Floodwater

Michelle Chuqi Huang

Part I

Winifred

Winnie jolts awake to the sensation of blood trickling up her spine. Her phone reads 4AM: two hours before her morning alarm. Immediately, she realises she is too sleepy––her body protests moving from the warm cavity she has made in the blankets overnight––despite registering the emergency in her pants. However, the awareness of laying in wet blood, and an unacceptable excess of it, grows until she abandons all wishes of falling back asleep. Plus, she thinks, best to seize the opportunity to use an empty bathroom while she can.

She hoists herself onto her elbows, and then her hands. Shuffles off the bed with a practised, quiet quickness. Soaks her bedsheets in the bathroom sink, manoeuvres from the toilet to the shower before blood comes from her again. Behind the shower curtain she stands, holding the shower-head between her legs and watching as the blood rinses off her body. Winnie smells it, too: the fragrant comfort of steam and hot water punctured by a metallic tang. She watches the whorls of blood find the drain with a dispassionate eye. A brief interlude to pat dry her limbs and contain her ass in a fresh assortment of period products, and then Winnie takes her bar of soap and gets to work.

What excellent work ethic she has: a common remark on her high school report cards.

“What excellent work ethic I have,” Winnie echoes, smiling to herself, as she kneads her bedsheets again and again until the water comes out transparent. She washes quietly, avoiding any loud noises that might awaken the others in her dormitory. She spent the day yesterday preemptively laying towels on every permeable surface of her room, treating herself like a dog before its potty-training. Spent the night sleeping on a folded-up square of towel so that she wouldn’t bleed onto the bedsheet––which she did, anyway, despite her best efforts. Every time she turned in bed, she folded the towel around the curve of her hip so that rogue oozes of blood would not stain her blanket.

Her fingers, although clean, still smelled faintly of blood. Or was that just in her head? She thinks of old wives tales and faraway societies that shunned menstruating women, believing their touch capable of souring wine, and isn’t sure whether to start smearing her fingers on every surface out of spite or to wash her hands again and again with layers of soap. Where to sit? The chair is off limits––it is dangerously upholstered with foam and fabric. As do all the chairs in her dormitory common area. The ground then, Winnie decides. Made of an ambiguously speckled grey stone that wouldn’t be too fussy about relinquishing blood stains. She balances her pen and pad of paper on her thighs, her back propped against the wall, and begins writing. Her pen glides past half a page. Her reflection, when she looks up to see it, slowly fades as the sun rises over the fields beyond her window. Three-fourths of a page. Winnie hears the sounds of other students’ alarms go off in the other rooms, followed by groans, a swishing of blankets, or the silencing of the jingle mid-squawk and then nothing at all. Soon the shuffling of flip-flopped feet marching into the shared bathroom, the pattering of shower water on plastic curtains, the brushing of teeth. Winnie’s thoughts begin to hiccup, her pen starting and stopping, often in the middle of sentences. She slashes through the few new sentences without even terminating them with a period. She hears the front door open and close for a final time, and then the dormitory air settles back into silence, and then it is just her and someone’s snoring across the hall. Winnie sets down her pad of paper and walks into the shared living room, her arms held in a stretch above her head. The room smelled perpetually of beer ever since an entire can of it had spilled onto the ancient carpet laid below the tables and chairs of the study space. A whiteboard had been rolled to one table and abandoned in the night. Closer inspection revealed mathematical workings that were correct or ludicrous; either way, they were indiscernible to Winnie.

Non-fine arts majors had courses that assigned lab reports and problem sets and essays, which students completed in uninspired subject-verb, subject-verb sentences that betrayed nothing of themselves except, perhaps, their academic competence. Winnie still has hard drives of her high school work, which she keeps not for the sake of their any particular elegance (she found even the best of them ineffectual and floundering), but because they testified to a mulish persistence with which she met all her deadlines. Her work now demanded that she unravel the murky thoughts in her head if she wanted to produce anything that packed a punch; she had to write stories that presented her hopes and dreams and insecurities and obsessions for her professor and fellow workshop students to see and critique; her work, from the mediocre to the best, became her darlings. For the sake of her sanity she couldn’t be a weeping, soft thing everywhere, so she remained vulnerable on the page and in the classroom, and maintained a stony composure everywhere else.

