1st Place - Life Cycles, by Mary Ann Mackey, Brooklyn NY

I was in the kitchen, wrists deep in biscuit dough, when I heard her at the top of the stairs. “The baby’s coming,” she said. No note of hurry or panic in her voice, just a simple

statement of fact. It was the most I’d heard her speak in nearly a week, and I turned with floured hands to see her where she stood barefoot, tall and backlit in the dusty sunshine on the second floor landing. My baby sister, not a child anymore, though brutally close to it, about to be a mother herself.

“I’ll call the doctor,” I said. The two of us had long been on our own in the too big, too old house, but it felt emptier than usual in that moment. The nearest telephone was a half mile away. Kit stared past me a second, then nodded in acknowledgement before turning and tugging her bedroom door closed with enough strength to rattle the picture frames on the walls. I straightened the corner of a faded watercolor landscape, wiped my hands clean enough on the nearest towel. Left the biscuit dough where it sat, a drying lump on the rolling board. Any panic or hurry would be mine.

It was too warm for early November on the walk to Mrs. Donegal’s for the telephone. It didn’t feel like winter was inching up quickly. Kit and I had both been born in spring; I wondered if a baby born in November would grow up always feeling two steps behind, like they’d missed the best parts of a party they’d arrived at late. Or maybe that’d be true of any baby newly arrived in 1933. Born at a fading point, in the tunnel without a light at the end.

Mrs. Donegal was half expecting me when I knocked at her door. She was a small woman with ginger hair which she wore perennially pinned back in a knot. Nothing about her manner indicated any particular privilege, but her husband worked for the railroad, and so they had a telephone. She offered me tea and stood a polite distance away while I made the call, but I suspected she enjoyed the advantage she had in local gossip. Fortunately she was never anything but gentle with what she knew.

“Women have babies without fuss all the time,” she told me with a smile. This was true, she herself had four, but this was also my sister. Older sisters are hardwired to a certain degree of concern, but Kit’s behavior over the past months had done little to soothe my nerves.

She’d refused to tell me who the father was. I’d asked just once and received such a steely silence in response I hadn’t asked again. It had occurred to me that perhaps she couldn’t, not just wouldn’t, tell me, for any number of reasons that only increased in horror, but it plainly didn’t matter. Kit had set her mind to her course of action. She’d sat in the evenings and let out the seams in her dresses as she got bigger, methodically ripping out stitches and piecing them back together. Even anxious as I was, I’d admired the ease at which she gave herself permission to take up more space in the world. She’d always been braver than I was. Where I considered, Kit did. Where I flinched, Kit barreled forward. When she grew rounder still she took to wearing mother’s old dresses, then through the long hot days of late summer it was largely just mother’s old dressing gowns, tied atop her middle. I’d catch a glimpse of her sometimes in the half light of late evening and swear I was seeing a ghost. With her long hair and straight shoulders, she looked so much like what I remembered of mother when she was expecting Kit. When she was expecting all the others we never met.

But the worst of it was that my sister went quiet. She was the loud one of the two of us, the one who chatted up strangers in the store, the one who sang with her friends over backyard picnics. But as soon as she’d finished vomiting for the fourth time in an hour one day at the tail end of winter and looked up at me with bloodshot eyes from the floor of the bathroom to say ‘I expect it will be sometime in the fall,’ she’d limited herself to only what absolutely needed to be said, as though the baby needed her words to grow. At first I’d tried to make up for her lack of volume. Reading recipes out loud while I cooked, or holding conversations with the cat. But even that did not hold. Living alongside her determined silence was like hovering around the edge of a bear’s den, unsure what danger it contained or when it might emerge.

I thanked Mrs. Donegal for her kindness and my barely touched tea. Kicked up clouds of sunbaked dust on the road back to the old house. When he arrived, my first thought of the doctor was that he was young. I had been expecting Dr. Eisner, the silver-bearded man who’d delivered half the children in town. This one seemed barely Kit’s age, though he must have been older. Clean shaven and with his hair cut short, he could have passed for a schoolboy. ‘A Yale graduate,’ he told me, one of the best in his class.

