, as if resisting the life force rooting inside of it. You must will a thing to survive.

As Clara tiptoes up to the second floor of their home, she can feel the blood trickling down her pant leg. The dull pain of a migraine starts to build. A fan propels humid air through a tiny window in the hallway. She won’t leave the house this afternoon, that is certain. The rain is coming down hard again, but also miscarriages don’t lend themselves to little conveniences like grocery shopping or afternoon distractions.

The day becomes a blur—she scrubs the double boiler and frying pan from last night’s dinner, bleeds on the toilet, tears up as she tries to fall asleep on the couch, and smothers moisturizer over the dry crevices on her hands.

After ten years of infertility treatments, Clara calls her physician as a matter of course. But when he asks her to come in, she obliges. The next day, she waits in the examining room—shoulders slumped, legs dangling from the crinkled white paper on the examining table. She is glad Justin is working the second shift at the restaurant and can’t accompany her. She isn’t expecting good news, or any news for that matter.

Naked except for a loosely tied hospital gown, two pendulous breasts dangling against her chest, she bites her lower lip until it bleeds. Surrounded by colorful life-sized posters of the female anatomy in each trimester, she fantasizes about flattening her own organs against the wall. If only she could hang from the rafters and label her child-bearing parts, raw and lifeless as rotting chicken at the local butcher’s market. Caveat emptor. Justin has been by her side through it all, but he didn’t sign up for this. Although he never complains, she knows how disappointing it is for him. When they visit his brothers’ homes filled with screaming children and dirty little footprints, she feels the smallness of their life together. A tiny house in a small town in Maine will never be enough for him. You must will a thing not to die.

Clara cracks her knuckles and knots her fingers like pretzels as she hears the echo of her obstetrician’s loafers down the long hall. When he enters the room, he runs his fingers over his shiny head, glances down at his clipboard, squints, and sighs. “Clara, we have all your results back.  I’m sorry to say that you’ve had another miscarriage. At this stage, given your age, I just don’t think we should do any more cycles. Your fallopian tubes…well, I’m not sure how to say it but, they’re just not designed to bear children.” He furrows his brows and turns down the corners of his lips—appearing grim, but in a perfunctory way as if he has delivered this news so often it has become inconsequential.            “But as you know, we’ve been trialing an experimental approach. We can download a copy of your genetic code, then algorithmically generate random variation in that code. All you and your husband need to give us are blood samples. It won’t cost a penny since it’s funded by the bigwigs at the academic center. They’ve got deep pockets. All you’d need to do is find a surrogate and we can help with that. Something to consider.”

Clara bristles at the words. It reminds her of the Build-A-Bear workshop her grandmother took her to for her fifth birthday. A factory line of whining little girls with bows—each waiting their turn to give orders to a saleswoman about what type of bear they fancied. It wasn’t about building anything at all, just pandering to their casual, Tuesday afternoon desire for fur, a pair of plastic eyes, and power. As if depositing money into a manufactured vessel can make it breathe.

“Do you have any questions?” he interrupts. She gives him a blank stare. No surprises, no questions. Just the blunt end to a long, dark decade. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.

“Doctor, I just believe that the abortion I had in high school must have caused this. I don’t know what else…” her voice trailed off. Those stolen kisses in the shadows of the sycamore had led them to this, she is certain of it.

“It’s nothing you did. It’s important for you to know that.” He places a hand on her shoulder for a moment. His hollow, mechanical tone makes the words fall flat.

She meets his gaze and searches for a glimmer of forgiveness. Her mind wanders back to her parents, tight lipped and staunchly religious. They would have killed her if they had found out. And she didn’t want to burden Justin. Walking into Planned Parenthood alone, she wanted to disappear into the curves of her sweatshirt. There was a flurry of paperwork. She could barely remember her own name as she wrote it—the squiggles were illegible and the black ink bled in the spots where her tears landed. There was a searing pain between her legs, then a vortex of darkness. As if her own insides had been extracted. Had they done something while she was under, some permanent damage that had led to this?

“Don’t you think there might be scarring? We have no family history of infertility, and I had no trouble getting pregnant back then.” She asks him the same question she had asked countless times, because she never believes his answer. It is different to kill than to let die. There is a price to pay.

“No, no. Don’t worry yourself about that, Clara. You might have miscarried that baby anyway in the end. We don’t know for sure, of course. We don’t have a crystal ball.” Clara shudders at the word baby. Grief comes in waves, and years later she still feels its force. He removes his hand from her shoulder, then squints at her and flicks his wrist, as if to brush the words off his lips.

