I lay on the pallet next to her, my hand on her belly, and under my palm the second heartbeat kept a schedule I had not set.
A heartbeat has a throat behind it.
I had built every calculation in this room around a sound. The chain’s length. The stand’s height. The wool I cut from the Tuesday shirt and stuffed into the ventilation grate. All of it engineering, all of it aimed at the same problem, which was keeping her audible only to me. The hum the stone absorbs, and the keen I answered with one word. Cats.
A child’s voice would not be mistaken for a cat’s . A child’s voice would bring Holst up out of the graveyard.
The cellar that I had called sanctuary was a trap, and the trap was not for her.
The trap was for the voice.
The word arrived at three in the morning. The word family. I had not used it since the farmer’s son became the novice became the priest. The word belonged to the before: the farm, the father, the mother testing the milk’s temperature on her wrist.
The word was lying beside me on a straw pallet with its belly full of a heartbeat I had helped create and its ruby eyes closed and its antlers resting against the wall and the word was family and the family was mine and the mine was the man underneath and the man underneath was —
Awake. For the first time in fourteen years, awake. Not the waking of the canonical hours. A man who slept inside a building woke up after the building collapsed, and the air turned cold.
The cellar could not hold them. The woods could.
