Red in Tooth and Claw

FICTION

by L. Mack

The roses were the first to die.
         Maggie and Roger were so overwhelmed those first weeks back from the hospital that they missed the signs. One morning, staring at the kitchen sink, Maggie heard the newspaper skid up the pavement, and when she trudged down the sidewalk in Roger’s battered sneakers, she found three issues lodged in the shrubs. And there were the roses: withered leaves curling toward empty stalks and a sludge of brown petals on the ground.
         In October she had spent hours, blissful, selfish hours, chopping back dead growth and heaping thick mounds of mulch to choke out weeds. Now they lay wasted by a rapid blight. Roger, yawning over a coffee cup, dismissed it as bad luck, the inevitable loss that accompanies change, and promised to replace them.
         Two weeks later, she spotted yellowing grass by the oak.
         “Maybe we should pay someone to thin out those branches, let a little light in,” he said, though there was no money for landscaping. Baby formula was shockingly expensive. Just after the rose incident, a nasty little raisin of a woman had trapped Maggie by the checkout, jabbing her bony white finger into the flesh below Maggie’s collarbone and accusing her of negligence as if formula feeding were an admission of indifference, or worse. When Roger came home, the baby was wailing and so was Maggie, weeping on the floor with her coat on.
         The patch spread quickly: a crunchy brown stain halting conspicuously at the lush edges of their neighbor’s lawn.
         “I can recommend a guy,” the neighbor told Maggie, who imagined slapping him across the face as she shut the door and returned to scrubbing bottles in the kitchen. She had been up six times in the night with her ravenous charge, and the day stretched before her like an obligation. She could not be bothered now, when there was still so much to endure. But she worried.
         The baby was devouring two hundred and thirty-five ounces of formula a week when her potted gladiolus blew off the porch in a squall and shattered.
         “We must be cursed,” Roger joked, but Maggie, picking potshards from the dead grass, wasn’t laughing.
         “It shouldn’t be this hard to keep something alive.”
         She had meant to match his tone, but he kissed her so gently it felt like an accusation. Maggie pushed him away and scooped some kibble into the blue bowl they left on the back porch for Smoky, the neighborhood stray. It was still there the next morning, and the next, and for many mornings after until Roger tossed the kibble and rinsed out the bowl. They never mentioned it.
         In September the leaves of her beloved redbud browned and fell, revealing gnarled blotches on the bark, and Roger called his brother over to look while Maggie fretted in the kitchen.
         It had to get easier. Logic, the perpetuation of the species, demanded it. This fugue would dissolve and she’d be herself again, or close enough.

         They had resisted parenthood for years, cheerfully parrying the inevitable questions, indulging in lazy Sundays and impromptu road trips. Approaching forty, she had begun to wonder sometimes if they weren’t missing out, and that was enough to make her say yes when Roger asked if they shouldn’t maybe try after all. She hadn’t expected to succeed.
         Roger’s joy was immediate, expressed in a boundless enthusiasm for transforming their home, whereas pregnancy had made Maggie dangerously ill. She lost nineteen pounds, vomiting violently for months before her body reached an uneasy détente with its unappeasable tenant.
         Roger plumped her pillows and left water on the nightstand, and Maggie lay wretched, unmoored by nausea and misgivings, listening to the drill’s muffled whine. Danger, Roger insisted, was everywhere: household cleaners that could poison a curious child, garden stakes that could pierce an eye, stairs to splinter fragile bones. Lightbulbs could shatter, kettles tip, doors slam on little fingers.
         “You’ll have to give this up soon,” he said without sympathy, eyeing the paints and strippers of Maggie’s art studio. She had quit already, though it broke her heart. Art was an insatiable hunger she felt still, and his indifference infuriated her.
         “It’s not illegal to paint,” she snapped, and he said, “Sometimes I can’t believe how selfish you are,” in a tone that said he could and did.
         When her nausea finally abated, she had grabbed a drill and joined him, installing child-proof toilet locks, bolting furniture to walls, corner-guarding tables—anything to make their home safer, softer, than the world that pressed against their walls and the dark reservations within.

         Roger tapped on the glass and beckoned her onto the porch. Maggie looked at the branch he was holding, and not the light circle where Smoky’s bowl no longer rested.
         “Cankers,” he said, proffering the redbud’s blasted skin. “It’s girdled the trunk.”
         Maggie turned away, embarrassed by her hot eyes and the sudden pain in her temples.
         “Hey,” Roger said, rubbing her back gently. “We can get another.”
         She shook her head but didn’t respond. How she hated his rationality, this new sturdiness. He lacked her fear, her ominous uncertainty, her sense of having made an irrevocable mistake. Roger murmured irrelevant platitudes, his hand heavy on her back.
         “It’s just a tree,” he said. “Not the end of the world.”
         Inside, the baby screamed, demanding to be fed.