Firelight

By Amy Rains

Featured art: “The Bells in the Bell Tower, the University” by Rebecca Pyle

I like to light candles in church. I think it’s the way those tiny plumes of smoke branch upward in some stilted metaphor for the human spirit. It makes me picture each waxy torch as a being of its own: the cracked and stubby Uncle Todd, the hunched and leaning Grandma Shirley. A collection of timeworn souls mollifying life’s wounds one small flicker at a time, gleaming for all of us left paralyzed in the acrid dust of desperation. Everyone who has lit those wicks before me has their own story to tell, to be sure, but I’d wager they have one thing in common: grief. It’s an indiscriminately pervasive thing, and it’s an old grief that’s led me to these candles today, one that no longer stabs directly at the heart but circles stubbornly overhead like a vulture. I watch the molten wax drip slowly down the sides of the fresh candle in front of me and remember how the bleeding started. 

It wasn’t so much at first. I even wondered if I had mistaken the pink spots on the toilet paper for something else. Maybe I was just seeing the skin of my hand through the thin tissue? Maybe, I thought, just maybe I had imagined it altogether. 

But then it got heavier, and the acute pain that followed signaled something was surely wrong. It was 7:02 p.m. on a Thursday evening. I called the after-hours line at the women’s clinic and spoke to a doctor who wasn’t mine, a doctor who apologized for my “discomfort” and told me that all I could do was “let nature take its course.” I could come in for lab work tomorrow morning to make sure, he told me, but the signs were pretty clear. 

I couldn’t form the words to acknowledge I had heard what he said. I thought about saying “thank you” because it’s what you say. But that sentiment was a salty thing that lodged itself in my throat. The doctor fell silent, so I just hung up. 

Not once in the short time I had spent tracking baby’s approximate size on a scale from poppyseed to watermelon had I ever stopped to consider that this fragile wisp of a dream could disappear in less than a moment. For so many weeks prior, I had spent hours each day browsing through nursery pictures on Instagram, researching prenatal vitamins, and studying the subtle melodic differences between the names Parker and Porter, Julie and Jolie. I hatched plans of the elaborate reveal schemes I’d employ to share the news of my pregnancy with my family. I cut caffeine from my diet. I ate superfoods. I took belly pictures long before I ever began to show.

But now, all I could do was place a shaking hand where my baby had been growing, or so I had thought, only moments before. Should I lay down? Should I drink some water? I was cemented to the spot on the carpet where I stood, afraid to move and somehow make it worse. I had taken a shower that morning. Had the water been too hot? Did I eat something I shouldn’t have? Had I remembered to take my vitamins that day?

Did I do this?

I took each wave of cramping with a self-flagellating grimace, knowing in my head that miscarriages happen all the time but feeling in my bones a guilt and shame that I couldn’t explain. 

Miscarriage. What an awful word. Those three syllables rolled around in my brain like colliding boulders. I didn’t have to consult a dictionary to know the prefix implies wrongdoing—as in, there is a guilty party here. Someone has done something wrong. Mis-handle, mis-place, mis-lead: these are all words that place blame on the actor in the scene. Someone handled the thing wrong. Someone put the thing in the wrong place. Someone led another person in the wrong direction. A miscarriage, then, implies that someone carried something wrong. And there’s only one person who could be to blame here, only one person who had been given the task of carrying and blew it. Miscarriage. God, I hate that word. But why does it have to feel so damn accurate?

In the days that followed that night, I ate. I cried. I slept. I watched my husband have a birthday. I went to work and smiled; I know I smiled because I practiced diligently beforehand. I made excuses and avoided things. Oh, maybe next time, I would say. I have a headache. I’m helping a friend move that day. I need to feed my goldfish. Because you don’t just tell your neighbor you don’t want to come to the barbecue on account of your recent miscarriage still being too fresh. That’s the kind of thing no one tells you not to talk about; you just somehow know not to do it. 