“I wrote…this.” From her bag, Winnie pulls out the creased page she had worked on that morning. Other students seated around the circle clicked into the file containing the typed version of her page and loaded it onto their laptops. Their professor is silent as the students shift into the familiar workshop procedure.

Someone says what the story is about, eliciting a round of nods.

“…again,” someone else mumbles. Winnie tries not to look as pathetic as she feels. She looks across the circle to Mona, whose face is illuminated by the faint blue glow of her computer screen.

“I like the rhythm of your sentences,” Mona says. “Like this one:”

She quotes a line from Winnie’s writing.

“It’s beautiful.”

“When my students stop––not at their piece’s ending, per se, just where they have put down their pen––if that place feels like a closing I tell them to write something else, and if it feels like it’s letting light through I tell them to keep going,” says the professor. “The world rarely stops for stories that leave no wiggle room, you see.”

Winnie chooses her words carefully. “And…what I shared earlier today, I––it––reads into a closing?”

None of this is personal, she reminds herself. It’s why workshop procedure is so militant that students say ‘the narrator’ instead of ‘you’ when critiquing, and ‘readers’ instead of ‘I.’ Both sides make efforts to step back, and both sides pretend that the piece of writing placed on the chopping block isn’t a pulsating organ, still connected to someone young by a bundle of tendons and nerves.

“I don’t know, Winifred. You write beautifully enough, but I sense that scarcely anything makes it from your mind to paper. You stop somewhere along the way and I, as a reader, am left with nowhere to go.”

The professor looks at her intensely. Winnie looks away.

“What is the impetus that drives you to write? Can you articulate it for me?”

Winnie shakes her head. She understands the unspoken lesson in the professor’s questions: instinct can only take you so far. Everyone begins their first page with instinct. But to write beyond that, to give a story its full form, requires something more sophisticated than instinct.

Everyone in the workshop group writes beautifully enough. They would have to. A compulsive need to rearrange syntax, to roll synonyms around in the mouth until the right word lodges into place, to pry their writing abilities from the carpentry of argumentative essays and use the same material––an above-average grasp of language, but really, the same words––and carve it into something beautiful instead, decorative and hopefully something more. They could all write beautifully enough; it’s what leads them to apply to this program in the first place, to exchange loneliness for concentration among campus grounds surrounded by endless fields of corn and nothing else.

And they all came with their darlings: ghosts of ideas in the mind quickly brought to life with deft hands and defter minds as week after week they’re made to write. They’re all brilliant, Winnie realised, after two weeks of classes. One wrote with eloquence, another with ease, yet another by drawing from a wealth of life experiences. Mona, who wrote through dozens of pages without pause, did all three. Of course she emerged as the brightest of them all. The bona fide artist. Winnie would hate her if love didn’t get there first.

Winnie didn’t fear being not enough in one sense. She did not feign indignation at the objective markers of competence: how well-read one was, or the size of one’s vocabulary. Those markers she had all her years at the college to make up. She feared not being enough. Her fear, which she bites back at every workshop, concerned simply not having the reserves of talent to write something great. Not having the inexplicable yet obvious something that separated the middling from the true, the something that no amount of hard work could generate. And yes, greatness in the most selfish sense: to create something that spreads out, to create something beautiful. She allowed herself this one selfishness when deciding on her college major: she chose something individual and cerebral––a path in the arts––instead of something technical, something social, where it sufficed to suffice in order to help other people.

She leaves the classroom, not quite on the verge of tears––her professor never reprimanded anyone––but stomach churning with the familiar panic of looking around and seeing nothing but her thoughts and the suffocating fields of corn. Why am I here, she thinks. Why am I here. Why am I here.

“Everyone in my group is smart and insightful and amazing,” Winnie says into the mixing bowl, stopping to break apart a chunk of butter. “And I’m. I might just be boring and untalented and have nothing to say.”

Francesca cracks some eggs into the bowl. Winnie incorporates them into the dough and continues. “I came here to pursue writing. My thing. My. Thing. And it gets criticised on a daily basis––I ask for it to be criticised, I know, that’s the plan, right? And for that, I’m spending a hundred-something––“

“—a hundred and twenty.”

“a hundred and twenty thousand of my parents’ money to pursue something with no foreseeable economic return.” Winnie mashes clumps of butter back into the dough when they resurface with every turn of her spatula.

“An English Lit––”

Mash.

“-adjacent––”

Mash.

“major! What was I thinking?”

