Hearse

posted on 18 May 2025

A smile had not graced the mother’s lips since the child was born nine months ago.

The chasm of despair had festered into every crevice of her life. It was made incarnate each conscious moment, taking shape through the interaction of the physical and emotional, becoming something much greater, a force that extended beyond the tangible outlines of the shapes that comprised their mode of reality.

It haunted the gray and malnourished strands of hair, the splintered wood in the corners of the ceiling being eaten away by termites, the bleeding pox on the child’s face that oozed. It was ever-present. Suffocating. It made her choke in the morning, made her spit bloody phlegm into her rusted sink and slither down the drains alongside gray water.

Before this, she had been someone. But who? Her identity was fractured like a frail bone, split into a million pieces. It was worth it, for she knew no other way.

Love alone was not enough. What she felt for the child transcended love. It’s what forced her to wake each morning with fervor despite her miserable depression and withering body. With each moment that passed between her and her beloved, she was dying.

Because he was everything to her, everything was dying too.

The illness of the child came with a predetermined end. The doctor in the village informed her that the child would not see his first year’s birthday. No one knew what the affliction was exactly, but it meant that the child could not see the sunlight. It meant that the child could not hold hands with his mother and breathe in the fresh air of the outside nor see the colorful, blooming flowers of the spring.

It meant that they were confined in their dark prison.

The days passed like murky, congealing blood.

The rooms had just enough candlelight to make out the dusty particulates floating in the air. But no light was required to glimpse the bludgeoning dysphoria. It assaulted the senses like a hammer. Life was beaten down and flattened in the confines of this seemingly liminal space.

Nightmares and reality blended together in the mother’s confusing and volatile existence. She knew not whether she had drifted to sleep or whether she was trying to fit mushed fruit into her child’s mouth. As if it was any use: he would simply vomit it up, screaming in equal parts pain and hunger.

He cried without end. When he was not asleep, he was crying. The thought of how much agony he was enduring inside of his little body gutted the mother. She was helpless and could do nothing to alleviate the suffering.

How could she possibly accept such a thing? There was no acceptance.

In their shared pain, she wished only that she could connect to him on some deeper emotional level. But the delirium and suffering distorted and ultimately severed the connection. They were apart despite being together, despite being the only two people in each other’s lives. In the same confines they lay, their hearts universes apart.

At certain times, she had fantasies of the life that they could have shared together. These were the most atrociously painful conjurings. Before his first breath of air, he was a bundle of potential. But now he was a ticking carcass, her little baby. Her precious child, so beautiful and without impurity, was begotten from death.

Death seemed to look an awful lot like her when she stared long enough at herself in the mirror.

She had lived a quiet, inconsequential life. She had given pieces of herself to others for as long as she could fathom the concept of the ‘other’; she had never lived for her own desires. Despite this, a hellscape she was granted, as the universe is fundamentally opposed to the human virus which arrived at its doorstep.

The mother was as much flesh as she was a conduit of omnipotent metaphysical animosity.

On many occasions she sat by her child’s bed while he drifted in and out of consciousness, contemplating such things while a hole bore down in her soul. She drew closer to him, put her hand on his tiny head pockmarked with scars which intertwined with lesions. She brought her head close to his, brushed her cheek against his own, wet his face with her tears.

“I love you,” she said. “I will always love you.”

It was not meant to be like this. But it was; regret had become part of the blood that pumped through her veins.

The largest castle would not be enough to house the contradictory emotions that plagued her. Betwixt the love and mourning was the almost unnameable feeling of self-preservation, that distinct human selfishness burrowed so far into the cortex. The thought of relief - those guilty thoughts of how much better off she would be if the son was simply dead. Or perhaps if he was simply never born in the first place. Yet she thought that she could not live without him.

Indeed, she knew what she would do when he was finally gone; in life and in death, their lives were enclosed in a breathing loop.

The span of nine months felt like an eternity. In those months, the mother felt like she had existed in a plane of torment that lasted millennium. For in this domain, time was nothing but a marker of decay. Time flows forward only to render the human soul into an unrecognizable state.

On the tenth month, the atmosphere in her life had changed. For the first time in as long as she could recount, she sat under a warm sun. A cool breeze caressed her skin and the sound of birds chirping could be heard in the distance. It was as if the conglomeration of all that the mother and child had endured together had bent back in on itself and sent them in the reverse direction.

The horses carrying their carriage plodded onward, causing a consistent bump that grounded the mother as she sat in her wooden seat with her hands clasped in her lap.

The smile that she had not seen since the boy’s birth was made animate once more. She felt as if the giant hand that had been pressing her into the surface of the planet had been lifted. Yes, she felt as if she had grown wings, that she had flown far into the sky with the clouds and the birds and the rapturous heavens.

She felt joy. She was happy. Yet, tears streamed from her eyes as she looked at her dearest son.

“You know, I always wanted to show you the outside.” The smile quivering, trying not to shatter into pieces. “It’s so beautiful around our house. I thought that you’d like it, especially during the spring.”

The light shone brightly on the tiny coffin that sat behind her in the carriage, jostling with each bump.

“My angel. I’m so happy that we can finally be together like this.”

She looked down, her eyes hollowly staring into a void that seemed to draw closer than the rope that would soon be around her neck.