[FICTION]

[01/07/26]

Hand Made

by Fern Kealy

The pharmacist sneered at me as I slid the test across the counter. It seemed like a longer journey from my hand to hers than when I bought vitamins or toothpaste. I thought only men reacted like that. There was something else present with the women. Maybe they enjoyed it not being them. Relished the upper hand, felt a certain pride in their position. Maybe I just projected all of this onto her. I found pride in the fact that I wasn't drunk when it happened. It wasn't in some pub toilet, or field. We had been together for ages. And we said we loved each other.

*

‘I have the name picked out for her,’ he said.

I was quiet for a minute. Something swirled around my stomach like dregs of bath water into a drain. I worked hard to ignore it. To bring myself up out of the feeling, into my brain, where my thoughts were rational, responses considered. Considerate. 

‘I want to name her,’ I said, and looked over at him. The words didn’t come out how they sounded in my head. 

‘You can name our second,’ he said, like a reflex. ‘I’ve known for years. This has to be the name of my first.’

*

I had considered an abortion. It’s a funny word, abort. Abort mission, abort. Harmless. In games children play on tarmac. But abortion. It changes the air in the room. People tense at it. I do, too. I wondered if that would change at some point, if I forced it out of my mouth enough times. Like Juno before Sabrina Carpenter turned it into a song.

I mentioned this to him in bed. In bed. Not like that. Fucking me was weird now, he said, with the baby between us. He said it was cute that I noticed these things about words. I decided to take that as a compliment, and watched the white ceiling. He painted it himself, the brushstrokes beginning to invade the navy where the wall began. He always fell asleep faster than me. Not before asking if he could feel her kick again, already reaching his hand across toward my stomach. And how could I deny him access to his child, through me? An ecumenical matter, a right-of-way controversy between farmers. And I was that laneway with grass growing down the middle, tractor marks, muddy pools reflecting the sky. 

My stomach used to be so hidden. Before this, I worked hard to keep it flat. When I did crunches I pictured what I would need to do in nature if we had never been civilised. Maybe my legs would be wrapped over a tree branch, the backs of my knees against the bark, pulling myself up from my core, the weight of my hair tugging on the roots. I used to take photos of my stomach when I decided I needed to lose weight again. Without tensing or sucking in, to show myself how badly needed it was. I wouldn’t call it a belly at the time. The word just seemed too cruel. Now it’s a belly. My stomach is squashed. My organs are moving. It’s a belly. And it’s full.

*

In another version of this, I get the morning-after pill in time. I’m more careful. The pill is shield-shaped. I take it with brown bread, so I don’t throw it up. There are tiny achievements in and amongst the shame. I tell the doctor I don’t understand the difference between the pills he’s talking about. One I take once. One I’m on forever, I have to take it every day at the same time. It must be the same time, the pill. How long do I need to take the morning-after pill for then? I’m confused. He doesn’t believe me. He thinks my innocence must be feigned. His face and body wring slightly when he has to say the words, the cells and substances.

Actually, in fairness, I don’t want to say them either.

He says I should still use condoms. I tell him I never considered not using them. I never have. Not used them, that is. He says, Well, still. Then he jokes that with all these measures in place, the only way I could be any more careful would be to keep my legs closed.

*

In another version, she is carried to term, delivered. Briathar Saor. I could never truly define freedom for myself. He insists she have his surname as well. We’re emptying the dishwasher.

‘Is that how it works in this case, though? We’re not married.’

‘Yeah, but, we will be.’

‘But we’re-’

‘It’ll make it easier if she just has the right name from the beginning.’

He looks at me, fistful of cutlery in his left hand.

‘You want to get married, right? That’s what we were saying.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I’m just- It seems far away.’

He drops the silverwave into the drawer, indiscriminately. I asked him to separate them. He never said he wouldn’t do it. He just doesn’t.

‘The time’ll fly.’

I don't have a surname, only my dad's. Maybe I’m allowed creative control over the middle name. Then I call her that in my head, I consider it her real name. Until I forget. Until her first name becomes merely functional, the everyday chore of calling her, and I’m too tired to maintain the principle. I only get a flutter of confirmation when I see the full thing on her passport, the letters she gets at sixteen from Revenue.

*

Sometimes I think I can see her. The Mother-Me, in town. Greasy hair in a bun, black leggings and hoodie, pushing a buggy.