“But you’ve delivered babies before, right?” I asked as I showed him inside. “Actual babies, not just cows, or horses maybe?”

“Actual babies, yes,” he said.

To his credit, only the dimple that rose in his left cheek betrayed that he found my anxiety amusing. I took his coat and sent him upstairs to my sister, who had refused to let me in the room to check on her. I paced the kitchen rug, counting out my steps in increments of ten to distract myself. But the doctor was back downstairs barely five minutes later.

“It’s early yet, but she’ll be fine,” he said, rolling his shirt sleeve down.
“How can you be sure?”
“She’s young, she’s strong.” He shrugged, as if that was the sum total of what he’d learned in medical school.
“But would you tell me if something was wrong? If there was a problem?” He considered me a moment, as though waiting to see if I was about to burst into tears. I didn’t.
“No,” he said. Then, “Nothing you could do about it anyway.” I had no reason to assume he was lying, but still the tight knot in my stomach refused to loosen. “She really will be fine.” He offered me a small smile. “We have some time yet though. Don’t feel like you have to entertain me.” His look caught on the long forgotten ball of biscuit dough behind me. It had been a long time since there’d been a guest in the old house.

“Oh, no,” I waved a hand at him. “Sit down, Doctor. Make yourself at home.” He set his bag on the table, pulled a small notebook from its pocket, and sat. The bag was obviously new, the leather still shiny in a way that betrayed a certain degree of luxury. I took a second to admire it before turning back to the counter. Something else to serve as distraction.

“Are you hungry, Doctor?”

Before Kit was born, I’d been a lonely child. I spent a lot of time with my books. I also spent a lot of time in the kitchen, watching my mother roll out pie crusts and clip the ends off beans and carefully scoop the pit out of deep red cherries before handing them off to my eager fingers. I was her little fairy assistant, she called me, but I was so eager for a playmate that from the time Kit was barely old enough to toddle after me I’d abandoned the kitchen and we’d made the entirety of the old house our playground. We hosted prim tea parties in the parlor and rolled around like puppies on the guest room rug. We crawled into closets and buried each other in blankets, sifted through old collections of letters, clothes, jewelry, anything our parents hadn’t specifically said not to touch and even sometimes those things too. We were settling into our own growing bones, and the house lived and breathed along with us. It changed with the seasons and the weather, swelling in the summer humidity until the doors stuck in their frames and shivering in the dry chill of winter. It was a house haunted in all the best ways, for a child.

Then mother was gone suddenly and father drank himself into the grave beside hers not too long after, and it was just the two of us and our memories and the house. The house built if not by the hands of slaves themselves then on their backs nonetheless, the family money earned once upon a time in hammering together the ships that ran the Atlantic trade routes. A house built on a century of comfortable New England deniability. The blood money was long since gone before I knew of it, and good riddance to it, but nothing ever came to replace it. Of course, then the bottom fell out of the world and no one had any money, not anymore. The doctor at my kitchen table had to have known there was little by way of payment I could offer him for his services in keeping my sister alive. He was simply too much of a gentleman to mention it.

There was no cash, but there was still the kitchen. No longer mother’s, I’d made it my own in her absence, doing my best to keep alive for Kit the sense that abundance was still possible, at least in one regard, no matter how little I believed it. And there was an old brown hen who’d quit laying and likely wouldn’t make it through the winter anyway. I excused myself to the side yard where the flock was already settling down in their coop for the evening, and, axe in hand, quickly dispatched of her head.

Kit had always been the sentimental one about such things, mooning over the animals and giving them names so that when it came time to eat them she’d cry until father sent her to bed hungry. To me, it made sense. An old life for a new one.

I could hear the other chickens scratching for bugs, all ruffled feathers and quiet chirps. Briefly, I wondered if they would notice an absence, if grief was something that could consume a chicken as wholly as it could a person. Or if their lives were only concerned with each meal, each new sunrise. I held the bird at arm’s length back through the dew damp grass, careful not to bloodstain my dress.

