Ashes to Ashes

by Amy Cipolla Barnes

When I was twelve weeks pregnant, gray ash suddenly flew out of my mouth with each breath. I coughed a lot in that twelfth week, bits of baby ash blowing into the faces of my friends and family, settling in pastel dresses seams at my baby shower, leaving a trail in grocery store aisles. It all began the day two charcoal gray lines showed up on the pregnancy test. 

It was easy to get pregnant in Buzzard Creek. On each solstice, women of child-bearing age consumed the ash that fell over the city. Working in the mines kept the men below ground for much of the year, and we learned to adapt. 

When each of my six children were born, I ate a spoonful of ash in the same sterling silver spoon that my mother and her mother and her mother had used.

When I went to Sunday dinner at my mother’s house in that twelfth week, my shoes were filled with ash at her doorstep. My face was gray and my fingernails disintegrated on the dinner table.

“I’m okay,” I whispered. 

“I’m your mother. You are not okay.” She told me.

She called the doctor. He came to her house and covered my midsection with a gray sheet. I held my breath. She held hers too but only my lips were porcelain gray-blue by the time he got done examining me.

“We will need to sweep the baby away.”

It was a matter-of-fact medical determination. 

He pulled a tiny silver broom from his breast pocket that I knew too well; sterilized but looking like it belonged in a dollhouse.

“My husband is in the mines. I need to talk with him.” 

“There’s no time.” 

I coughed ash into the doctor’s hair, until he looked a decade older.

Mother called my children in to say good-bye to the baby. They patted my belly and watched ash poof out of my mouth like I was a play cushion. Whoosh whoosh the ash settled into my carpet. 

“Go play,” I told them. 

When the children were all in the other room, my mother stared into my dove-gray eyes, and held my hand until the doctor said it was over. 

He left a tiny silver box on the dining room table. I sat it next to the birth spoon in the china cabinet and felt myself pinking up.