“The nurse will be in with your paperwork. I’ll give you a pamphlet about the new embryo coding procedure. Just think about it. Take care of yourself, Clara.” He exits the room, his voice turning to laughter as he shares a joke with the nurse outside. His shoes echo down the hallway. Down will come baby, cradle and all.

Defeated, Clara gathers her belongings and walks out towards the parking lot. She sits in the driver’s seat and examines herself in the rearview mirror for some time—counting her own silver hairs, squinting her eyes and puckering her lips to look for new wrinkles, craving menopause.

She finds Justin asleep in the living room. She busies herself with the long line of his whisky glasses balanced along the rim of the sink. She’s tolerated the habit for years. As she circles the rim of one of the glasses with a dishtowel, it slips through her fingers and shatters in the sink.

“Can you put your glasses in the dishwasher when you’re done with them?” she asks under her breath. She hopes he won’t hear.

“I like to let them air dry so I can use them again.”

“But they’ve taken over the entire sink. This is the second time I’ve broken a glass, you know. They’re the ones from our wedding and we only have two left. We have a small kitchen as it is, and all I can see are these filthy glasses. I can’t stand it. We already have mice in the attic, they’ll come down here soon enough.” As she picks up shards of broken glass, her fingers tremble.

“Mice don’t like to drink, Clara, don’t get your panties all in a twist,” he laughs at his own joke. “But they aren’t even that dirty. I rinse them before I put them there. Then I can use them again when you don’t run the dishwasher, which is happening more and more these days. What’s going on there anyway?” He looks at her, his eyebrows raised the way they always are when he’s worried about her.

The dishwasher would deprive her of her ritual.  It doesn’t clean things as well anyway. The glasses are in a precarious position for anyone trying to wash dishes in a tight space, but more than that, they’re a nagging reminder of his insatiable thirst. The searing pain from the deep cut in her palm gives her comfort. The weight of their loss is everywhere—in the walls of the rooms they share and even in the air. She can feel him in her lungs. It’s suffocating.

That night, as Justin lies sprawled on the loveseat, Clara hollers from the kitchen, “I saw the doctor today. Another miscarriage.”

Silence. “Did you hear me?” She peeks her head around the doorframe.

His face hardens. “Were you going to come sit with me to have the conversation or stay over there?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“Don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault.”

“It is, Justin. If you were with someone else…you could be with someone else, you know.”

“Clara, I don’t want to be with someone else. I want to be with you.”

“You shouldn’t be so stubborn. Sometimes things happen, you need to go with the flow, let yourself change, let go.”

“I don’t.” He can’t help who he loves. She can tell from the straight line of his mouth that she has stoked his anger. But he knows how to harness it, takes a deep breath and looks back at his book.

And so they let go of their last embryo in much the same way they let go of their first. Even with such small living quarters, Clara manages to construct new walls that she can feel but not see. She settles into her disappointment. Marriage doesn’t crash and burn—it fades. A series of small unspoken truths inhabit a dark crevice of the earth then spread like a web, spinning, spinning, until at last they unravel—a tattered silk skeleton floating to the ground.

Clara spends her mornings inhaling steam in the shower. She lets the water stream over her flabby skin and pool at her feet, then circle the drain. She racks up a hefty water bill. Sin is expensive. She unburdens herself of more objects and people each day. She scrubs the floors, stacks dinner forks neatly one on top of the other, and teaches herself how to fold paper napkins into origami cranes.

This new way of living creeps into her bones like a disease. It isn’t just inside of her but all around her. The apartment is spotless: no smudges on the walls, no muddy footprints on the doormat. Pristine, sterile, oppressive. Defined by what it does not contain.

There is the rare occasion when she and Justin drink enough wine to binge on Seinfeld reruns late into the night. “Clara, we need to do this more often,” he whispers, wrapping his arms tight around her. “It’s good for you to laugh.” Clara tries not to let her body stiffen at his touch. They laugh together—but for Clara, it is a programmed, hollowed-out laughter, mostly so she can feel the echo of her own voice vibrating through the air.

When the second-to-last whisky glass breaks, Clara wraps her hand in a dishtowel as a stream of blood pools in the drain. As her fingers caress the jagged edges of her deepest incision, an electric shock races up her spine. It feels good—too good. “How about you put your glasses in the sink?”