“It smells good down here,” the doctor said, returning to the kitchen from another trip upstairs to check on Kit. The chicken, having been plucked and dressed, was halfway through its roasting time in the oven. The work of getting it there had proved less of a distraction than I’d hoped from the sound of Kit’s footsteps as she paced a line across her bedroom, the creaky floorboard under the south-facing window marking time.

“It’s taking too long. Isn’t it taking too long?” It had been fully dark for hours though it felt like weeks.

“It’s her first baby. First babies usually take a while.” He returned to his seat at the table and bent his head again to his notebook. I realized I’d never thought to ask my mother how long my own birth had taken. That seemed now like something a daughter should know about her mother. There was so much I wish I’d asked and written down, tucked into a notebook of my own somewhere. A manual on how to live a life. But there were only recipes, a few dress patterns. Faint memories of the bedtime stories she used to tell when I couldn’t sleep, when she’d sit by my bedside and make shadow figures against the wall in the lamplight. Nothing practical. No answers for the millions of questions Kit would surely have as a mother without a mother.

If only babies were born like lambs, able to walk and eat and function immediately. All a ewe needs to do, all she can do, is put her put her body between her little one and the wolves if she has to.

I hadn’t eaten since oatmeal at breakfast, but I wasn’t hungry. Still, it felt rude to let a guest eat alone so I set a second place setting at the table. I plated our meals on mother’s old blue and white dishes. They’d been a wedding gift, bought in New York, and meant for special occasions, but she’d used them at every meal, her way of insisting there was no such thing as an ordinary day. I used them because I hadn’t been able to break the habit. And because they were a piece of her.

I set one plate down beside the doctor’s elbow, and he stopped scribbling. But before he could close his notebook, I noticed the pages in front of him weren’t full of medical notes, as I’d expected, but drawings.

“An artist?” I sat down with my own plate, and he smiled, with the slightly guilty expression of a child who has just been caught eating the last cookie before supper. “May I see?” He hesitated for a second before sliding the little brown book across the table. There was a house, a few trees, a road even, but most of the page was taken up by a delicately drawn airplane.

“It’s a habit I picked up at school,” he said. “The drawing. It’s something I can do while waiting that keeps me focused.” I flipped back through the previous pages only to find more airplanes, all of them shaded in pencil, none of them terribly artistically perfect but good enough it was evident where he’d tried to capture a propeller in motion, where the machine was meant to be in flight or at rest. “I used to think I’d be a pilot,” he said, when I turned the book shut and handed it back to him.

“Really?”

“Really. Always wanted to until my uncle decided he’d rather I take over his practice. Have you ever been in one? A plane?”

“No. Have you?” He shook his head.

“One day. I think we’ll all be able to fly to Europe soon enough. I want to see London. And Paris. Vienna.”

“It doesn’t scare you?” He pulled off a piece of biscuit and chewed for a moment.

“Not any more than most things do.” I wasn’t sure what I thought the appropriate level of fear in life was for a doctor.

“I think I wouldn’t like it. Maybe if it was like birds, with wings and feathers and hollow bones, but I don’t trust a metal box to stay in the air.” There’d been a time when I was younger and determined to keep a bird as a pet, to teach it to talk, and so Kit and I’d set out to catch one. Hours spent observing them in the yard, watching closely as we waited for one to unsuspectingly walk into our trap. They never did. But Kit loved to watch them, and bounced around the house for days flapping her arms like she might just flutter up through the roof at any moment. Perhaps I would fly, if she was the pilot.

“It’s all science,” he said with a shrug. He turned his fork towards the chicken on his plate. I was glad someone at least was able to eat. “You’ve never dreamed of flying off somewhere?”

“It’s not the same, but I did use to think I’d go to school one day.” He smiled. “I wanted to study literature.”

“What stopped you?” A family, a house, the weight of too much everything sucking up all the oxygen required for flight, I thought.

“No one to pay for it,” was what I said. “I was never going to fit in beside the white- gloved debutants in the daisy chain at Vassar.” He set his fork down.

