138 APRIL GRAY WILDER Precipitation he cloud above Wikitoria’s house is ripe red in the middle and any day now her child will drop onto the nest she and Pim fashioned from the best brand of air pockets money can buy. Because they had difficulty conceiving, they miss no precaution, not even the ones the cousins ridicule as old wives’ tales: the elderweed with which they pepper the marshland around them, the night-songs they sing under the crescent moon, the sandalwood dust they waft up to the morning sky. The cloud’s membrane is constricted around its blood-red belly, which means that their daughter—for everyone knows cumulus clouds bear girls—will arrive any day. “I had the strangest dream last night,” says Wikitoria. “Instead of a human child, we birthed a flock of geese. They inhabited the baby’s room and turned the pink wallpaper gray with downy feathers, and when they were just two weeks old, they pecked holes in the ceiling and flew away.” Pim takes a sip of warm honey and milk. “Let’s sprinkle meadowsweet across the thresholds today,” he says, as if this is a prophecy instead of a nightmare. “What do you think of the name Bonifacius for a boy?” “It’s a fine name, my sugar, but we’re having a girl.” The meadowsweet weeds are crisp and flat in a copper basin. Wikitoria sinks her open hands to the bottom and fluffs them up. A soft thunder rumbles. She spills a handful of weeds onto the floor by the doorways and turns to her husband, both of them wide-eyed and grinning ear-to-ear. “The baby is coming,” they say. They put on their rain slickers and boots. They don their Grade-A unbreakable, smudge-free, waterrepellent goggles and climb through the roof escape. Rain collects in the roof’s horizontal grooves and drips into the marsh below. As far as the eye can see, the sky is covered in clouds. Wikitoria and Pim recline in two chairs and look up to the cloud holding their child. t 139 “What if babies grew out of the earth?” says Pim. “What if they rolled out of the ocean?” Wikitoria responds. “What if they grew inside of us?” “Ah! Wouldn’t that be a spectacle! How would we get them out?” “Well. What if we spun them on a spinning wheel?” “Ah—that would be loving indeed.” Pim’s sister weathered her storms for four and seventeen hours, respectively, before Pim’s nephew and niece were born. The Earth was bleak in the year of Noach’s birth. The child launched toward the chimney , his father catching him by the ankle in the nick of time. Heleen, by contrast, slept peacefully before descending bottom-first like a tiny angel. Then she let out her first breathy giggle. Both are grown now, and it won’t be long till they yield the new generation out of their own squares of sky. Wikitoria has no living siblings. Legend has it that her family is cursed. Descendants of Koenraad de Vroom, her great grandfather many times over, had dwindled by the twelfth generation as punishment for that man’s enterprising nature, which everyone knows is proof of witchcraft. “It’s nonsense,” Pim always says. “Then why am I the only one left?” Wikitoria responds, emphasizing again that even her parents had evaporated unexpectedly. She was unable to preserve them in an opaque jar, like Pim’s father, who sits atop the mantelpiece and sprouts precipitation in the warmer months. “It’s nonsense,” Pim always says again. They notice that their neighbors have raised flags on their behalf, painted with warm hues to conjure protection. “Aleta will be here soon,” says Pim, and Wikitoria smiles, for this is the first time he has used a girl’s name. “Yes, oh yes,” she says and begins to cry. Wikitoria had a sibling once. She was four when her brother was born. She doesn’t remember the birth, but she does remember the day three years later when Ambrosius lay drenched in sweat. Her parents stood over him, arguing about what to do should the...
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Jul 8, 2023
Jing Zhang + 9
Open Access