Yuletide Thrills by Rebecca Cantrell

Author:Rebecca Cantrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rebecca Cantrell
Published: 2022-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

White Christmas

SONG PAIRING: White Christmas.

Agnes drifted along with the peyote, not worrying about her contractions. There was time for the baby to come. Time for everything.

She crawled across the cold plank floor and lay her head on the quilt. Under her cheek interlocking buttercup yellow and ruby red rings glowed. The wedding ring pattern. She imagined many pairs of withered hands stitching it. A simple design now infinitely complex. When the next contraction hit she gazed into the weave of the fabric, seeing how it all connected, loomed by the universe. The colors blazed so brightly they pealed like cathedral bells.

“I don’t want to get all heavy on you.” A woman’s voice drifted in from far away. “But what did you take, honey?”

Agnes laughed at her. She had secrets. Things she wouldn’t tell these strangers who had taken her in out of the driving Alaskan snow. When her son slipped between her bloody legs into the world, she still held onto her secrets. She told no one her name, what she had taken, or what she intended to do in the morning.

The woman helped her into bed and placed a wet warm creature on her naked stomach. Agnes stared at the baby’s head, its ebony curls plastered against its skull with fluid from her body. She shuddered. She touched a strand, repelled at the sliminess. Such night-black hair. How had something so dark been birthed from her own light body? Once part of her, their connection now sundered.

The woman severed their umbilical cord with giant shears.

“His face?” Agnes pointed to a white membrane that covered his eyes and forehead.

The woman lifted the membrane off with a piece of dark flannel. Agnes smelled the tang of soap. It rang warm against the metallic scent of blood.

“It’s a caul,” the woman said. “Happens only once a thousand births.”

Agnes stared at the heartbeat pulsing in the soft spot on top of his head, quick like a lizard’s. “Did it hurt him?”

The woman shook her head. Each strand of her long hair floated and swung from side to side like a spider web in the lightest of breezes. “Doesn’t he have beautiful eyes?”

Agnes avoided the warm wetness that were eyes, still mesmerized by the leathery spot on his head, pulsing at her in time with the rhythm of the universe.

The woman ran a trembling index finger along a strawberry birthmark on the left side of his chest. Light glittered on its crimson surface. Agne

She touched it with a fingertip, expecting it to be hard and cold like a ruby, but it felt warm and soft, like the skin of her eyelids.

The woman cleared her throat. “A caul means many things. A caul with a birthmark like this means it is his fate to know true connection.” She dropped her voice. “If he can give away that which matters most to him.”

Not listening, Agnes answered, “I will call him Rainbow. After the colors of the sky.”

The next morning she wrote his name on a piece

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