Grapes
Originally published in The Antihumanist, 4th Edition (May 2022).
933 words
Ellen Jane Duvall was born three months early on February 10, 2020, weighing only three pounds, six-and-a-half ounces. When my daughter died three days later, a part of me died with her. My grief was indescribable. Total. But Marin’s grief was more than total. It consumed him.
We had tried so hard. First, we turned to science. I’ll never forget my husband’s face when Marin decided to sell his grandmother’s piano to pay for one more fertility treatment. He grew up listening to her play it—a Wurlitzer that had survived being sold for food during the Great Depression, and the fire that destroyed most of his mother’s home in ‘67. I begged him not to sell it, even though he couldn’t play.
After science failed us and there was nothing left to sell, we turned to God. For one brief summer we were no longer the staunch atheists we had always been. It was Marin’s idea. He’d seen a sign outside a church quoting Romans one day on his way home from the university biology lab, where he worked as an entomologist, studying ticks. I never learned which verse it was he’d read, only that it had contained the word hope.
I fell into a depression and lost interest in the church when God proved as useful as the scientists, but Marin found something else to latch on to.
The night he brought home a deck of Tarot cards there was a fight. I don’t remember what was said, standing there in the kitchen shouting and pointing and slamming cabinet doors, but the memory still hurts.
And then it happened.
You know how everything goes between the announcement and the birth. A baby shower, doctor’s appointments, nursery decoration. Before I went into labor, we’d had no reason to worry. I remember the sound the spring peepers made in the sweltering Maine summer night, driving to the hospital and my hair clinging to my face in a wild tangle, my swollen feet sticking out the window of the back seat. At 10:21, our baby girl was born.
Three days later, she was dead. Her tiny lungs just weren’t ready.
I don’t remember much about what happened after that. Two weeks went by—or maybe it was three—and people came and went, dropping off food, cards, flowers. I was numb. When I wasn’t crying, I slept. We were like ghosts to each other.
The alarm bells should have gone off when Marin returned to work. A part of me knew it was too soon, that no one could be in any reasonable state of mind to work so quickly after that kind of loss. But I can’t deny that I actually wanted him to go back to work. Needed him to.
Marin started wearing sweaters, even though it was too hot for them. That was the first thing. You can write off someone’s return to work as an attempt to keep their mind busy, but no one wears sweaters in the middle of August.
He began losing weight. He said he wasn’t hungry, and I believed him. Neither was I. His skin became pale, sickly. I don’t remember looking in a mirror, but I’m sure my complexion was no better. He stopped touching me and that was okay too, because all I wanted was to be left alone. On the rare occasion that I tried to hug him, he’d push me away. But I understood. I won’t say that I hadn’t done the same.
We became like strangers, lost in our grief. He started sleeping on the couch in the basement, and for three days I didn’t see him at all. I ventured to the basement for a picture frame—the ink on the only photo of Ellen that we had had begun to rub off—and then I saw my husband alive for the last time.
The light was dim. He’d removed all the bulbs but one, and the absolute stink that filled the cool, dry room was unlike anything I’d ever encountered, a coppery mixture of blood, earth, and shit. It was absolutely fetid. I began to wretch at the bottom of the stairs, dry heaving with my hands on my knees.
There was a moan from the couch. I could see his eyes, tears glistening in their narrow slits.
“Heather,” he called, his voice frail, little more than a whisper.
“Marin?” I tried to straighten. My head swam. The stink, oh God, the stink. I gagged.
“Heather, come here. I want to show you something. We don’t…we don’t have to be sad anymore.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come. Take this blanket off me.”
I held my wrist against my nose, wary of the strange noises I heard as I approached the couch. Slowly I pulled back the blanket.
“I’ve been feeding them. For…for us. Babies, Heather. So many babies.”
My husband’s skin moved, shifted, ten thousand grey and purple grapes undulating in the shadow.
Not grapes.
Ticks.
He’d taken a number of them from the lab and had been breeding them ever since, attaching the babies that spawned to his arms and legs, torso and back, all over to let them feed.
But I don’t know why he felt he had to hide them from me.
I buried my husband a few days later. His plot is next to our daughter’s, right next to the one that waits for me. We’ll share a gravestone, and it’ll read simply Marin and Heather Duvall—Loving Parents. But first I’ll need to nourish our children. There are so many mouths to feed.