“If I’m not mistaken, this,” he gestured towards his plate, “is real china. And I’m fairly certain that was a D.A.R. sign up outside.” It was, put up with too my pride by my grandmother. “I’m not so sure you’re as far from the daisy chain girls as you’re claiming.”

“All things from some other life.” Previous generations who’d lived lives that took them beyond the care and keeping of an old house and the necessities of survival. “And anyway,” I poked at a lump of chicken on my plate, “there wouldn’t have been anyone else around for Kit.” At the moment that fact was plainly obvious.

“Maybe so,” he said, though it sounded like he didn’t quite believe it. I watched him clear his plate, sopping up the last of the gravy with the end of a biscuit. He had delicate hands, suited to an artist. Or a doctor. Once, at a fair, Kit had begged to see the fortune teller’s stand where a woman in a red veil and heavy gold earrings advertised she could see the future in the palm of your hand. Father’d given her the nickel, and she’d giggled through the woman’s tales of the adventures and romances that lay ahead, alight with the possibilities. The woman, having clearly enjoyed Kit’s reaction, had offered to read mine for free. I’d refused. I couldn’t bear to get my hopes up.

A loud thunk from upstairs interrupted the memory. The doctor startled in his seat, and we looked at one another from across his empty plate and my still full one. For just a second, I saw real fear in his eyes. She wouldn’t let us in, at first. The two of us, pleading from outside the bedroom door for her to unlock it, for her to tell us if she was alright. Then the floorboard by the window, at last, returned to creaking every few seconds as she picked up her pacing. When she eventually opened the door her face was flushed, the blue silk of the dressing gown she wore dark with sweat across her chest and around her neck.

“I can’t do this,” she said, barely a whisper, one hand tight to the doorframe, her body folded over with the effort of standing through the pain. The doctor sprang into action.

“That’s good, that means you’re nearly there.” She let him walk her over to the bed, and for a few minutes she panted as she lay there, a low rumble like a wounded animal’s growl coming from her chest. Her knuckles white from her tight hold on the bedsheets. The doctor, I thought, no longer looked quite so young, his face lined in concentration, as he murmured indecipherable words of encouragement. Through the bedroom windows the night’s uncooked darkness was just beginning to give way to the first hints of gray at the horizon.

I was caught, standing in the doorway. I wanted to be useful. I wanted to disappear. I didn’t know how to fight the tender, twisted pieces of myself convinced these were my last moments with my sister. Then Kit turned her head and caught my eyes.

“Please, Peggy,” she said, her voice tight. I couldn’t refuse her anything. This feral creature who was still my sister. I moved closer to her and she loosed one hand from its grip on the blanket and held it out to me, her eyes closed again as she fought another wave of pain. I took her hand and focused on sending what was left of my own energy to her through it. She squeezed so hard I could feel each individual joint in her fingers.

“Almost there,” the doctor said, perhaps more for his own benefit and mine than Kit’s. I doubted she heard him at all. I couldn’t see everything he was doing around the tangle of sheets, only that his forearms were streaked with blood. Kit had bled all the time as a child, all skinned knees and accidental injuries, things that required a quick bandage from mother or me until she could proudly show off her puckered scab or new scar. She was good at bleeding. Still, I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking how much blood was too much.

And then everything happened quickly. Kit braced herself one last time, and there was a baby.

“It’s a girl,” the doctor said, lifting the new arrival from between my sister’s knees and placing her on her chest.

The baby was small and blue-red, her tiny body a mottled bruise against her mother’s pale exhaustion. Kit’s hand loosened in mine. The doctor still stood by the end of the bed, his face still drawn but his posture no longer so rigid. Everything in our lives to that point seemed to funnel down to only the pool of light in this bedroom at the top of the stairs.

There was a baby, I had a niece. My sister - a mother, me - an aunt. A tiny tingle of hope. Maybe Kit and I could do this. We could put our bodies between this child and the wolves. We could fly if we had to. Everything was silent and still but for the first waking birds outside, the baby’s round, dark eyes peering up at us with idle curiosity as though she hadn’t just shifted the house’s, our family’s, entire center of gravity.

Then she scrunched up her fists. And screamed.