The black leather jewellery box didn’t open for my key, so I catapulted it across the room. It smashed into my grandmother’s oval-shaped mirror in slow motion. Shards of her heart-shaped face at 18, 25, 42, exploded upwards and hung in the air. The key didn’t fit in my music box, either. Nor did it open the old wooden crate with the rotting bottom. I jammed the key in all of them. I twisted it this way and that. Nothing. 

I pulled the chain around my neck and nestled the key back between my breasts, where it had lived since it came to me. 

This all had started three nights earlier. It was a new nausea, a completely different sickness that came into me that week. Every morning, I chewed on mint leaves and apples, drank tea and ginger water. But it did me no good. I was violently ill despite my careful consideration, my good habits, my concern.

My husband paid me no mind. I was always on about something, he said, and if we hadn’t been blessed by a crisis, I would invent a stomach flu, a fever, or worse. He continued to come and go without warning. So, I laid in bed. I stopped eating as long as the sun was up and stayed indoors. I slept for twelve, fifteen, eighteen hours at a time. “So dramatic,” my husband told the other men.

The pain came suddenly, like it always did. It woke me in the middle of the night. I clutched at my abdomen with both hands, trying to knead out the hurt. But my insides were in orbit, moving with a will that was not my own. 

I smelled the blood before I felt it oozing out of me. There were handfuls of it. More than there had ever been. I tried to climb out of bed to clean up, but my legs refused to hold me. Numbness tingled up my toes, spread to my feet and ankles and landed in my legs, while throbbing pain twisted around inside my centre. I rolled onto my stomach and inch by inch, dragged myself off the bed and across the floor to the bathroom. I looked up at the small, square window above the tub. The moon was hanging there, full, basking the room in her white light. 

A thick coat of red covered the insides of my legs. I pulled off my pale-yellow nightgown and climbed into the tub. My face shrunk. My eyes drooled. I wiped the tears away instinctively, but already my hands were sticky with blood. It blackened my fingernails, left streaks and smears all over the tiles. Death lived. It was here to see me.

The pain was so fierce, and my shock was so thick that it felt like my soul had left my body. I became an actress in a play while my real self hung outside the window, watching — she and the moon were our only audience. If I’d given birth to a full set of dinner plates that night I wouldn’t have even blinked, just rinsed them off and stacked them in a cupboard.

He was out somewhere. He had been all day. I wondered how long I would have to wait before he’d find me like this. I hoped he would. I hoped he’d come home whistling and sigh when he heard me sob and shake his head. Sigh when he heard me sob and feel rage. Finally, he’d smack open the bathroom door and find his woman, writhing, naked in the bathtub. Naked except for a pair of soaked underwear, a handprint of her own blood on either cheek.

 

It was the next morning that he found it. He was horrified that I left the gore for him to see. 

“A woman must know what to do,” he called from the bathroom while I crouched on the edge of our bed, gripping my toes. “Dispose of it.” 

“Dispose!” I cried. “Our baby!” 

“Stop calling it that!” He growled. “It’s not a baby. It’s a bloody mess.”

I rocked back and forth and wailed. It was no longer words that came out of me. A madman rose from my belly in moans. My ankles buckled, I collapsed forward and hit the floor with a thud, face first.

When he left that time, he wouldn’t return for a week.

 

My sobs subsided and I stood. The afternoon sun sparkled outside the bedroom window. I concentrated with all my might on breathing, in and out, in and out, as I took steps toward the bathroom. 

Get it into a bag, I thought, or a box or a bin. Then I can go outside once nighttime comes and bury it. I took a box from the shelf and dumped the contents onto the floor.

My sobs returned as I tried to scrape the dried blood and tissue to one side of the tub. It wouldn’t budge. I would have to use water. There would be no burial for my insides; they would leave this life through a drain.

I turned on the tap and water sprinkled softly from the showerhead. I slumped over to lean on one arm and watched my blood turn black—red—orange. A shape emerged and I sat up. Something hard, something round, had come out of my body, wrapped up in the mess of my guts. I reached for it. I pulled up a fistful of flesh and rubbed it under the water. A gold key.

 

That key kept me company until my husband came home. It was on a chain around my neck when I scrubbed between the tiles with a wire brush. It was in my pocket when I wiped down the baseboards with vinegar and lemon water. I cleaned the bathroom first. Then I cleaned the baseboards, the walls and the floors of the entire house. I dusted cobwebs from the corners of our ceilings. I swept up the pieces of grandmother’s mirror and her voice sailed softly through the room. “You will find what you are looking for.” I packed my bags. I packed my clothes, I packed my shoes, I packed my books. I collected everything that was mine and folded it neatly into suitcases. 

The key was in my hand when the door swung open. I tucked it into the front of my pants. Footsteps. He hung his coat in the hallway like he always did. I looked at my hand. I pulled the diamond ring off my finger, dropped it onto my tongue, and swallowed hard. I choked as it scraped down my esophagus. 

“Sweetheart?”