I found out what my mother did when I was little.
They said that if you saw her, you started looking for a priest or a bottle of whisky. If you saw Celene Cross, you’d know you were finished. Everybody had heard about the places she’d been, the things she left behind. The way she set a place to rot, and no matter what you did, it’d keep rotting until it collapsed around you.
I’ve seen pictures online and in newspaper clippings. She looks like she grinds bullets for fun. Like nobody could ever hurt her, and she’s hurt people, so she knows all about that.
There was one night, though, that changed everything.
She’s pregnant but that doesn’t make her soft. Her eyes are black cigarette burns, her hair dark and clinging to waxy skin. That’s how I imagine her, anyway. She claws through the night, her cheekbones like jagged blades. The door damn near buckles under her hammering. When it finally opens, she staggers inside, almost crumples to the floor, only someone catches her. She’s hauled to a bed, her teeth crunching together.
‘No,’ she grunts, batting hands away. ‘Him. I need him.’
When the priest appears, he’s carrying a wriggling lamb. Its tongue sticks out at her and my mother clutches between her legs, writhing in pain.
There are no comforting words. No reassuring caresses.
He tears her dress at her belly. Red splatters, still warm. Lamb’s blood, spraying from its sliced throat, its head limp and dangling.
That’s where I came in. Or out. My mother screamed and writhed and screamed some more and out I slithered. But I didn’t scream. I didn’t make a sound. I was purple and I didn’t move, which is how she knew I was dead.
They say she didn’t even stop to check. A woman gives birth, she’s supposed to lie there and think about it. Not her. She took off like Beelzebub had her name and address, and she never looked back. She came out of the night and she went straight back into it.
Thing is, I didn’t die.
The priest thumped my back and I coughed a breath, then kept on breathing.
They say the dead lamb started bleating then.
They say the house shook on its foundations and a shadow passed across the moon.
They say a lot of things.
The only truth I know: my mother was a terrible person. She killed and she didn’t care. Sometimes they called her the Witch Assassin or the Red Widow. Other times The Ghost, maybe because people hardly ever saw her. She went into a place, did her thing, then left. Afterwards, it was like she’d never been there. The dead people had maybe done it to themselves. She was a whisper without an echo.
I’m pretty sure she wished I didn’t exist, either, when she found out she was pregnant. It’s not like I’ve seen her since. She died a few weeks later. Washed up in the Thames, pale and broken. The papers said she had it coming, she’d pissed off too many powerful people, but what do the papers know? They buried her in a cemetery in North London. Seeya, Celene. Nice knowing ya.
I shouldn’t be alive.
Sometimes I wish I wasn’t. I suppose some days, a lot of people wish they weren’t. If you’ve got a crummy job or you hate the person you used to love.
If I had been dead a lot of things wouldn’t have happened.