Cradle of Ruin

The stirrups were cold. They always are, even with the little knitted covers someone's grandma had donated, the ones with the smiling suns that said you are doing great! in purple yarn. I'd been staring at those suns for six minutes while the speculum warmed inside me, and I was starting to think the suns were mocking me personally.

"You're tense," said the woman between my legs. She had kind eyes and a name tag that read MARGARET, RN, and a small cartoon stork on her scrubs with a red X stitched over it. "First time?"

I nodded at the ceiling. The ceiling had a mural. I hadn't noticed it until now, a soft blue sky with clouds and a single hot air balloon drifting toward a horizon that glowed gold. Somebody had painted it by hand, and they'd done a good job, the kind of good job you only do for a room where people are scared.

"It's okay," Margaret said. "Everybody's tense the first time. You want to know a secret?"

"Sure."

"Nobody stays tense. Not one patient. I've worked here four years and I have never once seen a woman leave this room still tense."

I wanted to laugh. Instead I felt the speculum settle, and my whole body did the thing it does, the clench, the brace, the waiting for pain. I'd read the reviews. I'd read them at two in the morning with the phone brightness turned down so my roommate wouldn't see. Four point nine stars. Two thousand reviews. The one-stars were all people who'd never been, you could tell, people writing about politics instead of about the place. The real ones, the ones from actual patients, they all said the same thing in different words. They said I can't explain it. They said you have to feel it yourself.

"Deep breath," Margaret said. "In through the nose."

I breathed in through the nose. The room smelled like eucalyptus and something sweeter underneath, like vanilla, like a bakery. That was the part nobody warned you about. You expect a clinic to smell like a clinic. This one smelled like a place you'd want to stay.

She pressed the plunger.

The medicine went in cold and then it went in warm and then it went in like nothing I have words for, a spreading heat that started somewhere behind my navel and rolled outward in slow waves, and I heard myself make a sound. Not a gasp. Lower than that. A sound I'd only ever made in my bedroom with the door locked.

"That's it," Margaret said. Her voice had changed. Softer. Closer. "Just let it work."

I closed my eyes and the ceiling mural kept going behind my eyelids, the balloon drifting, the clouds turning pink, and the heat kept rolling, and somewhere far away I felt the suction start, a gentle tugging, a pulling, and it should have hurt, it should have been the worst thing in the world, but it felt like the moment right before you come, stretched out and out and out until you forget there was ever a before.

My hand found the rail of the bed and gripped it. My hips lifted off the table on their own. Margaret put a hand on my stomach, flat and firm, holding me down, and that touch, that one touch, sent me somewhere I hadn't been since I was nineteen and in love and stupid.

"Good girl," she said. "There she goes."

I didn't know what she meant. I didn't care. I was coming, actually coming, on a table in a clinic with my feet in stirrups, and it lasted longer than anything had ever lasted, and when it finally crested I felt something leave me. Not the pregnancy. Something else. Something heavier. It slid out of me with the suction and I felt it go and I started to cry, but the crying was part of the coming, the two things braided together, and I heard myself laughing through the tears like a crazy person.

Margaret wiped my face with a warm cloth. "There you are," she said. "Welcome back."

I opened my eyes. The balloon was still there. The clouds had gone gold.

"How long?" I asked. My voice was wrecked.

"Twelve minutes. You did great. Most first-timers take twenty."

I sat up slow. The room tilted and then settled. Between my legs there was a pad the size of a paperback and a dull ache that felt less like pain and more like the memory of pleasure, the way your thighs feel the day after. I looked down at myself, at the soft roll of my belly that was already smaller, and I saw it.

A tattoo. Small, maybe an inch across, on the inside of my left thigh, high up where the crease meets the hip. A little bird. A swallow, mid-flight, inked in a blue so bright it looked wet.

"What," I said.

"Your mark," Margaret said. She was stripping her gloves off, dropping them in a bin, and she said it the way you'd tell someone their parking validation was validated. "Every patient gets one. It's how we keep track."

"Keep track of what?"

"Of how many times you've been here." She smiled. "That's your first. Some women, they come back and get a second bird. A third. I've seen a woman with eleven."

I touched the tattoo. The skin around it was red and warm and the ink was perfect, no smudge, no blur, like it had been there for years. "I didn't consent to this."

"You signed the form. Page four, paragraph two. Body modification as part of the ceremonial process." She said ceremonial like it was a real word that meant something. "It's in the paperwork, honey. Nobody reads page four."

I should have been furious. I was furious. But the fury was happening to somebody else, somebody far away, and what I actually felt was the ache between my legs and the phantom warmth still rolling through my gut and the strange, undeniable fact that I wanted to touch the bird again. I wanted to press it. I wanted to feel it there.

"You'll want to keep it clean," Margaret said. "No swimming for a week. No sex for two, though honestly, most women don't wait. They can't."

"Why not?"

She looked at me then, really looked, and something in her face shifted, the nurse mask sliding down a half inch. "Because the medicine doesn't leave your system all at once. It lingers. About three weeks. And during those three weeks, you're going to feel things. You're going to want things."

"Like what."

"Like a baby," she said. "Just to feel this again."

She handed me a pamphlet. On the front was a cartoon uterus with a little smiley face, and underneath, in the same font as the ceiling suns, it said: WELCOME TO THE FAMILY. On the back was a phone number and a line of text: Ask about our nurse training program. Earn while you learn.

I walked out through the lobby. There were six other women in the waiting room. Two of them were visibly pregnant. One of them had her hand on her belly and was reading a magazine, and when she looked up at me she smiled, and I saw the bird on her wrist, a whole flock of them, five or six swallows spiraling up her forearm in blue and green and red, and she winked at me like we shared a secret.

Outside it was raining. I stood under the awning and lit a cigarette I'd quit two years ago, and I smoked it down to the filter, and I thought about the bird on my thigh and the woman with the flock and the way Margaret had said good girl, and I did the math in my head. Three weeks. The medicine lasted three weeks.

I got in my car and drove home with the pamphlet on the passenger seat and my hand on my thigh the whole way, pressing the bird through my jeans, feeling it there, warm, waiting.