At the sink he rolled up his sleeves and scrubbed himself and slipped his right arm up inside her. He moved his hand up past the torn and pulsing placenta and found the breeched legs, the curving beads of the small spine. Ruth’s eyelids fluttered and Creed didn’t tell her that she’d come too late. He knelt by the bed and stroked her hair and told her in a soft voice that she was a good girl, a brave girl. He repeated the same whispered words over and over the way he did with his sheep when they couldn’t birth and they were suffering and miserable; and when he was sure there was no more time and no other way he boiled up a pan and went in under the breastbone with his razor and brought out the child, a tiny curled-up girl with a pointy chin and a small beaky nose and a glistening cap of sand-coloured hair, and when the long night ended and morning came and Creed had done everything he could with his boiled cloths and his needle and his fine cotton thread, when he’d tried every desperate thing short of a prayer to stop the blood and there was nothing at all, now, that could be done and it was over, he went and stood for a long time looking out through one of his arrow-slit windows at the sloping fell aflame in the dawn with the child in his arms.

She was light as a leaf and just as beautiful.

He’d call her Rowan, after the tree in his wall.

He wished his wife could see her.

Nothing Like My Nightmare

Nothing Like My Nightmare

THE DAY SHE left I thought of all the things that could go wrong: that she’d lose her passport or her glasses or run out of anti-bacterial handwash. Or the nuns wouldn’t be there to meet her and take her to the school as they’d promised. Or she’d go to the cash machine her first day in the city and it wouldn’t give her any money. Or she’d get a blister on her foot like the one she got in Solva last summer from her new sandal and it would get infected and she wouldn’t go to the doctor in time and it would grow gangrenous and she’d end up having to have her leg amputated, or she’d have brought the wrong kind of adapter, or the travel towel she’d bought from Millets would be worse than useless, or her plane would crash, exploding in a ball of black fire somewhere high above the mountains – but when we got there, the old man in the bright shawl said it was nothing like that. It just broke in two like a bread roll, spilling crumbs from the sky.

Sibyl

Sibyl