Hannah

I could feel that something was wrong. The pains in my stomach were getting worse and more frequent. Being busy with the farm I ignored it, hoping that it was nothing serious that would go away on its own.

Frank and I agreed that in preparation for what we thought would be a spike in the need for refugee aid we should get the farm producing more. I ploughed the remaining land with the tractor, we took on ten more farmhands and we added eight more cows to our cattle stocks. The increase in crops and livestock placed more pressure on our water supply, forcing us to drill a second borehole. The work that I was doing overseeing the expansion of the farm helped to take my mind off all the different worries we had. Cathy wasn’t alone in being extremely worried about Morgan, we all were, especially me, because of my suspicion that he was a Prospera orphan. I hadn’t yet told the others of my suspicion; I didn’t have any proof to support my theory and I didn’t want to make Kevin re-examine what was the worst memory of his life.

We all knew—when we thought about the situation rationally—that it was only a matter of time before we discovered that Morgan was dead. His insatiable thirst for revenge wouldn’t allow him to stop what he was doing; he’d told us when he’d come to the farm to see Cathy that he was prepared to die for what he saw as his mission and that was exactly what he was going to do. The little hope that Cathy had—that Morgan would decide that being with her was more important than dying in vain in service of his mission—was futile. I empathised with Cathy a great deal because I understood her feelings perfectly; Kevin had been driven by his singular obsession to uncover the truth about Prospera and the outside world the same way that Morgan was obsessed with exacting vengeance on the Americans. My love for Kevin had led me to follow him on the dangerous journey that had led us here. We never would have known about the existence of this world were it not for him; the recklessness of his that had gotten us here was a big part of why I loved him so much and it was the same for Cathy. Maybe that made us masochists; if it did, we didn’t care. We were in love.

I had stopped watching the videos of the executions of #OI members; the gruesomeness of them was more than I could take. I made an exception for one video, the last one any of us would ever watch. A boy was walked into the shot wearing a #OI balaclava over his head, making it impossible for his face to be seen. The tattoo on his arm was unmistakable. Morgan had gotten himself captured; what we were watching were the final moments of his life.

“Maybe you shouldn’t watch this,” Lisa said to Cathy. Miranda, Lisa and I were with her in her room, watching the video on her computer.

“No, I have to,” Cathy responded tremulously.

Miranda put her arms around Cathy from behind to lend her support; Cathy raised her hands and held onto Miranda arms. Rivulets of tears fell precipitously down her face as she waited for the moment that she had been living in fear of the whole time she’d known him. The US soldier that would be Morgan’s executioner walked into the shot also wearing a balaclava and carrying an assault rifle. Execution by gunshot was the quickest, least gruesome method for execution; of course this was of no consolation to Cathy.

“This is what happens when you oppose American military might,” the hooded soldier said into the camera.

Morgan stood with his legs apart, his arms behind his back and his head high. His stance was one of defiance, that of one who is facing death without fear. Cathy was distraught and rapidly coming apart at the seams but I was certain there was a part of her that was proud to see Morgan staying true to his convictions right to the end. The hooded soldier walked off camera and we were left to watch Morgan standing and waiting for several tense, macabre seconds. The sickening crack of the gunshot, when it finally came, snuffed out the few faint embers of fortitude remaining inside Cathy. She fell to the ground when Morgan did, with a look on her face of pure sorrow and emptiness. Miranda had kept her arms around Cathy and had fallen to the ground with her. By holding on to her she was doing the only thing she could do; after what Cathy had just seen we couldn’t think of anything we could do that didn’t instantly feel pathetically inadequate. Miranda refused to let go of Cathy, who didn’t wish to be let go of. Her grip on Miranda’s arms grew tighter and she nuzzled her head into the side of Miranda’s neck, fully embracing the comfort that she was being offered.

Watching them, I was moved almost to tears by the compassion and tenderness that Miranda was showing to Cathy. We were from completely different worlds yet there was no distance between Cathy’s pain and Miranda’s empathy; despite Prospera’s best efforts our shared humanity with the people of this world had remained unbroken after a century and a half of separation. Miranda stayed with Cathy for the rest of the day and spent the night with her in her room. Cathy didn’t want to see her father; she said that he would see Morgan’s death as vindication of what he had been saying all along, which, in all honesty, it was. That evening at dinner Lisa and I informed Frank of the situation and his response was exactly what Cathy had predicted it would be.