“How about you stop complaining and start using the dishwasher?” The words slice through her.

She glances at the white scalloped shelves in the living room where all of their books are arranged along with her old photographs. It is the one fixture they built together when they first moved in. They tore the boxes from IKEA open and put the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle, one by one, staring into each other’s eyes with lust for this new grownup life where they could cook dinner, have loud sex on the kitchen counter, and build things together. But minutes later, they quarreled over how to orient the shelves. “They’ve got to go on this wall so the books won’t get destroyed by the afternoon sunlight,” he insisted.

But she hated the idea of the loveseat ramming up against the kitchen table. “This place is just too small,” she stammered, then just as soon wanted to take it back. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.” She tore off a piece of her fingernail and it started to bleed.

“Don’t worry, Clara,” he took her in his arms. “I’ll pick up more shifts at the restaurant and as soon as we’re ready, we’ll move to a place of our own. Big enough for a nursery. A crib, a rocker, a big old bear,” he laughed as his lips moved up her cheek to her ear. She laughed with him.

As he stripped her down to her lingerie, she wondered how thin the walls were, if their new neighbors could hear them, and whether or not they were the right kind of couple. Like how her grandparents had been—Grams resting her hand on Pops’ forearm when work got delayed at the factory. Pops drying the dishes, even though he detested it, at the end of a long day when Grams’ blistered hands had nothing left to give.

She fears they are not. She has recurring fatalistic nightmares about their embryos, but never dares tell Justin. In the dead of night, quintuplet aliens with green warts and too many eyes emerge from the small opening of a cave, their rectangular heads all lined up on ventilators for life support. This is her burden to carry.

***

Seven months later, the coyote reappears at the edge of their property. On a frigid day in mid-December, wearing nothing but a black thong and a gray crop top, she presses her navel into the lip of the bathroom counter and recites three Hail Marys as a double pink line appears on her pregnancy stick. She pees on ten more sticks after that, her eyes tracing her urine as it creeps up the test strip, a brutal but sacred cycle of disbelief followed by awe.

When she gets down to the last stick, she fights the urge to drive to the nearest drugstore to buy more. Staring into the mirror, she watches the color drain from her face. Her chest starts to burn. She plasters her half-naked body against the linoleum tile. Belly down, arms and legs splayed out, she presses her flushed cheek against the cold surface and struggles to breathe. Her eyes land on a trail of mouse droppings under the toilet. They’ve invaded the second floor.

A bouquet of pregnancy sticks clenched tightly in her fist, she sprawls her pale, limp body across the loveseat in the living room. She bounces the sticks against her knee to the rhythm of Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” Above the buzzing fluorescent lights, she notices a faint ringing in her left ear. She wonders if it’s the coyote’s voice reverberating inside her head, driving her mad.

She counts nine months forward from her last menses. September twentieth. A date of no significance until today. As the afternoon slips away, she stares into her remaining half glass of wine and swirls it as she recounts. May fifteenth, February eighth. A graveyard of failed attempts, the non-holidays that define the rough edges of her days.

Clara tosses and turns against the stiff sheets all night. As she slips in and out of consciousness, she is roused by cold sweats. When she hears the pickup truck spewing gravel across the driveway, she glances at her watch—three a.m. Justin stumbles into the kitchen. “Rough day?” she asks.

“Yes, it was a long one, we had three people walk in right before closing. Cleanup was a bitch.” As he lays his head on the pillow, she can smell alcohol on his breath.

“When I saw the doctor last time, I never told you, but he said it’s done for us. He doesn’t think it’s worth any more cycles. He mentioned that crazy coding experiment again. It’s like he’s trying to find new ways to take our money or turn us into research monkeys.”

“Maybe it could work. If you think it’s worth a shot.”

The unpaid electric bill still sits on her nightstand. She knows down to the cents how much they have left in their savings account. What is the price of a human life, made in this way?

“It’s not.”

Silence. She can tell he is tired, drunk, fighting to stay awake. “Clara, it’s one doctor. Don’t overreact. We can keep trying on our own, there’s still plenty of time.”

“But what if I’m tired, Justin? What if I need this to be over?”

“If you’re done, we’ll stop. That’s it. You call the shots.” He reaches out to touch her check with the back of his hand. She hates how tender and warm he can be, even in moments like this when she repulses herself.

“But what if I’m not done?”

“That’s okay, too. I was talking to Mirabelle tonight and had an idea. We could start our own restaurant—”

“We—do you mean me or Mirabelle?”