Francesca returns to peeling apples. Winnie takes the peeled fruits and slices them into another bowl. They’re making apple crumble for a girl in Francesca’s criminology cohort, whom neither would have considered a close friend just weeks before. But the secret that the girl told them, monumental if not a bit outworn by its familiarity, sealed the three in a silent solidarity. Winnie and Francesca were going to support her through her last days at college emotionally, if only with baked goods. With the still, quiet voice of girls bearing news almost too grave to bear, the girl told them that she could no longer hide her pregnant belly, and was going to drop out to go through the last months of her pregnancy at home, give birth, and raise her baby. It was a series of choices following the first, most decisive choice that neither Winnie nor Francesca understood, but the girl was a Mormon revert from the Bible Belt, and they were second-generation children of immigrants from liberal, coastal states, and their paths never crossed frequently enough to form any deeper understanding beyond a surface-level friendship.

The girl––woman, Winnie reminds herself––was the first teen-mom either of them have ever personally known in their lives. Almost. Two years over the legal age demarcating adulthood but utterly unmoored by the pregnancy nonetheless. Another woman betrayed by her body? By society? Winnie considered writing something feminist around the girl’s case, but ultimately chose not to. Capped her pen with a sardonic click and threw it onto a blank page. Indignation drove her to write sometimes, but other times, if she held onto the feeling for too long, she just felt tired. We are all helpless in one circumstance or another, she thought.

Francesca stops peeling and speaks. “When was the last time you knew, with certainty, that you were doing the right thing?” A vague sentence, but Winnie understands what she means: the decision to major in what they did. Recently, it seemed to be the only thing they spoke about.

A pause.

“The first week of the first semester. The night at the deck.”

The students of the creative writing cohort had staked claims over a wooden structure erected just shy of where the lawns of the campus grounds gave way to the cornfields beyond. It was an ascetic but solidly-constructed thing, structurally uninspiring but a reliable platform to support twenty-something students––mostly women––and their blankets, drinks, and snacks. Someone had also strung fairy lights around its perimeter. Spontaneously, they all called it ‘The Deck,’ perhaps because it was made of wood, but Winnie could think of no greater logical reason as to why the name stuck.

“We shared our dreams of being published authors,” said Winnie to Francesca. “It was at the end of the week, I had already had some classes, so I knew––I knew––that at least some of them would make it work. That they had stories to tell.”

Winnie describes the twinkling eyes of the cohort as the Midwestern dusk settled into darkness. The same ambitious, fidgeting fingers.

“They had stories to tell,” she repeats. “I’m never sure of that with most people, but I was sure with those guys.” She looks at the apple slice in her hand, and takes a bite. She couldn’t figure out how to recount the rest of that night to Francesca––Winnie was quite inarticulate most times. She didn’t know how to say that it wasn’t everybody’s eyes she looked at that night, but just Mona’s, only to find out that when she looked up, Mona was already looking at her, and that being seen, even if just in the most literal sense, was so affirming that Winnie fell a bit in love right then and there.

She didn’t know how to summarise the rest of what had happened. That later that night, far from anyone she had previously known from the coast, she took Mona’s hand and followed her to her dormitory. That Mona’s dormitory was somehow absent of everyone else, so she and Mona pretended the kitchen was theirs, smuggling food from Mona’s room to the kitchen with hushes and giggles, the two of them sharing a single pyjama set, one wearing the shirt, the other wearing the pants, and neither wearing anything else but their undergarments. That they took turns breaking a baguette and dipping the pieces into a dish Mona had made with eggplants, walnuts, and some sort of yogurt. That in bed, Mona rubbed her hairy legs against Winnie, making them both cackle. That later, she asked Mona if she knew how to quieten the voice in her head that questioned the use of a writing degree and everything that they were learning.

“I don’t have that voice,” said Mona.

“How? You must have felt pressured to write…for certain things. About certain things. Or to do something else altogether.”

“No. Do you? Who do you want to please?”

“Gosh, I don’t know,” said Winnie. “My…my fucking ancestors? The rest of the world?” She took a lock of Mona’s hair and curled it around her finger. “Of course, maybe it’s different if you’re really, really good…”

She averts her gaze, suddenly shy.

Winnie: “You don’t think we made the wrong choice? To write and…not do something else?”

Mona: “Nope.”

Winnie sat up, frustrated at Mona’s non-answers, wishing that she would explain more, but so in love it made her dizzy. Mona sat upright to face her.

