From Origins and Adventures of the Epiphany Machine,
by Steven Merdula (1991), Chapter 16

That instant was I turn’d into a hart;

And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,

E’er since pursue me.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Twelfth Night

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. The mind of a woman who murders her children can never be opened, and what can never be opened is empty.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Her father told her this many times. My princess can’t seem to figure out how to play the piano no matter how many lessons we pay for, but that is for the best, because men do not like women who make a racket. My princess doesn’t seem to be taking well to her French lessons, does she, but that is for the best, because one language is all a woman needs. My princess is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, is she, but that’s very good, because a man does not want his woman to be a knife, sharp or otherwise, but rather a drawer, in which he can store what he needs.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Fearing her father, she told her mother that she did not like to be called a princess. Only a very stupid little girl would not like to be called a princess, her mother responded. A princess was the best thing a little girl could be.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. She read books about Greek and Roman mythology. Long after she was supposed to have gone to sleep, she would read under her blankets, pretending that she was in a tent with Ulysses, plotting strategy against the Trojans. She did almost no schoolwork.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Her mother insisted on taking her to see Sleeping Beauty, then insisted on taking her to see it again, and a third time, and then her mother had the gall to complain to her friends that Rebecca was forcing her to see it.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Rebecca did envy Sleeping Beauty her good fortune in getting pricked by a needle and sleeping for a hundred years, waking up to find a different world. When Rebecca pricked her finger with a needle, she found nothing but blood, and not even very much of that.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. One boy followed her home whispering rude things. She could provide the heart, he said, and he could provide something else. That was clever, she told him, that pun on her name, and she told him another pun on her name: “Hart” is a little-known synonym for “deer.” She told him the story of Actaeon, who spied on Artemis, the goddess of hunting, as she was bathing in the woods; in vengeance, she turned him into a deer, a deer who was then torn apart by his own hunting dogs. The boy turned away and left her alone. As her father often said, men do not like women who pose a threat.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Her guidance counselor told her he did not have time for girls who wanted to attend college, particularly girls with academic records as spotty as hers. She was not certain she disagreed; she was not certain she belonged in college. Perhaps she belonged in jail, having killed her guidance counselor. She did not kill her guidance counselor and went to college instead.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. This was almost the first thing that Elliot told her. The results of her tests and her work suggested that she was not likely to do much better than a B. The pleasure she took in Homer and in Athenian drama was admirable, but divorced from an ability to master the languages, her pleasure offered no hope of a future career in classics. Maybe she could be a high school drama teacher somewhere, make kids love Sophocles. But that seemed like it would be a shame; she was so beautiful that she should be a movie star. She was more heart than head, if she did not mind his saying so.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would have cursed at him and left his office. It wasn’t even his office. He was just a graduate teaching assistant.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would not have taken his words as confirmation, even for a moment, that there was indeed nothing in her head. She certainly would not have agreed to go back to his apartment with him.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would have found a way to find a doctor who would perform an abortion.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would not have left school.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would not have agreed to marry him.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would have insisted that Elliot help out around the house in some way. Instead, whenever she asked him to so much as take out the garbage, he grumbled, “I’m an intellectual,” and refused to budge from his armchair. Seven months pregnant, she took out the garbage.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would not have been fooled even for a moment into thinking that she could be happy caring for this red, screaming thing.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would not have been surprised when the only permanent job Elliot could find was at a tiny college in a tiny town.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would not have calmed herself with a pursuit as mundane and as stupidly female as sewing.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. At faculty dinners, it was easy enough to watch professors and their wives come to this conclusion as soon as they saw her.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. And her head, already empty, somehow got emptier every time she wiped up spit or put her fingers over her eyes as though this would make her gone.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Hunched over her sewing machine, she resembled neither Helen nor Penelope, who had neither machines nor thoroughly worthless husbands.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. She pricked her finger and wished that that pricking would put her into a sleep from which she would not wake up, even in a hundred years.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. But there was another thing inside her womb.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Babies were supposed to be pleasant to look at. The first time around, she thought that maybe she just happened to get a rare ugly baby. Now she knew that all babies were ugly. Slightly less ugly than adults. But louder.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Two children, two years, no sleep. Any mind she once had was gone.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. That did not mean that she did not know that Elliot was having an affair with the coed who was in the living room, listening to him tell her how he envisioned her playing Antigone in a major Broadway production.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Jobs and rumors of jobs. Now there was a rumor of a job at Cornell. He was trying to get to Ithaca. Ha, ha, ha.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. For Elliot’s interview, they left the kids with Elliot’s parents and took a car trip to Ithaca. A large part of Rebecca hoped that a monster would devour her and Elliot en route.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. On the way back, they spent several nights in a hotel room near Central Park. The intent was to rekindle their relationship. They did have a lot of sex, granted by Rebecca mostly to interrupt Elliot’s monologue about how the faculty had set him up to fail so that they could hire somebody’s unimaginative nephew.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. On their last night in New York, Elliot fell asleep early and Rebecca went for a walk. Each step she took was a step away from Elliot. She could stay in the city forever, or get on a bus and by morning be in a town she had never heard of.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would have kept walking when a man tapped her on the shoulder and told her she looked lonely and sad. She would have run away when he unbuttoned his sleeve and pulled it up to reveal a tattoo that said FIRST MAN TO LIE ON. She certainly would not have once again followed a man back to his apartment.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, when she went home with this strange man, she would never have used his machine, no matter how much she wanted to believe that there was something within her that, if only she could find it, might offer a way out of herself.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would have seen OFFSPRING WILL NOT LEAD HAPPY LIVES for what most of us agree it was: a fortune-teller’s guess.

And maybe that’s how she did see it. Maybe that tattoo had nothing to do with what happened. Nine months after that trip to New York, she gave birth to a third baby, and three months after that, she drowned that baby in the bathtub along with his two older brothers. Maybe, as some have speculated, Adam Lyons was the baby’s father, and she felt shame for cheating on her husband. Most likely, something happened to the chemistry of her brain that left her with little of what we would call choice.

There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Maybe when, in Adam’s apartment, she saw her tattoo for the first time, she felt elated. She returned to the hotel, taking a comfortable stroll with no knowledge of what was already growing inside her. She had every intention of telling Elliot that she was leaving him. She would also be leaving Greek myths. There would be something for her beyond benighted people doing bloody things. She did not yet know what that was, but she would figure it out as soon as she was free of this man whom she had punished herself into marrying for reasons she could not even remember. But maybe she intended to tell Elliot she was leaving only after seeing her children one final time and giving them the sweetest news that a mother can truthfully give: that their unhappy lives were just beginning.