“I knew this would happen,” he said with an unsympathetic sigh.

When we were in bed later that night I couldn’t let go of Kevin. At any time during our final years in Prospera the same fate that had befallen Morgan could have befallen Kevin; the despair that Cathy was in reminded me how I felt when Kevin had been knocked overboard.

Later that night, I had stomach pains that were worse than any I’d had before. They woke me up the moment they started and I knew that the problem that I had been ignoring for the past few weeks was not nothing. Searching for some relief from the pain I slowly crawled out of bed and tried stretching out my midriff but a sharp pain caused me to double over and drop to my knees in agony. There was something terribly wrong with the baby. As I struggled through the pain that was ripping through my body, all I could think of was how foolish I’d been to have done nothing about the physical discomfort that I’d been feeling for so long. I had needlessly placed our child in danger; if I ended up losing it I didn’t know how I would ever forgive myself. I was trying to make as little noise as possible but the pain was too bad, I couldn’t stifle the cries that were welling up from the pain in my stomach. The noise that I was making woke up Kevin, who was quickly on the floor next to me on his knees.

“Hannah, what’s wrong?” He asked me with his hand resting reassuringly on my back.

“It’s the baby, something’s wrong with the baby,” I managed to say before another cramp rendered me speechless.

Kevin wasted no time in taking action. He left my side to go and wake up Lisa, who was with me in the room in a matter of seconds.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

“Where’s Kevin?” I asked her when I was able to.

“He’s gone to get Miranda and Cathy; we’re going to put you in the truck and take you to the clinic, Sister Audrey’s a midwife, she’ll be able to help.”

I felt more fear that night than I had my entire life, even more than when we’d come face to face with the wolves in the forest. The cramps, when they hit, sent shockwaves through my body so painful it was impossible for me to so much as think; between the cramps all I could think about was how much I didn’t want to lose my baby and that if I did it would be nobody’s fault but my own.

Frank ran down to the cottage together with Kevin and Miranda; Cathy had gone to get the truck. Frank kneeled down next to me and asked me if I was okay with his hand on my back just like Kevin had. Having him next to me provided me with some degree of calm, though not nearly enough for me to feel any less terrified about my predicament. I was carried out of the cottage by Kevin and Frank, who supported me gently under my arms as I tentatively made my way out of the room and toward the front door of the cottage. We got as far as the living room, at which point the pain made it impossible for me to go on. They laid me down on the sofa and began formulating a new plan for what to do with me. Frank took charge of the situation. He told Lisa to call Sister Audrey and tell her to expect Cathy to arrive to pick her up soon and then ran outside to tell Cathy to get moving. I heard the truck pulling away aggressively, spinning its wheels in the dirt. Cathy didn’t plan on wasting any time in getting to Sister Audrey; I just hoped that in her rush she didn’t get herself hurt in an accident. Until Cathy returned with Sister Audrey I was in Lisa’s care, the only one of us who had any medical training. She told me to get my breathing to a steady rate and pulled up my T-shirt and pushed down hard on my belly several times, moving further down my belly with every push, inducing pain that I had to endure.

“Something’s not right,” Lisa said in an urgent tone of voice.

“What’s not right?” Kevin asked her, sounding alarmed.

“The baby’s on its way out.”

“How can that be? She’s only five months along!”

“She’s miscarried; her body’s getting rid of the dead tissue. Get me a basin of hot water with some Dettol in it, a sponge, and some towels.”

Lisa’s calm words took my fear away and replaced it with a feeling of pure hollowness. It had been my negligence and stupidity that had cost us our child. The whole time that Lisa was attending to me I could think of nothing else. I blankly followed her instructions when she told me to change the way I was resting on the couch so that my feet were on the floor and my legs as much off the couch as possible, then she told me to lift myself up so that she could remove my sleeping shorts, which had blood on them that I hadn’t felt leaving my body. Lisa soaked the sponge in the hot antiseptic water and gently wiped the inside of my legs and my vagina, the hot water and her delicate touch brought me a modicum of relief.

“Hannah, this is going to hurt a little, but I need you to bear with me,” she said to me before manoeuvring her hand inside me, “This isn’t good, the baby’s almost all the way out, there’s no time left. Kevin, I want you to put a towel over her face, she shouldn’t see this, and hold her hand. Hannah, I know you can feel where the baby is, I need you to push.”

