Short story Creative non-fiction, excerpt from “The Sun and the Moon and the Baby” (previously published in Brain,Child Magazine)
“The sun and the moon could have been fighting.” Doña Luz pursed her lips in concern.
I breathed out, grateful she blamed heavenly bodies.
“An eclipse, Laurita. Without you even knowing!”
I nodded. For a moment I let myself indulge in believing this. “I’ll check my calendar. See if it happened on an eclipse.”
A woman in a blue flowered apron and long braid walked down the dark corridor of the market toward us. Doña Luz lifted herself carefully up from the chair and hugged the woman, who then turned to greet me, excused herself for interrupting, and said she needed a pot. Doña Luz burrowed her head into a pile of precariously balanced breakables and emerged moments later with a large aluminum pot. Her tiny market stall overflowed with woven tortilla baskets, wooden spoons, chocolate stirrers, clay dishes, metal cookware. It was a comfortable place, like an attic converted into a cozy living room and plunked down in the corner of a market. Years earlier, when I’d lived here in small-town Mexico teaching English and doing research on childbirth practices, she’d treated me as a granddaughter. Whenever I’d needed a grandma she’d given me big hugs, and this visit—my winter vacation—was no exception.
While the women examined the pot, knocking on it and cocking their heads to judge the echo, I sat on the doll-sized guest chair and thought about the sun and the moon fighting. It didn’t surprise me that Doña Luz had shaken her head and clucked at my half-hearted explanation involving random microscopic causes. Wandering outside during an eclipse seemed much more likely to her. And it wasn’t that far-fetched, I decided; menstrual cycles do correspond to lunar cycles. I kind of liked this explanation, so poetic and mythical, with forces astronomical and ancient affecting my body.
Back home in Colorado everyone—the midwife, my mother, my women friends— had assured me it was a random event. “One in five pregnancies ends in miscarriage,” they chimed. “Lots of women don’t even realize they’re pregnant, just think it’s just a heavy period.” (No one, I thought bitterly, no one could mistake the fist-sized thing that slid out of me as a heavy period.) Statistics couldn’t make it less real; they couldn’t absolve me.
After the customer left toting the giant pot, Doña Luz settled down across from me in her chair, smoothing her apron over her twig knees. “Or, Laurita, maybe it was a cold wind that struck you.”
I felt glad her mind was still acute enough to pick up the conversation exactly where we’d left off. Since my brief visit the prior year, she’d become thirty pounds skinnier, her hollowed cheeks and thin voice betraying a severe bout of anemia and stomach infections. She’d barely survived.
I nodded, watching her furrowed eyes sift through seventy years of life experience.
“Or”-- and here she grew excited, as though she’d hit upon it-- “you could have passed by a heavy place, where an evil wind struck you. You travel so much you might not even know which places are heavy!”
For five months—since August-- I’d tiptoed around some explanations, one in particular, and tried unsuccessfully to embrace others. My fear now was that my pregnancy had been a fluke, a one-time shot and I’d blown it. I blinked back tears. “So what should I do?”
“Prepare your body, my daughter! Do a limpia with herbs. Put the heat back in your womb. Wear a red strip of cloth around your belly. And don’t leave the house on an eclipse!”
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