“You, of course. Listen, Clara, it’s late. I’m wiped out. Let’s finish this conversation in the morning.”

She wonders if the two of them stayed at the restaurant late to talk over dirty martinis. Perhaps they’d shared one. Clara curls her body into a fetal position and buries her face along the edge of the mattress. Grief comes in waves, and she lets this one wash over her.

By the time she wakes in the morning, Justin is already gone. One empty box of red wine, one half-empty bottle of Johnny Walker Red. His drinking has been getting worse, but she can’t scold him about it. It’s her fault, after all. A price she has to pay. She spends the morning scrubbing the rim of his glass so hard that the sponge chafes against her fingertips, red and raw from soap and eczema.

The ringing in her ear grows louder and the room begins to spin. She craves the sharp edge of glass, the musky smell of blood. She stares at the vacant sections of their bookshelf, then her eyes wander to one small stack of yellowed fairytales. She found them neatly stacked in her father’s attic on the day of his funeral. They sat untouched on the top shelf, tattered orphans searching for a home.

Justin is home by five. They’re heading to Monhegan Island that evening to the old family cabin. As they veer off Route One, the Atlantic Ocean slips in and out of view.

“What are you thinking about?” he glances in her direction, half inquisitive, half paranoid like a caged animal wanting to be set free.

She keeps her eyes on the road. “Nothing. Just our last trip out here a few years ago.” It wasn’t entirely untrue, as she scanned her memory for all the places this car had taken them. She’d purchased it from a junkyard on her own dime as a graduate student, and it had served her well, which was good because she knew nothing about automobile repair.

As she gazes out over the marshes, she lets her body sway with the weight of the Wrangler as it tilts from side to side, the salt breeze racing through her hair. She keeps her camera on her lap, scanning the roadside. When the time is right, she asks Justin to pull over. After adjusting the angle of her lens, she captures a shot of a lobsterman’s torso as he lurches forward over the dinghy. The muscles in his back tensed as a seaweed-covered cage of two-pounders breaks the surface. His eyes, serene pools of green, gaze down into a mirror of soft gray water.

As she slips back into her seat, Justin adjusts his ear piece. “Just lost the goddamn reception,” he mutters. It sounds like Mirabelle’s hushed voice on the other end, but with the ringing in her left ear she can’t be certain. As he mumbles something about the restaurant, she reaches over to turn up the radio.

The pines sweep along the shore, their long green talons inviting her into the desolate beauty of northern Maine. She hoped she would feel something human, or at least something, as this new life grows inside of her. But there is nothing except the anticipation of drowning. Down will come baby, cradle and all.

As the sun sinks beneath the white caps, she stuffs the urine sticks deeper into her bag. She does not regret the restless night spent swirling her wine, possessed by an unfathomable, black desire to fill her body with toxins so she could will her own ending this time. They aren’t fit to parent—not together, not anymore. Or at least, not Clara. It was all set in motion years before—the secret appointment, the violent extraction of the child from her womb, the murder then deaths that her uterus invoked. Her mind floods with regret. All things lost.

Then it dawns on her—she isn’t going to tell Justin. She will lose this embryo, one way or another. The coyote’s guttural warning reverberates in her head. The ringing starts again, this time in her other ear. It is disorienting. She laces her fingers across her abdomen and recalled the old children’s rhyme “Here is the church, here is the steeple…” She turns towards Justin. He glances away. His phone is ringing but he doesn’t pick up.

Open the doors and see all the people. She is almost certain that warm blood clots will start to seep between her legs that very moment. Her mind drifts back to the mice breeding like wildfire in the attic. Burrowing in boxes of defective floss stacked next to the door. She can’t bring herself to set traps. Close the doors and hear them pray. She imagines one of her paper cranes taking flight, small red veins blooming on its back as the sharp crease of its wings soften beneath the remnants of a four-week old fetus. Open the doors and they all walk away. Looking out across the ocean, she sinks deeper into her seat and anticipates the intoxicating rise of the moon, its light intensifying against these black waters—broken by delicate white ripples that race like liquid glass towards the horizon.

---

Anne Merritt is a writer, physician, medical humanities scholar, and Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor at Yale University, where she teaches narrative medicine. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Creation Magazine, Cordella Magazine, and Third Wednesday, as well as other journals and anthologies. Her first book of poetry, Light through Marble Veins, was published by Kelsay Books in May 2018. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and two daughters.