Mona: “What’s wrong with you? What are you thinking?”

Winnie: “I think I’ve made a horrible mistake in choosing this major. I’m thinking that I’m a selfish person for not learning something more useful. I’m thinking that it’s too late, there’s no way out, because I convinced myself in high school that writing is the one thing I’m really good at, but no, here I’m realising that I’m not very good at this thing either.”

Winnie flops back onto the bed and looks straight at the ceiling.

“You don’t think we made the wrong choice?” Winnie repeated.

Mona took her face in her hands, turned it towards her, and kissed the tip of Winnie’s nose.

“Après nous, le déluge.”

Winnie: “I took Spanish in high school.”

Mona: “Let the flood come after we’re gone. Before then, you’ll create something beautiful. You can turn something intangible into something real. Something people can see and hear and smell and feel. Isn’t that magical?” And then a real kiss this time.

“Isn’t that enough?”

“What about you?” says Winnie. She watches as Francesca crumbles the dough onto the baking dish holding their mixture of apples and cinnamon. “When were you sure?”

Francesca puts the dish into the oven and leans against the counter, purses her lips in thought.

“Audrey Yeoman. We were learning about her case. Texas sweetheart drowned her kids and later called the cops on herself.”

“My God.”

“A remarkably straight-forward litigation process. A remarkably simple childhood and marriage. I had never seen a crime separated so cleanly from its surroundings.”

Francesca washes the flour off her hands. “Well, probably not so cleanly, but I wasn’t studying the non-legal stuff. That’s all background and unimportant to me, no offence.”

Winnie shrugs. “None taken.”

“Go search her up if you’re interested.”

In the afternoon Winnie writes in starts and stops. She barely makes it to the end of a page before her mind fizzles out of words. Her fingers are sticky from the dates she has been eating: they’re soft and moist and too-sweet, nothing like the spongy, red-skinned dates she ate back home, but nevertheless, they are supposedly useful in replenishing the iron she loses when she’s on her period. She imagines the nutrients going straight to her uterus, pulling plush velvet over the bare uterine walls that testified to her failure to conceive this month, before rolling her eyes. But she does feel better.

She knows how to take care of herself. Knows how to decipher from her complexion and the types of pains on her body if what she needed was more citrus, more water, or more sleep. It was knowledge passed from her grandmother, to her mother, to her. She obviously knows the importance of caring for her body: in a Marxian sense, this is to maintain her health so that she can continue to produce––that is, to learn and write and love and experience, she thinks. The only observation that irks her from time to time is the fact that the organs she was taught to prioritise are also her reproductive organs.

Winnie oscillated between baby fever and resolutions never to have kids, but society expected her to want kids and choose to birth them eventually. And the more that society aggressively affirmed that position to Winnie, the less she wanted to work through her dilemma herself.

She goes to the bathroom to rinse her fingers of the dates’ stickiness and to change a pad. The blood doesn’t bother her anymore, but the constant sensation and sight and scent of it does make her a bit weary. She considers what things are connoted with blood. Pain? Death? And then she realises that throughout her life, she hasn’t seen much of blood in other contexts at all. There was the time a soccer ball smashed into her face in gym class––she had felt the blood stream from her nostrils, but she was quickly covered with tissues and gauze before she had had an opportunity to catch a reflection of herself. Once, she slipped from a tree and fell onto her back, her fractured ribs stealing her ability to move. In the shock-still, she gasped for air. But aside from a giant bruise, she did not bleed. When her boyfriend broke up with her in high school she was sure the pain in her chest was her heart breaking, that muscles and sinew were tearing apart inside her, but once again, nothing red. Not even a whiff of it. What comes out of her smelling of cervix and sweat is the most blood she’s ever seen, and possibly will ever see. Even Audrey Yeoman, the woman connected to her by the smallest of tangents, is someone who killed with a series of bloodless drownings.

She returns to her room and enters Audrey’s full name into her laptop’s search engine. She calls a Texas mental hospital. Her heart pounds in her chest with the certainty that, if a few affirmative answers came from the phone, she would do the first real thing for her art.

In the dark, there’s a rattle, and then the hum of a car engine. There’s a crunching of wheels on gravel, and then a fading rumble as Winnie heads for the highway.

