The Great Wide Open
My mom and Nancy idled around the loop in Tippecanoe State Park.
“We don’t have to tell him,” mom repeated.
Nancy kept clicking her nails on the polished wood steering wheel. Outside on the hot asphalt the tires squelched along. A porcupine nibbled on some bark.
Nancy stopped with her nails and instead swished the insides of her fingers along the top of the steering wheel. “Do you think,” she said, and paused – swish-swish. “Do you think we could just take off?”
Nancy is mom’s lover. I wonder if she wants to ‘just take off.’
Mom shrugged. Her elbow is on the arm rest. Two fingers behind her ear prop her head up, and she bats her eyes at Nancy. “Why not?”
Nancy laughed. I want to protest. But I have no voice.
“I don’t know,” Nancy said. “What about his rights?”
“Pay him, we buy the rights.”
I could kick her. But I have no legs, and mom is already hurt. I can feel it like ink in my blood.
Nancy tittered. “That wasn’t the deal.”
There’s a rest area on the loop, just a small gravel pull-off with two port-a-potties. The tires popped on the gravel. Nancy put the car in park. She took mom’s hand in both of hers; her blue eyes pierced. “What’s going on?”
Again mom shrugged, hiding. She sat up in the seat and looked out the windshield instead of at Nancy. “What? Nothing’s ’going on’. But … you really want him to be a part of us?”
“That can’t be avoided, can it?”
“I’m saying it can,” mom said. “That’s what I’m saying: don’t tell him, let’s just go; we got what we needed.”
“A part of him is always going to be a part of us,” Nancy said, and I know that is me; I’m the part of him that will always be a part of them.
“No,” mom said, “the baby will be ours. If we go, if we break contact, the baby will be ours; not his.”
Nancy sat back and folded her hands in her lap. “Chelle, we can’t really do that; we promised him.”
“We did what we had to do. That’s all.”
Nancy turned to drive. The tires spun in the gravel. She pulled back on the park road, driving it like a highway. The trees are rushing past now.
“He’s not going to care,” mom said.
“Of course he’s going to care. He wanted this as much as we did.”
“Oh, it was a roll in the sack to him.”
“Is that what this is about? The sex? You agreed to it.”
“It brought it all back, Nancy.”
“Jesus.” Nancy pressed the brakes so hard that mom was pushed forward and had to hold herself with both hands on the dash. “What?”
“It brought it all back.”
“But you told me it was okay.”
“Well, it wasn’t. And I just know that every time I see him, even if it’s just holidays, once a year, whatever: it’s going to be a reminder. Every time I’m going to have to remember … every single thing that they did to me. I don’t want that shit to be a part of my life.”
“So the baby can have no father.”
“Would that be so bad? Nancy, would you have missed your father?”
“Anderson isn’t our fathers.”
“He’s more like them than you think. I should know.”
“No. I don’t believe you,” Nancy said, and she pushed the gas so fast the car peeled out, and it threw mom back against the seat.
Right then, I feel my mom decide to abort me. But I am no longer riding in the car. I’m lifting, out of her, through the green canopy into blue. I see the park, the small town, the web of highways. I see the continent full of people.
The earth shining in darkness.
Base photo from Pixabay, by Pexels. Edited by myself in Canva Pro.
Thanks for reading!
The way in which the unborn baby intervenes in the story, with consciousness and emotions, being the center of the discussion and yet without the right to an opinion makes us focus on the selfishness present in all couple relationships where children are involved; we see it all the time, children's right to a certain lifestyle or to life itself does not depend on them, and instead, they often become collateral damage. The most interesting thing is that we do it from the unsuspected perspective of the unborn child.
When this cosmic consciousness that is the possible soul of the child lifts out of her and goes back either to its origin or to nothingness, the green and blue that we observe as it rises reminds me of Woolf's "Blue & Green": The change of light (in Woolf's story), which makes the narrator see a different reality, although only in appearance, is equivalent to the change of perspective (in your story) in which we participate as readers, producing mise en abyme that I personally found very enlightening and touching; in the end, we can see the great wide open through the baby's eyes.
Thank you for a remarkable story, @cliffagreen. I enjoyed it a lot :)
Thank you for your wonderful comment. I like Woolf (at least Mrs. Dalloway); I don't know if I've read "Blue & Green".
Congratulations @cliffagreen
this play is suspenseful to the end. The ending, leave us ..... thoughtful. Poor baby, he was not to blame for anything.
People debate each other for the decisions they make, but it seemed that after a first happy decision, they remembered the past and all was lost.....
