Yuki grows, expands. She stares at her naked body in the bathroom mirror and is reminded of the first. The bump in the glass reflecting back a humourless irony that screams of abandonment. Of failure. She feels that her body isn’t her own, as if the thing stretching her wider and wider is no part of her. Her brain teems with ugly thoughts that do not slow. She utters none of it.
In the early hours of a dark October morning, she gives birth. Yuki wakes in the night to use the bathroom and on her way her waters break. Then the blood, the faeces come, her body ridding, readying for work. She sleeps through the first contractions until she enters the phase where she cannot think, where only breath exists, surrendering to the fall and rise of the body. Her mother draws her a bath where, in between contractions, Yuki lies limp, storing her energy for the next one that will roll over her harder than the last. Her mother wraps her head in black cloth, dulling the senses. She turns off the lights and leaves only a single lit candle so she can see and feel the dilation. She steeps raspberry leaf tea to encourage the baby. A mother’s voice guiding her daughter’s breath. The force of Haniyasu-hime pulling the babe towards her molten core. Breathe . Out of the bath and hanging onto her mother’s shoulders, squatting on the bathroom floor, the baby crowns. The need to push so strong as her mother exclaims she can see the head. Yuki, eyes closed, imagining she is giving birth to a grapefruit. The water in the bath cold and pink with blood. Her Mama knew how to do it without much pain. At home in the dark, without screaming. How the silka deer and foxes and wild things do it. With only the rushing that slams in waves more intense and uncontrollable.
She comes, terrifyingly silent at first, then wailing. Covered in blood and amniotic fluid and white crust. Beneath her, between her squatting legs, Yuki scoops up her baby off the bathroom floor and holds her close against her chest. This little beating thing. Time slips shadowy and clever out the window, and all that remains is the pale glistening eyelids, the inner tickings of this weightless life-force. Alive. A redemption. A second chance to do it right. To be the mama her mama was to her. So that one day this bloody creature might be a good mama to someone else, poured forth from a womb.
That was the inheritance. Goodness. Maternity. Rice cakes in the shape of a teddy bear.
She names her Haruka 遥花 . Meaning distant flower.
An honest name, one that Yuki hopes to be self-fulfilling. Better to be remote in this world. An island untouched by man, a hidden place where the true things grow.
Yuki and Baba and Jiji raise this fatherless child, teaching her about the fruit on the tree, the rice in the fields, the direction the heron flies, how to gut a salmon with a knife. An education among the planted and the wild, side by side. Yuki’s heart cracks open and heals over the places that have been frightening to her. She loves her daughter as she loves the first.
And soon the name of the first is buried deep, occasionally breaking forth in sleep. Where nightmares excavate her name with ease.