A couple years after a hard labour. Hours and hours. Labour. Manual labour. Unpaid labour. Her father and I are already broken up. I see that version in my head too. I’m on my own for most of it. I only half hear them when they tell my mam it'll be another while, she should go home, sleep, have a shower. Baby hairs cling to my damp forehead. Sweat dries under my arms, re-wets, dries again. I was concerned about sweating when he did it. When we did it. I could feel it starting to prick at my skin and I didn't like that. It distracted me, though there was a film all down his back. That's different. 

Middle-aged women witness the pain jump me. I beg it to go away, but instead it becomes me. I can sense their cocktail of pity and concern, a sour trace around the rim, a smirk twist. That knife doesn’t turn anymore. Just sits there, fused to my spine. Their fingers brandish glistening gold bands, rectangles made up of dotted diamonds.

Is there anything worse than something so expensive yet so fucking ugly?

I wonder who will own her. Me, at first. Then her. She’ll own herself. But when, exactly? Legally, it’s him who owns her. And he's not here now. Only going to swoop in when I have finished the labour. His mam will go straight to her. I suppose she'll think she owns her, too. Her grandchild. She'll skip my eyes. She won’t even look through me if she averts her gaze in advance.

*

In another version, I met him and his sickly-sweet charm repulsed me. In another version, male validation meant nothing to me. I never touched him. I remained frigid. Always pictured a fridge when I heard that word, and still do. Before this, in the early hours of the morning I would wake and walk to the kitchen, burn my palms in the steam of the freezer, on the fogged up plastic. A cold burn couldn’t be the same harm done by sharp things, by fire.

*

In another virgin, this made for a prophet.

*

It’s the morning after, that the birth is finally given. Saor, Saor Briathar, sweeping like a starling. That’s how I picture this version. All happening all through the night. Done at dawn.

I’ve only just finished screaming when they hand her to me, then it’s her turn. Her crying travels through my ears into my skull. I feel it in the centre of my head. 

It's okay, I say, trying to console her. Trying to conceal my own internal screaming. It's okay. But I won't be able to will that forever.  

One nurse says to another, about me but it’s all she/her. Give her a hand up so we can get the bed made.

At twelve I tell her she will bleed every month for thirty to forty years. She turns into a teenager, then an adult child. I wear a fascinator at her wedding and feel as though my heart is outside my body when she smiles. She gazes lovingly at her husband. And she peers back at me happily, her eyes eclipsed by the pearls glued across her veil. Her ring is a diamond cluster. I tell her I think it’s nice. She isn’t artistic. She takes after her father.

*

Or maybe not. 

In another version, she dies as a toddler. I stand at a grave with stone sculpture teddies on it. People wince when they walk past. I don't like going. I feel the pity off them, souring the country breeze like vinegar. Jesus on the cross in the centre of the graveyard. I don’t think the Romans noted it as a donation from the Murphys. 

*

Maybe if I were more confident, the naming conversation would have gone further.

‘I'm naming her. She's in me.’

It only takes him a moment to craft it. It comes from his bones.

‘Yeah but it’s me. It’s me in you.’

But I’m making her. I say this in my head. There is no version of me that would say this to him. 

*

When I make her, is she organic? Since there’s all the teflon, microplastics inside me too. Am I a small business owner if I make more and more? Is my womb my capital? Babies my output? Blood my run-off waste. Am I profitable?

*

In another version, people protest outside a clinic. I come out relieved. I’m glad I went through with it. Like a clone of myself, a parasite.

*

In another version of that version, I’ve murdered her. I beg them to put her back in, to reattach her to my womb lining, like holding a tooth against my gum in a dentist’s office. 

A woman puts her hands on my shoulders without asking, takes me into a kitchen. She looks at me warily as I tell her all I need is for them to put her back. She makes tea. I tell her I don’t want the tea, then raise it to my mouth anyway. The cup shakes, hot liquid trembles, storm in a teacup. We’ll forget all about this when they put her back.

*

I’m visiting my mam. It’s been years since the whole debacle. These visits involve more tea. There’s a strange silence as the kettle boils. The sound is too loud to shout over, too quiet to feel normal standing there without a word between us. I think that situation might have curdled our relationship. Slowly, at first, little chunks getting bigger, until it was all suddenly rancid. We avoid the mention of it. And we won’t talk about it. I can tell by the way we are now that we won’t.