Yes, you picked up on something I felt when writing this: it could easily be made into a ten minute play. Of course, the baby leaving earth might be hard to stage. :) Thanks for reading.
Baited from the word go and made to stay by this agonising suspenseful piece. Hard decisions are hard but I feel like 'being' at the centre of a hard decision is even worse.
I guess I don't really practice what I preach, do I? I mean in reference to our discussion the other day, about being uplifting. Thanks for reading. :)
I want to point fingers and agree but what you said has been weighing on my mind heavily and I'd like to say that though I didn't have the words for a reply at that moment, I hope to keep your wisdom with me :)
Somehow you do. You yourself said it was okay to bleed until we heal. Yes?
I think my preferred spiritual teachers, The Marys, would say that everything is okay, everything is possible, and everything is a choice. If we choose to heal by bleeding, it's okay and we can do it. If we choose to just be healed, that's possible too.
Thank you @cliffagreen, for using the CO2 Compensation Coin (COCO / SWAP.COCO) on Steem-Engine or on Hive-Engine to reduce your CO2 footprint. You want to join? Buy some COCO / SWAP.COCO and transfer them to CO2Fund's account @co2fund.
This HURT my soul ... I never thought I could be made glad about such an ending ... such an escape ... but it truly is great storytelling, and gives voice to the voiceless ... WELL DONE
Thank you. And congratulations on your Wildsound success!
I love this ending. Shining in darkness. It's meaning in relation to this story is so deep.
The ending was definitely a surprise! I didn't expect the child to have not been born yet. You did a wonderful job capturing a difficult discussion and an even more difficult situation. I really would love to hear more of their lives. Like how did they get to this point? I'm so curious.
This was very clever. good work @cliffagreen
Thanks for joining us in The Ink Well, @cliffagreen! And you arrived with fanfare. This story is heartwrenching. Regardless of one's views on the decision these women are facing, it's painful to contemplate from any angle, and you've handled this unique viewpoint — the unborn child's — so artfully.
Well done with the prompt challenge to integrate action, dialog and narrative. You've done so seamlessly.
Thank you @jayna. I found the prompt and the tips very helpful for this. Somehow the focus on those elements helped free up some creativity; certainly it made them useful building blocks. It was a good exercise and I'm fairly happy with the story that resulted.
I find the same to be true, especially when feeling stuck. If I think of the story like a weaving that must include those elements, the story comes together.
Yeah! Pretty cool the way that works.
You are subtle and yet hit the reader with great force. We feel the powerlessness of a child, whether in the womb or outside, as adults work out their tangled relationships.
There is deceit, anger, selfishness--even lust at play here. All the elements that destroy relationships, without regard to the harm done to children.
The story is skillfully crafted. You meet the challenge of the weekly prompt but by the end of the story we don't think about that. We think about those startling last lines:
Thank you for posting this extraordinary story in the Ink Well community.
Thanks. I've been watching the Ink Well since it started ... I'm really impressed with what you've built.
One of the greatest qualities (in my personal value system) a creative piece can have is originality. Thank you for surprising me, and thank you for making me think about something from a new perspective--in this case, a really new perspective.
I'm not a fan of language that is conspicuous. While your writing is powerful, and some phrases stopped me in my tracks (I can feel it like ink in my blood) there is nothing ostentatious about it.
A memorable story.
Oh, thank you @agmore. I absolutely don't want my language to be conspicuous. Thanks for commenting on that, especially.
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What do you do lately besides creativecoin?
You're not around that much anymore...
It's all about Creative Coin right now, mostly. I'm working nights too, so that takes a bit of time.
Ok, let me know if I can ever help with anything.
Eat, sleep, work...
Thank you. I set up a curation trail at hive.vote to support my Creative Coin vote ... and work on funding for a not-yet-announced CCC project I've got going. If you want to follow it, the trail name is cliffagreen.
I should add: I don't know how to set it so that it only votes on Creative Coin, if that is even possible. So if you follow you'd be voting with everything ... don't set it too high or you'll burn all your votes!
Thank you. I'll look into it but won't join until the autumn any way. I have set myself to curate manually and when I leave for recovery, I will make a list for autovotes.
BUT, Can I put a small percentage to your trail also? like something from 1-10%
Yes. I don't think you would want to go higher than that.
Perfect!
Is it ok if you remind me around 24-25 June? So that I don't forget to set it before I go?
Nice fiction writing.
Thank you for reading!
Wow, I really enjoyed this... the journey, the constellation and the surprise! This was a great read, thank you for sharing!
Thank you. I followed you and I'm enjoying your work too. Look forward to more. :)