by Lorraine Rice
The baby factory has an assembly line that runs backwards, making a mockery of time…
By the end, no one remembered the beginning. The city on fire, burning itself out in a squall of flame and ash. The escape, fleeing to a rumored safe house in the basement of a church near the waste station. Their empty-handed arrival — there were thirty of them then. Clamoring at the door, clinging to the wooden beams, clawing the earthen floor in their anger and grief. No one could recall the decision to stay, to burrow in for the duration of an indeterminable hibernation, but there they were. Ghosts of their former selves, waiting for the clock to start ticking again.
In a cobwebbed corner of the safe house, Aye is surrounded by stacks of hymnals, suturing herself with gold bookbinding threads. Not even the church tomes remain sound when there are wounds to close, holes to mend. Sacred is subjective, and while she is grateful for the songs, she reserves her reverence for margins and blank pages. At first, they’d filled the empty spaces with what they knew about survival before it faded like the rest. Drawings of wild edibles, a fragmented materia medica, an illustrated guide on hand-to-hand combat. Now, only Aye bothers with the books, recording her own devotions and praises.
A woman who could be her mother — Afro like a halo’s white light in the dim — grins as she passes, gaps in her smile to match her memory.
Everyone has a take on their shared affliction. Dee says it’s because of the chemicals “in the water, our food and whatnot.” Some start blaming diseases they can’t name — their own names a struggle to pinpoint. Kay sighs, “No, it is the trauma,” and for a while the debate is a decent distraction. Then Aye calls from the corner, “A song might help,” and waves one of the hymnals over her head. Silence, blank stares. The moment is already gone, irretrievable. She returns to her book, riffling the pages for a whiff of recollection.
#
For Aye, life before is all blur and spark with the occasional snapshot rising to the surface. Scenes preserved behind glass, but no scent pumped in, no background sound to lend authenticity. A perfect moment viewed from a cold distance. There is one where:
[ I am laughing / in a wedge of sun / mid-peel orange fruit / flesh without a name / a child blooms next to me / Or maybe / I am the child ]
#
The woman who could be her mother — if any of them had mothers there — sings in her sleep and infects Aye’s dreams with visions of the baby factory. “They are starting over,” the woman on the next mat cries, then sleep-laughs so bitterly it stings.
Aye hides her face under the blanket, scratchy and stinking of unwashed bodies. She knows the woman won’t stop until she asks, “Who are they?” but the question always catches before it breaks through and they both can breathe again, settling into soundless sleep.
The woman never sings in the waking hours, and when questioned about the song, looks at Aye as if she is the one with a head full of turbulent sky.
#
From the first refraction and scattering of light to the last…
Most days Aye finds the woman sitting alone tending a rope she wears tied around her waist. She is strange, even among them, with their truncated names and shrinking pasts. The others keep their distance. She braids and unbraids the fraying strands, whispering to herself. Chapped lips and crinkled hands moving in time. Monotony and mantra some read as prayer — Please, please forgive me, my Lord. But Aye has gotten close enough to know she’s really saying, Please, please forget me, my Love.
#
Outside of the safe house are too many dangers to enumerate. Aye knows this to be true despite her limited experience. Fanged and foaming vicious creatures; eye-scalding and throat-swelling contagions; infernos incinerating fields; tempests that submerge the streets. Shadowy figures, armed and patrolling in the distance. Every salvage crew returns with different versions of the nightmares above — a new set of reasons to stay hidden, to go deeper underground.
Aye has not left the safe house since the beginning, the end. She does not know if she is more afraid of what she will find or what she won’t. There are rumors of ships and how, if one could make it to the docks, there’s a chance it might be possible to sneak into a cargo hold and escape. “But escape to where?” Kay says, and others nod in agreed dismissal of the idea. Dee throws her hands up in exasperation, and Aye catches a flash of two brown birds taking flight.
#
They are tunneling underground to wait this out — Or else digging our own graves. Their palms are stained and blistered from hacking at the earth. Days sifted like dirt. Aye is desperate to remember what they are fleeing, what they are waiting for. She craves the whole of it — even the parts buried so deep the excavation proves perilous. “Leave it alone,” Dee says, “it’ll break you.” And Aye thinks, I choose collapse over this slow erosion.