So, I silently continued my practiced smile, all the while taking pregnancy tests every day to watch for the drop in hormones that signaled I was “back to normal.” Those two pinks lines that I had desperately looked for in the beginning had now become a cruel reminder that my body’s chemistry was refusing to let go of a pregnancy that had ended days ago, a pregnancy that hadn’t even come with the sound of a tiny heartbeat or one of those butterfly kicks I had read so much about. I spent a lot of time those days bargaining with God, sitting in the bathroom that was now my would-be-baby’s graveyard. Make it not true, I begged. I knew women could bleed and still carry a baby to term—a dear friend of mine had, in fact, done this very thing—let me be one of those women. I had only had a phone consult, after all; maybe an in-person exam would find something different. Please, don’t let this happen. I will never ask you for anything ever again.

But I guess God couldn’t hear me from my bathroom. Still, that (frustrating) thing with feathers perched in my soul convinced me I just needed to move a little closer.

It’s an odd feeling, attending Sunday Mass while still processing what it means to lose a baby—could I even call it that? Peace be with you. I’m sure the pain of losing a fully grown baby, or even one who was just a few weeks ahead of mine, is different. And with your spirit. I don’t deserve to grieve for something I never really had to begin with, do I? The word of God. But if I’m being honest, it wasn’t just grief I was feeling while listening to the priest speak of God’s love. Amen.

I had never noticed before how the pews in the sanctuary felt so stiff and unyielding, how the walls seemed so tight in their ornament. I even found myself wondering what sound the stained glass would make if I sent my fist hurtling through it. Whatever I maintained out loud about faithfulness, I couldn’t stifle the rage that boiled inside me. It was raw. It was unruly. It was me staring at the crucifix and hurling my anger at the feet of a God who made women mothers only to go and steal their babies from their wombs—a God I blamed almost as much as I blamed myself. 

I’m not sure how long it took for that anger to give way to acceptance; only the smoke can explain how time behaves when you’re on fire. But when I got pregnant again, a story all on its own, I went to church not in anger, but in desperation.

I prayed as I had prayed before, only harder, begging God to protect my growing child, insisting He owed me that much. I prayed for health. I prayed for each trimester to pass quickly by so I could stop worrying that every move I made would ruin this one too. 

It wasn’t until I saw my beautiful, healthy son for the first time that I realized I had been holding my breath for nine long months. The doctor held my perfect boy out for me to see, and I cried as he cried: him to clear his lungs, me to clear my soul. 

As life-altering as that moment was, I won’t pretend that it brought a magically tidy ending to my story. Though I now have three beautiful children to call my own, there are still unexpected moments when I feel the familiar ache in deep places and wonder what might have been. I still feel pangs of grief on my husband’s birthday, the first whole day I had to live through after finding out my baby had stopped growing inside me. I still wince when I see children who are the age my baby would have been. 

My grief is an old one. Old for me. Older still for so many before me. And maybe it’s old for you, too. And so today, I light a half-melted candle and watch: watch the thin tendril of smoke glide swiftly upward for what I lost, watch the tiny flame glow for my space among many, watch its light bounce off the dimpled stained glass behind it for all my sisters whose pain continues to smolder.

Amy Rains is a baker, dog lover, and sometimes writer who usually finds more pleasure in helping students craft good stories than in writing stories herself. She studied English Education at St. Gregory’s University, received an MA in literature from Oklahoma State University, and currently teaches composition classes at Tulsa Community College. A life-long resident of Oklahoma, she lives with her husband and three children in Collinsville, where she unabashedly forces her love of Oxford commas on all who know her (and some who don’t).

Rebecca Pyle is a writer and a visual artist. Her written work can be found or is forthcoming in Fugue, Gargoyle, Guesthouse, Eclectica, Wisconsin Review; her artwork is featured in West Trestle Review, Blood Orange Review, New England Review, Alexandria Quarterly, Menteur, Gris-Gris. In 2020 fiction by Rebecca, "White as Clouds," in Guesthouse, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Rebecca Pyle is closing in on almost two decades in the mountainous American West. It's time to move to Copenhagen? See more at rebeccapyleartist.com.