Wraiths of the Broken Land

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The woman who had forgotten her name shifted upon the damp mattress, and the raw sores across her back, buttocks and arms sang out in a chorus of pain. She turned onto her left side to relieve the wounds. As her legs closed, something hard and unfamiliar press against her vaginal walls, and she said, “Lord...” The woman slid her right hand to her pelvis, poked her fingertips inside, touched a hemispherical lump and withdrew it like a pearl from an oyster. After a moment of lightheadedness, she opened her eyes and looked at the thing pinched in-between her right thumb and index finger and saw that it was a dead baby turtle.

The sight of the deceased creature should have shocked her, but the woman who had forgotten her name felt only a detached curiosity regarding the extracted inhabitant, as if she were listening to nearby strangers discuss a topic of mild interest.

Beside her bed and nestled within small cubbyholes were two candles that yielded the overripe smells of flowers, cinnamon and vanilla and a small amount of amber light. In this cloying luminance, the woman appraised the dead baby turtle that had been inserted into her for some obscure purpose by a man whom she thankfully could not remember. The creature had died with its head and legs withdrawn into its shell, wholly isolated from the world, and she envied it.

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