Each day, as measured by the safety of night, a little bit of who they were sloughs off and turns to dust. Aye looks around, We are bones. So thin the skin clings to the frame without fat or flesh enough to cushion them when they fall flat onto their mats at the end of a work-shift. Layered in salvaged sweaters and blankets, they huddle together and do what they can to get warm. It never lasts underground, no matter the season. How many seasons has it been? Too many, and still not enough for those who can recall the warmth of sun.
The chill runs through them, but it is nothing compared to the loss. Someone shudders mid-sentence and loses whatever they meant to say, losing another shard of memory from life before. They are left grasping at a new hole, and the fear is as palpable as the relief.
Aye puts on another sweater, hugs herself tight to keep in the heat and hold onto what she can — no matter how it cuts. Like this:
[ Tuck the blue flowers in / a cloud of black curls / the morning light swirls / milk-drunk eyes, tender palms / reach up / pluck a kiss at dawn ]
#
Dee doesn’t stay under long. She routinely volunteers for the salvaging trips and occasionally sneaks out on her own. Says, “I wasn’t made for this limbo,” and Aye can almost see the crimson current running through her as she paces. Like any of us were made for this. But Dee doesn’t think in terms of Us, which Aye can appreciate, even admire — that total commitment to self-preservation. Still, sometimes she wishes they could share more than their bodies — what’s left of their bodies — when the numbness spreads and threatens to crack.
Once, Dee is gone for two nights before she shows up again with a bag of oranges slung over her shoulder. She breaks the seal on the safe house door just as the sun breaks the seal on the day, and slaps the bag of turned fruit on the table in front of Aye. Variously green stone and dimpled orange, stippled with white.
“I went too far, couldn’t find my way.” There is an undeniable quaver before she coughs to steady, then continues, “Got turned around and ended up by a train yard. Had to hide in a car filled with crates of these until dark.” She nudges the bag closer to Aye, who refuses to acknowledge the apparent peace offering.
She is attempting to focus a blurred memory of riding a train, instead of looking at Dee, who is here now, not gone / Hills and fields speeding past / Here, not missing. Though Aye suspects that won’t be true for long. She lets the image return to smoke, and looks hard at Dee, asks, while she still can, “Why did you come back?”
For a while there is no answer, and Aye understands. She didn’t mean to come back. “This place —” Dee tries, but the rest falls away. Silence accompanied by the familiar dazed expression, slackened jaw and twitchy brows. She wipes the sweat from her forehead and winces, looks to the face in front of her for an explanation. Aye takes Dee’s hand, shaky, with knuckles raked, and touches the wounds to her lips. The orange scent brings tears to her eyes.
#
Belching punchlines from smokestacks that dominate the skies…
Since the sleep-singer won’t name herself, Aye has taken to calling her Em. They end up working most shifts together, Em and Aye, usually in the improvised kitchen, coaxing weeds, fungi, roots, and anything edible the salvagers find into something they can all eat. The meals are more ritual than sustenance, but Aye appreciates the shape they give to the days.
She sits across the table from Em, scraping the skin of a large seed pod with a dull and tarnished blade. The low yellow hum of the lamplight reminds Aye of a song, and she fishes again, from a different angle, for an answer to the Baby Factory. “Why do you sing in your sleep?”
“Why do you cry when you’re awake?” Em shoots back without looking up.
Aye’s mouth hangs open, refusal frozen on her tongue even as the heat rises in her face. She stares at the woman who has always seemed lost to another time and place, who in that moment cannot be bothered to look at Aye and yet sees what she has tried to hide. There’s no point denying it, but Aye isn’t ready to share with this ghost who may be gone tomorrow.
“I’ve lost more than I can name and the hole keeps growing. If I cry,” and she can’t help it, now that Em is looking at her — into her, it feels. “I cry because I can’t remember.”
Em erupts in a whole mouth grin, all gaps visible. But before Aye can fully register the pleasure, the grin is gone, and Em is startling in her severity.
“I sing because we can’t forget.” A shudder, and her face clouds over, definition dissolving in a fog. She drops her hand under the table, and Aye knows without looking that she is fumbling for the ends of her rope.
#
They find a skull, hack right into the bone. A skull that was fully intact until Aye’s pick hit what she first mistook for an earthen pot or massive rock. They have been careful to steer clear of the cemetery. Still, every now and again they come across bones. A sundry of bones that all sink through the soil like slow-motion stones in water.