Audrey

The smell of fallen apples rotting in the grass always reminded Audrey of high school. There were a row of apple trees that lined the back of the exercise field. Each year, incoming freshmen took bites of the wild apples, scrunched their faces at the bitter sourness, and left the bitten fruits on the grass to brown and ferment.

When the weather was dry and warm Audrey sat below the trees and studied. She did most of her schoolwork during the day––it wasn’t a challenging curriculum––and involved herself in the student life activities after the school day ended. She led the school’s National Honor Society to admirable mimicries of the American democratic process, launching campaigns and fundraisers and elections. She enjoyed the leadership, the ease with which she entertained and inspired, even––to an extent––the politicking of students itching to break into higher executive positions. At night, she applied to nursing programs. In this way, Audrey churned through week after exhausting week. It was a small school, housing all the young adults of the county, so everyone knew everyone else. A certain degree of nosiness was the norm: after passing A in the hallway, B would make a comment to C about if A was aloof or not, if their family life was stable or not. If they blushed and stuttered when speaking in front of a crowd. Or not. And a wave of discussions would make their way to C, D, E, and F.

Informed in this way or that, everyone assumed that Audrey would be one of those restless, ambitious girls who moved far away from the rectangular states of the Midwest, away from their patch of nowhere among the crop fields, and towards faraway states. But Audrey enrolled in a state university for nursing instead: a stable field with a straightforward proof of its usefulness to society.

“You’ll be a big fish in a small pond,” her school college counsellor managed to say. Audrey picked out the lingering disappointment in the counsellor’s voice but didn’t care. She liked being a big fish. She was always a big fish. It was how she liked her life. Her life.

How to perform femininity? Some people struggled with the question their entire lives. Most people don’t develop a working answer for themselves until the end of elementary school. But Audrey knew early. Femininity presented just another list of tasks, which Audrey completed without complaint. Her mother taught her things and assigned her chores that her brothers did not receive. Bit by bit, Audrey noticed a different metric separating her from her brothers. But she didn’t see the difference as an inequality. The masculine world, brought into her consciousness and immediately rendered unknowable, was a world from which Audrey gladly separated herself.

When the little girls overturned boulders on the playground to marvel at the beetles underneath, hoisting their skirts over their rumps as they squatted down, Audrey, then a little girl herself, knew to smooth her skirt down the backs of her legs and balance on the balls of her feet as she came closer to the beetles. She waxed her legs as soon as her mother let her. She mastered walking in heels. In high school, she enjoyed biology the most––the content less so than the fact that when she accidentally met the eyes of a boy and smiled, he smiled back, and she realised she was successfully pretty. She asked him to prom, the only rule she had broken from a rulebook whose title she couldn’t quite articulate in her head, and there they were, but more importantly, there she was, their girl, their NHS president, making their gym decorated with oily lights and balloons grander than it really was.

Soon after finding work as a registered nurse, Audrey met Robbie. She bought an apartment with her parents’ money and was slowly paying off its mortgage with her own. One evening, a man entered the elevator with her and rode to the same floor. They walked the same path down the hallway, before finally diverging to opposite doors of the apartment building. Audrey turned around and cleared her throat.

“You must be my new neighbour. I’m Audrey.” She extended her hand.

“Robbie. It’s nice to meet you.” He took her hand and shook it.

Audrey looked at the name tag pinned to his shirt.

“NASA?”

“Oh, just the metallurgical department. We have a branch here in Port Arthur.”

“Christian?” asked Audrey, noticing the cross hung on a chain around his neck. They walked back to their apartment building after dinner, her heels looped in his fingers by their straps. “How does that work? You go on Sundays to a church with a pastor and you all sing hymns?”

“We go to a preacher, actually.” Robbie opened the door to their apartment building, escorting Audrey inside. “Quiverfull theology.”

“I work odd hours,” said Audrey, extending her foot out of the bathwater to examine the pedicure she hadn’t gotten touched-up in months.

“Not me anymore, thankfully. I have a regular nine-to-five now, I guess as reward for working all those years without getting a heart attack.” Robbie took her foot from the opposite end of the bathtub and began massaging it. “Why won’t you marry me?”

Audrey held back a smile. “Because I work odd hours.”

The long, odd hours made her feet hurt. And her shoulders. And her neck. It was not unlike her days in high school, where she worked during the day and worked during the night––only then, her parents took care of the meals and laundry in-between. Audrey imagined the alternative to be a sigh and a sitting-down.

“I’ve decided. Okay.”

