I Pray I'm Not Awake

Phoebe

I've been very hopeful so far
Now for the first time I think we're going wrong
Hurry up and tell me this is all a dream
Or could we start again, please?

Phoebe stared at her ceiling blankly, her mind - usually whirring with worries, to-do lists, questions - eerily quiet, cheeks stained from tears long since dried. The bed beneath her was bare, cold, uncomfortable, the sheets crumpled in a ball and burning in the fireplace.

Time was irrelevant to her, it had been for awhile. Things had been going so well. Emmett was with her again. She was helping him turn the barn into a real home. She was going to have a baby. The baby. A choked sob bubbled up through sore vocal chords, dry and barely registering in her mind. They were gone. Gone. Lost after a sudden awakening in the middle of the night, consumed in pain and tears and blood. It had been so early, so soon, too soon, easily mistaken for a particularly bad menstrual cycle but she was a midwife and she had known. She had been carrying a life, a baby, her baby. The baby she knew she had always wanted, despite her youth, despite how unsteady everything seemed, the want to be a mother had always been the resounding chord to which she always returned. Emmett had begun to build a room for them. She had begun to really feel their presence, the nausea, the heartburn, the sleeplessness, and despite all of the discomfort she had been thrilled, elated, because her baby was the cause.

Now all that filled her was a profound emptiness.

She did not ask herself why. She knew why - and the why was that there was no why. She was young and healthy. She ate well. She had been a little stressed but nothing bad enough to harm anything. She was uninjured. Already she could hear her own voice in her mind, consoling her as she had numerous clients before. These things happen. There is no reason for it. It doesn't mean you can't have children. It's just a sad moment that will pass in time. How easily those words slipped through her lips before. How much she thought she could empathize with her clients before. She had been wrong. She had not in her life felt such a deep sadness, such a strong fury, such passionate self-hatred as she did now. How easy it was to console another when you knew not the depths of sorrow through which they walked. Never again. Never again.

Phoebe had long since run out of tears to cry. As the morning sun rose higher into the sky she did not move. The fire consuming the sheets and rags of evidence of her shame dying out with her hope that she was not awake. That this was all a dream, a nightmare, an illusion cast by Ludo or any other spirit if only to be cruel or because they could. But no. The shadows on the ceiling grew longer, her desire to rise remained unseen, and her ability to pretend that she was not existing in reality grew thin.