This is the first skull — caked in mud, caught and cradled in the roots of a tree. Someone jokes that now they have enough pieces to assemble a whole body. “Hey, show some respect.” But Aye knows sometimes a joke is the cleanest way to cut through the pain.
#
One morning the salvage crew returns without Dee, and no one knows what happened or when. In the middle of the murmuring and rumblings of a plan, it comes back to Aye how Dee jerked in her sleep the day before, as if dreaming of motion.
“She must have run off when no one was looking.” Some shake their heads in lowered solemnity, others shrug and move on from the nagging feeling that they should be missing someone who is no more than a name, a letter really. Aye says it again, louder this time — “She ran off” — to drown out the other scenarios creeping to mind.
Speaking of nightmares, there is one that comes back to her:
[ Blood flush in the cheeks / fevered sleep / tossed and turned in a / boiling sea / the bitter route / saltwater seasoned / arms clinging to mine ]
#
The door to the baby factory is old-blood red and rusted on its hinges…
The song is sprouting teeth, becoming more fervid, almost brutal in its insistence.
even the squeal of opening is red…
When Aye is awake her skin prickles with the melody. Tiny pins around her temples and along her spine. In sleep, she returns again and again to the Baby Factory. The way is so familiar to her now that she does not jolt awake when she reaches the gate, and Em cackles on the mat next to hers. She lets the woman laugh-cry until the waters rise — each night a little higher.
#
“Look close now and tell me what you see.” Em shoves Aye’s open hand back at her, right up under her chin.
Aye has to tilt and squint in the feeble light. All she can see is her own palm, lined and calloused, ochre-stained in the cracks and joints. But she knows Em expects her to name the thing so evident it made the older woman suck in a breath.
“A tree?” Aye reaches for the first image that comes to mind when she stares at the varied intersecting lines, like root systems lining the wall and roof of the tunnel. Em leans in, so Aye keeps going. “Yeah, a tree, and all the roots feed into this spot, here.” She points to the pocket just below her middle finger.
Em falls back in her chair, laughter glittering against the gray. “You don’t see a thing.”
“Alright,” Aye slaps her hand, palm up, on the table. “You tell me what you see.”
Em shrugs, waves the thought away. “Nothing really — just passing time. Plenty of it down here.”
This sounds true to Aye, but feels like a lie. Her head is still ringing with the tune, the urgency in Em’s voice, the promise of collapse. So she says, “Then tell me about the Baby Factory.”
“No,” Em whispers and closes her hand around Aye’s, nails digging in. “You tell me.”
#
Dee has been gone for ten days. Ten tallies in the margins of a psalm. Aye wonders if the decision to leave came in an instant, or if Dee had planned, perhaps considered asking Aye to go. Aye wonders if she would have gone. And if she had, would it take ten days to forget her, the way they’ve all forgotten Dee?
She’s been keeping track — not only of her time there, but also the bits and fragments from before. They come with surprising frequency now. Like this one:
[ In a green field beside / the air is thick with / birdsong and newborn cries / first breath / then cradle / the heart / like an egg in hand ]
#
Where are the makers, where are the tenders?
The more Aye remembers, the more Em forgets. She is breaking down, crying with less song, frantically braiding and unbraiding. Her eyes are blood-shot wild, and all she can get out is,
Pleasepleasepleaseplease, until Aye cups the older woman’s hands and says, “Shh, rest.”
Em looks up at her with a flickering recognition. In and out — you, not you. Me, not me. “I can’t. Not until it’s done.” She nods to the rope in their hands, and when she lifts her face again, she is no longer a woman who could be Aye’s mother, but a child gripped and trembling.
“Alright, Em,” Aye gathers her up, leads her back to her mat. “I’ll finish it for you.”
“For us,” Em sighs and relaxes into her, surrendering the weight. She is even lighter than expected, and Aye thinks of hollowed bones and feathers. She watches Em sleep, watches her face contortions. The humming calms her, so Aye keeps on soft and low, brushing tears from her sunken cheeks.