“Decided what?”

“I agree. I do.”

Robbie’s face melted into joy. Audrey felt the corners of her lips tug upwards. She had pleased someone else.

“I think the problem is that you’re not eating beef,” said Robbie. Audrey walked down the aisles of the supermarket, while Robbie pushed their grocery cart behind her. She recalled the red crosses she made on their calendar at home, which marked the days of her period that occupied several days of every month with unfailing regularity.

“But I’m a vegetarian,” said Audrey.

“The iron in beef will help with your fertility.” Robbie threw a bag of pasta noodles into the cart. Audrey knew he was a great cook. “Think about it.”

They sold both their apartments for the money to buy a larger house in the suburbs. Audrey continued to work after the birth of their first child. When her maternity leave ran out, she continued to pump breastmilk into small bags which she froze at home. Her earnings covered the cost of a nanny. Robbie’s earnings covered the cost of diapers, bottles, a stroller, and other gear that the baby needed. She stopped working after their third child, coming to terms with the fact that mothering had become a full-time job. Whether she liked it or not, she had ‘sat down,’ although she was anything but well-rested, and any hopes of returning to her job faded over time.

After their fourth child, Audrey had a psychotic episode that led to her hospitalisation and prescription of anti-psychotic drugs. Months after the birth of her fifth child, she filled a bathtub with water and drowned all of her kids. Then, her arms scratched and stinging, she walked to the landline in the kitchen and dialled the police. She looked at the bowl of apples, which were each supermarket-round but starting to soften and rot from days of neglect. A bad purchase. The kids and Robbie didn’t like them, and Audrey rarely had an appetite for anything. A woman picked up the line, asked her about her emergency.

“I’ve killed my kids,” said Audrey.

Part II

Audrey

Here’s what you wouldn’t have known.

My early records belonged to the state hospital that closed down years ago, so the journalists wouldn’t have found them even if they tried. My high school, too. A small county school. When it closed, it threw every student newspaper and decades of yearbooks away. And where would you have found evidence of the heaviness inside me? The hair-pulling and insomnia and daddy issues. Undiagnosed, undiagnosed, undiagnosed.

In high school I attempted suicide by taking a whole bottle of sleeping pills. I woke up in the hospital, my face stinking with my own dried saliva. I guess by then they had already removed the intubation tube. They had pumped my stomach to stop the sleeping effect. I was awake––so tired, but awake, and my mother was crying. I looked to my father and saw that there was not a tear on his face. My parents loved each other. I think my father loved my mother more than he loved me and my brothers. I could barely keep my eyes open, but I saw the look in Dad’s eyes and never forgot: more than sad he was angry. He was so, so, angry, because I had hurt Mom in a way we both knew she would never recover from. I tried to be the perfect daughter again. On Monday I returned to school, and by Tuesday I helped Mom make dinner. But he never forgot––how could he?––and anything I did after that was never enough.

I was better for a long time. After college, I worked at a clinic, and I think that environment helped. I kept to myself, and dyed my hair. Did you know that Robbie had no idea I was a natural blonde until months into our marriage? On some days I felt the heaviness less than other days, but it never went away. I stopped seeing my old psychiatrist. Couldn’t get a regular schedule in after Eden was born.

Eden cried all the time. My nerves were frazzled from getting up several times a night to hold her and walk around the house. During my maternity leave Robbie left during the day, leaving me to spend hours and hours with her. One day I just sat down in the middle of the living room and cried with her. The heaviness returned, this time with something more. Eden hovered somewhere between something I should love to something I should kill. Either way, she was always something I should protect. I knew that the knife never really grazed her––they were adamant about telling me that. And it was clean, in the end. I put it away by the time Robbie came home. He found me on the living room floor and reassured me, saying it was just the baby blues, and that it will pass.

I stopped working after Matthew and Paul were born. Taking care of three kids became a full-time job. No one said it, but everyone knew it: some jobs mattered more than others. The world had no shortage of nurses, and Robbie had just gotten a promotion at NASA. I had no right to complain––his salary paid the bills and he attended every recital and soccer match. So I said nothing when he continued to not use condoms. And when I birthed our fourth baby, I quickly gave it to him.

I couldn’t bring myself to clean the house. I lost weight, but that resulted in folds of loose skin rather than the tightness from before, which I knew Robbie missed, but never admitted. I mean, of course it did. The only exercise I did was walk from the grocery store and back. I barely ate. A few of the kids’ peas here, the crusts of their sandwiches there.

