A Body That Is Warm
by Stephanie Frazee
Evelyn turns left, another car turns right. She doesn’t see the car in the second lane going straight. Her head slams against the driver’s side window. When she wakes up, her car is in park, the seatbelt has been unbuckled and is tangled around her arm.
She has always appreciated her mind’s ability to black out, to leave uncollected, and irretrievable, the worst of what’s happened to her. When the EMT asks if she lost consciousness, his tone implies doing so is a bad thing, so she says no. He speaks too gently when he asks if she needs to go to the hospital, like she’s weak, or a child. She says no.
Her husband meets her at the corner where the car is towed away. On the way home, she calls work to say she will not be in tomorrow and begins to sob. John takes the phone and ends the call.
Meanwhile, a fertilized egg floats inside her, deciding whether to attach itself and take the hard way out, or let itself be shed. Whether to give itself over to a mother, a spider’s web of cells, only to become a web of cells itself. Whether to float away into nothingness, or learn to serve a body.
The house is silent the next morning. Evelyn’s eyes will not adjust to the light streaming through the kitchen window. She holds a green apple and a knife. The sunlight cuts across the counter and she closes her eyes as the blade slices through her thumb. Her head floats in the streak of sunlight. She is a dust mote. She feels nothing.
Evelyn’s thumb bleeds onto the couch and the remote. She can’t remember how this game show works. It may be the one where people guess letters, but there are no blanks to fill. It’s the one where people answer questions. They’re all the one where people answer questions. But is it the one where they answer questions with questions?
The flesh of the halved apple turns brown on the counter, smeared with blood. The host makes a statement that is a question: Up to a billion birds die each year due to this clear mistake. A billion seems impossible, but the true number must be even larger. Those broken birds don’t return to their nests, leaving eggs to turn brittle, lint-feathered babies with gaping mouths.
When Evelyn can’t explain the clump of bloody tissues in her hand, John takes her to urgent care. She’s unable to follow the doctor’s finger. Her head whips to the left, no matter where he asks her to look, like she’s trying to see the car she missed the day before.
In the MRI waiting room, Evelyn’s mind floats away, leaves her body anchored under John’s hand on her knee. She’s a slip of smoke sliding through the window, a living ghost haunting the parking lot, a shimmer of ether mixing with heat escaping the asphalt. Her name is called, and she is zipped back into her body.
Evelyn tells the tech she’s claustrophobic and gets a cloth to place over her eyes and headphones playing a news story about cherries — sweet cherries in Michigan, pin cherries in Appalachia, a woman who cracked open a cherry pit and thought it tasted like almonds. Five pits were enough to cause lethargy, headache, and a fatal drop in blood pressure. Under the blindfold, Evelyn imagines the machine around her is another body — the whir of a pulse, the beep of heartbeats, the click of popping bones.
Her brain is only bruised—post-concussive syndrome. Her treatment is rest until her brain stops leaking. She rereads the same pages of the same novel but can’t follow the story. She floats above her body, watches it on the couch, remote in a hand hanging limp. Her body is a statue, suspended in time. If she keeps this up, her body could go on forever, its life extended a few moments longer with every dissociative episode.
John cooks eggs for her, because the internet says they’re good for brain disorders. People with epilepsy get relief from high-fat diets, he says. Cholesterol improves memory function in the elderly. It helps with depression.
I don’t have epilepsy. I’m not that old, she says. She didn’t know he could make perfect eggs. Each one is an irritatingly cheerful bulb of yellow encircled by glistening white, lacy at the edges. He serves them next to toast heavy with salted butter.
Time claws hashmarks into the background of their days. The bruise in her brain recedes like water into a sponge. Did you know pin cherry seeds can stay dormant in the ground for years, Evelyn says. She soaks a bit of toast in a puddle of yolk. See, I’m getting better already.
That’s why they call them a miracle food, he says.
She wants to get better, she does. Blackouts have meant memories uncollected, but they’ve left spaces she can’t help but try to fill. She’s never known where certain bruises came from or why she was sore where she shouldn’t be or why she recoiled when she was supposed to open. She’s stupid to think she could protect a child’s body from the world when she doesn’t understand what happened to her own. If only the bruise would have landed somewhere in her brain that tempered her drive to cradle a partial replica of herself, then she would truly be better.
But her body doesn’t care about her equivocations. It has made the egg warm, and the egg has nestled into place inside her. It will become a body — skin that can bruise, bones that can break, a brain that can bleed, a heart that can stop. A body that is warm, until it is not. And Evelyn will become a mother. She will serve two bodies, she will carry two hearts, and time will claw its way across them both.
Stephanie Frazee's work has appeared in Passages North, The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Editor at American Short Fiction and lives in Seattle, Washington.