#
There is no use trying to sleep with the song on a loop in her head and live wires sparking through her body. Aye roams the darkened tunnels like an apparition, past the others huddled in trios and pairs. The tremor of their stillness. They are just as haunted and restless, she knows, only better at forgetting. For better and worse. Aye is at the safe house door when a new line comes to her,
After hours it seems there is no one there to man the machines,
and she is on the other side before she realizes what she is doing, where she is going.
The night is so taut it whirs as she knifes through it. Shrouded in velvet and cloud, she moves without thinking, backtracking the way she came so long ago. Down the deserted streets lined with crumbling walls, littered with burnt-out cars that offer good cover, though she doesn’t need it. There isn’t a soul in sight.
When she is deep in the stink of decay, she knows she is passing the old waste station where they go to scavenge, and some animals go to die. She does not linger, but hastens toward the black expanse of highway. The road is naked and endless, but the sweeping lights in the distance drive her to the trees and overgrown grass alongside. A slim crescent hangs just above a violet canopy, fixed in a corner of the sky.
Aye is fending off fatigue and fingers of doubt when she finally sees smokestacks up ahead — three pale concrete towers, massive and dormant. No smoke, no punchlines. Her breathing is ragged, as much from the memory of running before as from the fear threatening her nerve now. She is drenched in a cold sweat and her feet are on fire but she keeps moving, even as the landscape turns malicious. Stinging weeds and zealous vines that swallow whole swaths of fence almost too tall to attempt. Aye climbs and lands hard on the other side.
The main entrance is double-doored steel and padlocked, which is fine because she’s headed for the door hidden behind the dumpsters around the corner. It is exactly as always — Old-blood red and rusted on its hinges.
#
Inside, the Baby Factory appears devoid of life. All the mechanisms and machinery — shiftless gears, slackened belts — seem meek in the smattering of light. Between the portable crank and moonlight trickling in through the high windows, Aye sees well enough to maneuver through the wreckage. The scene was chaos in the moments before they fled, and the broken glass, upended chairs, occasional ovals of stain — blood or solution? — are proof. No one has been back to clean up the mess. But then, who would? Aye thinks as she makes her way to the corridor.
The checkered floor is spongy beneath her feet, and each step springs her forward more quickly than she intends. With every lurch it takes a moment for her heart to catch up. It helps to focus on the rhythmic pounding emanating from the water-stained walls. There is a rush, and Aye is trying to outpace the past, the dread at what is coming, even as she races for the room at the end of the corridor. The widening distance, the hall constricting.
And then, a door of shimmering midnight softly pulses — the knob, a heartbeat in her hand. And as she opens, an underwater silence swells to a roar.
#
Aye tries the switch, but of course the fluorescents died long ago. The unnamed, however, are lined up in rows of plexiglass cribs, still awaiting inspection:
Ten fingers and so on
Little arms and legs in a synchro dance of spectrum shades
Doughy heels and tips and mouths like scalloped valentines drawn in ravenous dreams
Eyes like deep wells of indigo — no whites, just a sprinkling of stars
They weren’t done yet, left to set in the proofing room, but their eyelids flutter in time. No, she realizes, they are winking, blinking out a morse code for their makers. Open, blink, blink, open, blink. All saying the same, We’ve been here before. Remember?
Aye does remember, and her bones ache with the certainty of memory igniting the marrow. She can almost hear the plea reaching out from an immeasurable distance. Em, Dee, some past version of herself, all the others who survived the Baby Factory, all those who came before. When she opens her mouth to answer, a cry escapes. A wordless song on the cusp of a wail — part melodic exaltation, part guttural release. It cracks the ceiling, makes the foundation quake. And as she lifts each monstrous creation from its cradle to her breast, the sound expands, not just in volume but in layers, with every added utterance. The last voice to join is enough for the song to pierce the roof and split the frame.
The new singers scamper off through the widening fissures, and Aye, at last, surrenders to exhaustion. Her throat is raw and her chest heaving. Yet even as she falls she is smiling, watching the shifting sky visible above; anticipating new dreams that bloom in the sun.
###
Lorraine Rice is a writer and educator living in Philadelphia. Her work appears or is forthcoming in swamp pink, midnight & indigo, Scoundrel Time, Philadelphia Stories, and elsewhere. She has received a fellowship from Kimbilio, and a Pushcart Prize nomination for her fiction. She also writes poetry and literary nonfiction.