Out With the Bathwater by Rachel M. Beavers

When I go to the doctor to pick up the pills, I’m thinking about mothers. Not my own, or even hers. I’m thinking about my father’s mother. My father’s mother was born when women had only just gotten the right to vote. She married my grandfather instead of going to college, birthed two sons, and then proceeded to miscarry enough baby girls to fill a softball team. Baby girls, I always figured, because they got wind of what the world was like out there and terminated themselves. My father’s mother gave birth to three more boys after that, but never a daughter. She would always be the only woman in her home, even before they all left her.

The doctor didn’t have to tell me that my pregnancy wasn’t viable. My body knows, better than brain, what I can and cannot do. I’ve been in bed for seven weeks, looking desperately at the crotch of my underwear for blood, sticking a finger deep inside myself in case there’s some in there to let me know what’s coming. Nothing would ever grow inside me, not when my medicine cabinet plays host to half-full bottles of all the pills that never made me any better. Some days I don’t think I’m viable.  

I sit in a hot bath while I wait for the second pill to take effect. It hurts. I throw up in the mini trash can I put next to the tub, just in case. The bathwater goes cold around me, and I let blood turn it a diluted red. I whisper to the liquid surrounding me: if you see Grandma when you’re back where you came from, tell her I’m sorry. 

Rachel M. Beavers is a Los Angeles-based writer and insomniac. She holds an MA in Creative Writing and Publishing from City, University of London and an ABJ from the University of Georgia. Her previous work can be found in HAD, Major 7th, and The Daily Drunk.

11 April 2024