Writing Prompt #1

Your tools are heavy. Your shoulders are hunched over from the weight. Before you is the road. Long. Harrowing. Dark. You carry your burden alone. It’s what you’ve always done. Nothing is going to change that; not the sun, not the moon, not even God Himself will remove this horrid curse from your shoulders.


Crumpled in your fist is a water stained envelope addressed to you in your wife’s messy handwriting. When you first received the letter, your hands stained in black blood that was never supposed to be on this world, you couldn’t stop the tears as they drew salty tracks down your gaunt, hollow face. You immediately packed up your tools, your scant belongings, and turned toward home.


The cross around your neck dances in time with your steps, swinging almost like a pendulum. It’s hard, heavy iron weight pulls at you. You’re exhausted. You want nothing more than to drop to your knees and let God take you where He wills—but you do not give in. Hunched and haggard, you walk and walk and walk and walk…


Days, weeks later, you arrive home. The wind howls and whips around you. Ice cold rain drenches you, pelts your face like needles. The windows are all lit up with a warm glow and your heart aches with longing at the sight. Your steps quicken as your eyes fall upon the sight—until you’re running toward the door, hope aching in your chest….!


You open the door, throwing it open wide and letting in the chill air.


You hear her sobbing, your wife, your beloved, in your bedroom. A midwife stands in the doorway, staring at you with wide, terrified eyes. You drop your cloak, your tools, everything you have been carrying with you for…God only knows how long. You rush to her side, past the midwife.


In her arms, held tight to her chest, is a swaddled figure. She is sobbing relentlessly as she grips the tiny form tightly to her chest. Crimson blood has soaked the sheets beneath her body, her hands. Sweat still stands out on her pallid face.


“No…” you whisper.


“You were too late,” hisses a voice in your ear. “I’ve already claimed what is mine.” They laugh, mocking and cold. “If you want it back…come find me.”


Your hand flexes into a fist. Without another look at your broken wife and child, you sweep out of the room. You gather your tools again, pull your cloak on tight.


You have a date with the Devil. You don’t want to keep him waiting.

    It is four in the afternoon when Miguel Cabrero steps out from the hole-in-the-stone gateway into the mortal world, and immediately he begins to run. He runs, coat streaming behind him, through the sparse and rocky forest like a brand of fire—bright crimson, fleeting through the trees. He runs through the paddocks, startling goats from their lazy deforestation and leaps over the occasional fence, all the way to the small, winding road nearby—and then he runs down that towards town.

    By the time he reaches the town, it’s perhaps four-forty, but he doesn’t stop to check his pocket watch. He runs past the neighbours’ houses, not stopping even to wave or call back a greeting as they—like the goats—startle as he quickly passes by.

    It is almost five when he finally lets himself stop; he leans heavily, breathless and sore-legged, against a wall of stone outside a small house. It is painted in a sea-green shade, with pale terracotta shingles on the roof. Lightheaded as he is, he still notices the new additions to the little garden—the jade planted by the front door, the birdbath, the half-finished garden bed with several tiny pots of flowers waiting to be put into the soft, exposed earth.

    Miguel takes off his hat. He holds it to his chest, breathes deeply.

    He knocks on the front door. He can hear inside the gentle commotion: several voices talking at once, the sound of a basin, the rattle of a nearly-ready kettle on the stove.

    The door is thrown open and there she is—Miranda.

    Behind her, a nurse of some kind, perhaps even the midwife herself, has clearly been too slow to beat her to the door or stop her and elderly woman’s expression is one of mild, but indulgent, exasperation. Miguel, already smiling, only has time for a momentary thought—this woman must have spent a lot of time with her these past few months—before his wife kisses him.

    “I’m sorry I’m late,” he says.

    Miranda looks tired and proud and fierce all at once, especially when she puts his hand to her stomach.

    “I told you it would be at six,” she replies. Then she gives her eyes a faint roll. “With our kind, it always is. Come in.”

    She allows the midwife to escort her back to their living room, Miguel following behind. He makes tea, feeling ineffectual, while the nurse and midwife continue their work in brisk but friendly fashion. Miranda appears resigned to it: she gives him sly, sardonic glances every now and then as they check her temperature and remind her to relax.

    His entire heart hurts from loving her.

    All the missing of her he’s felt over the last months hits him as solidly as a stone wall or a great wave: it leaves him dazed and disbelieving that here, now, she is only a few steps away, that their first child is only a few minutes away.

    “Who have you been hunting?” she asks again, after a contraction interrupts the first attempt.

    “Whoever I can find,” he admits. “You have cousins all along the coast, by the way. Most of them will be writing letters soon, I imagine, if they haven’t arrived already. Not many of them knew they had… other family.”

    “Better family,” she corrects.

    He nods.

    “And my father?”

    “I had intended to arrive home sooner,” said Miguel after a long pause. “I wanted to be here for you. For both of you.” By this point, he has taken off his blood-coloured cloak, his weapons and tools, ignoring the curious and at times slightly appalled looks from the nurse. “But I also promised you I wouldn’t be home until I’d dealt with him—properly, this time.”

    He meets her eyes, seeing a hopeful shine in their perfect blackness.

    “You married an honest man,” he concludes, as humbly as he can.

    She grins fangly, that vicious pride glowing from her once more.

    “I never doubted you,” she says. “You are the best, I have always said that.”

    Miguel sits next to Miranda, taking her hand in his.

    “I have so much to love,” he confesses. “That’s all. With so much to care about,” he says, gesturing to her, then to her belly, “who wouldn’t fight with everything—”

    She cuts him off with a sudden, painful squeeze of his hand.

    “Hold that thought,” she says, teeth gritted. “It’s six o’clock.”

Screaming is a bit like showing mercy you decided when the pain began. Unnecessary. Gratuitous. Distracting.

You were three hours from home. Blood from your most recent hunt congealing in your hair and clothes. Foul smelling. Fitting. As brutality frames your life, so to should it frame the birth of your child. Such is the natural order.

Walked between the pain of the contractions. Twenty minutes. Nineteen minutes. Seventeen minutes. Sixteen minutes. Fifteen minutes.

Resting as they come. Abandon the pack. Only what you need. Every additional pound more pressure.

Rural roads a blessing. Were you to be seen, witnesses may attack out of fear. Unwashed for days, sticky with dried blood and your own prebirth, swollen as a corpse, the hunter appears as its prey. All spirals and remeets where it departs.

Ten minutes. Eight minutes. Six minutes.

Your first took a day and a half to be born.

You remember impatience at the slow pace of your labor, cursing your midwife and demanding to be finished.

Home only a mile away you pray for more time knowing you won't make it.

You give up and seek shelter beneath a bush, your robe a shield against the cold ground.

Five minutes. You brace through the pain, almost two minutes now, gasping and squatting as relief comes.

Close.

Now to wait.

The sun has long since set and your knife is gripped tightly, protection and precaution.

Unafraid to intervene if something goes wrong.

Not that you think anything would.

Pain mere minutes apart, you give in to your body. You defer where you're no expert.

Instincts as a mentor, your body does the rest and only just barely do you catch your own child before your knees give out from under you.

You clutch your baby to your chest, bloody, slippery, beautiful. Cries breach the still of the night but you are quick to respond, quick to act.

You're experienced, after all.

You've done this before.

Though not quite out in the open like this.

But you'll be fine, you and the baby.

You'll rest, and come dawn, you'll walk the last mile home.