I convinced myself that our fourth baby knew that I didn’t love him. The doctor told me he had latching issues, that’s why he shook his head when I breastfed him, but I knew he did it out of contempt. That might have been the first emotion he ever felt: contempt for me. I woke up one night to the sound of his crying, but when I went to his crib, I saw that he wasn’t. So I knelt and started praying, borrowing the words from the preacher Robbie introduced me to. I prayed that he would be spared the suffering of eternal damnation that I had brought upon him and his siblings. When Robbie came to me to ask what was wrong I told him what I had to do to save them, what I had to do, but he looked a bit frightened and stared at me in shock. I repeated my plan to him. Gibberish rang in my ears, but the point is, my thoughts were crystal clear, and I transmitted them to him, and he just chose not to understand. He backed out of the room to find the telephone.

Sunday arrived. We didn’t go to the preacher anymore. I got to preparing a beef roast, chopping carrots as Robbie played with the children at the dining table. The carrots rolled out from under my hand and onto the ground. I continued to drag the knife across the cutting board. Eventually, I reached my hand and started cutting it into ribbons. Matthew noticed the carrots on the floor and wandered up to me, noticed what I was doing, and screamed.

Then I was hospitalised once again. Robbie made me take medical tests––the kind where you answer yes or no to a bunch of questions, not the kind that demands vials of blood and piss from you. Somehow Robbie and my parents got in touch with my old psychiatrist. She ordered two things: one, for me to be supervised around the clock, and two, for us to not have anymore children.

‘Do not have more children,’ I repeated to Robbie.

‘One more time,’ he replied, and I knew he loved me, despite the madwoman I was becoming, despite the fact that my face was swollen and my breath was nauseatingly sweet from the medications I took. So I gave in one final time. And our fifth was born, and I was on my back and panting when they laid her on my chest, and she was still wet and warm from my insides. And the room filled with water. And hellfire roared outside. And I knew what to do.

Winifred

At least, that’s what Winnie imagines had happened.

In reality, Audrey was a quiet woman who looked at her with disinterested eyes. The staff urged that she and Audrey speak through a glass panel and prevent any physical contact. Winnie didn’t know what she expected: some unworldly shimmer in her eyes, perhaps? If there was ever any trace of her, Audrey concealed her under layers and layers of time. Winnie had prepared a few questions, but couldn’t get the words out, and settled for pressing her hand against the glass. Behind Audrey, the staff exchanged glances. Once visitors were allowed, no doubt a string of true-crime enthusiasts had demanded they see Audrey, only to be let down by the lethargic woman now sitting in front of Winnie.

Winnie shifts in her seat. Her period cramps had returned with a new rigour earlier that morning. Worse, every now and then they made her stomach rumble.

Brrrrrrr.

No doubt everyone behind the glass panel also heard it. Winnie blushes and apologises. One of the staff members behind Audrey wrinkles his nose. Winnie looks at Audrey one final time. When, ultimately, the woman did not do anything consequential, Winnie whispers a ‘thank you’ and rises to leave.

“Black beans and lentils.”

Winnie sits back into her chair. “What?”

“You need zinc and iron. Black beans and lentils.” Audrey leans forward, appraises Winnie, and nods. “They should help with your cramps.”

Winnie leaves the hospital building and steps out into the sun, the exhaustion of driving all night crashing into her like vertigo. After napping for hours in her car, she finds a diner, eats her first hot meal in an indeterminate number of hours, and writes pages and pages. She then tosses her pen and paper in the backseat of her car and begins the drive back to her campus. She would never see Audrey again. And what she wrote, treacherous and crackling like a secret in the backseat, not yet typed up for the next workshop…she only hoped that it was true, even if it wasn’t real. Winnie looks out of her front car door window and laughs through her tears, feeling the breeze on her face. She watches the concrete pass in a grey blue beneath the car tyres, breathes in the air, still sweet with green things and not yet fuzzy with husk. The fields of corn stretch out to meet the horizon.

~0~

Michelle Chuqi Huang is a student writer currently studying at a social science university in France. She aims to write things that are true, even if they may not be real. She is Chinese-Australian and is at a loss of words whenever asked about where she is from.

Judge Clare Wallace found Floodwater to be “ambitious in its scope, arresting and acutely observed.”