Kevin brought the towel down over my head, shrouding me in darkness and worsening my sense of desolation. I squeezed his hand tightly and, trusting Lisa, I did as she told me to; I pushed and pushed and pushed and with each painful push I could feel movement taking place inside me, the movement of my dead child passing through me as a despicable lump, something vile and godforsaken. The stillness of it, the incontrovertible evidence of its deadness, was horrifying. After several painful pushes that took me beyond my limit of what I was capable of withstanding the child slipped out of me amid a discharge of unctuous fluids.

The cottage became engulfed in silence the moment it was over. The shock that everyone was in was palpable to me under the towel; without looking at the expressions on their faces I knew that what had come out of me was an abomination, something more horrendously misshapen than they were expecting. But it was still my child.

“DON’T LOOK!” Lisa shouted at me when I raised my hand to remove the towel that was over my face, an order I obeyed, “Miranda, take this into the bathroom,” I heard her say before she started washing me with the sponge and told me that it was okay for me to remove the towel from my face, “There wasn’t too much blood, so you should be fine, Sister Audrey will probably still want to admit you though, just to be safe.”

Next to me, Kevin hadn’t let go of my hand and was silently crying, having held himself back from making any noises during the birth ordeal so as not to cause me any additional panic. In the kitchen, Frank was sitting in a chair with his elbows on the eating table and his hands clasped in front of his face, praying. Lisa was assiduously washing me with the sponge, her stoic face betraying the toll that my birth had taken on her.

Utterly exhausted, I fell to my side, placed my head in Kevin’s lap and freed my grief for my dead child to explode out of me. I screamed and cried and clawed my way up Kevin and wrapped him in a vice grip with my arms. He allowed me to selfishly use him as a ballast to support myself while I loudly and forcefully unburdened myself of the grief for the child that had been his too. Kevin kept his own feelings suppressed to allow me to fully express my grief. I loved him for that; after Cathy had returned with Sister Audrey and she wanted to examine me I didn’t want to let go of him. When she forced me to I kept hold of his hand and no matter what was to take place afterward I had no intention of going through any of it without him.

“Well done Lisa, you’ve handled this really well,” Sister Audrey said to her after the brief examination she gave me, “She can’t stay here though, we’ll have to take her to the clinic and have a gynaecologist come and look at her; where’s the foetus?”

“It’s in the bathroom,” Lisa answered.

“I’ll go get it and bring it with us; help her into the truck.”

Lisa retrieved a clean pair of sleeping shorts from my chest of drawers in the bedroom and put them on me, and Kevin and Frank resumed what they’d started earlier and assisted me to the truck. Kevin and Lisa sat in the back seat on either side of me, Cathy drove and Sister Audrey sat in the front seat next to her holding the foetus which was wrapped in a towel. It was giving off a putrid smell from the various fluids with which it was coated. Since giving birth to it my interest in seeing it had diminished to nothing. Were I to see it I would be forever haunted by the image of it as a monstrosity and wouldn’t be able to think of it as our precious child resting peacefully having been tragically taken from us before its time. Everybody had worked to ensure that I was shielded from the truth about the ugly consequences of its premature birth. I was thankful to them for that and I was sorry for putting them through what must have been for Lisa and Miranda, who had seen and handled the grotesque malformation that had come out of me, the most disturbing sight they’d ever seen.

Frank, Cathy and Sister Audrey were also in my debt. They were there for me and had displayed strength, kindness and selflessness all for the simple reason that I needed help that they were in a position to give, in exchange for which they expected nothing. I felt safe in their hands, as safe as I would in the hands of anyone from Prospera. All the time that I had spent in this world—with Frank and Cathy, working on the farm, helping Sister Bernadette to feed refugees, enjoying the modern conveniences of it, learning about its history—had, if not rid me of them, at least softened many of my opinions about it. I was more trusting of its people, more understanding of the challenges they were perennially working to overcome, more sympathetic to their failures, more respectful of their complex ways of doing things. But despite all of that, despite the remarkable extent to which we had assimilated to this world in such a short space of time, there was a nagging pull that I had been unable to shake, a pull that, on the night of my miscarriage, I knew I couldn’t fight any longer. When I woke up in my clinic bed the next morning and Kevin, who had stayed with me all night, asked me if there was anything he could do for me, I gave him the most honest answer I could.

“I want to go home, back to Prospera.”