10.22am ‍ ‍

You are on a plane. ‍ ‍

At the time of writing, you have been bleeding for twelve days.‍

In the duty-free, the woman brought you a dark blue pot. Crème Immortelle. You’ve been upgraded from the pink pot, Crème Perfectrice. You are no longer perfecting but preventing. You paid for it and then got on the plane. ‍

You’re going home ‍ ‍

to where your mother is dying. ‍ ‍ ‍

In Nilling, Lisa Robertson tells us that, ‘The reader loves without knowing.’ She is talking about codexes, about the twelfth century people who learnt to create whole worlds, characters, narratives, inside their heads. Prior to this, words were read aloud, sounds that generated collective imagining. Then the practice of silent reading developed and became private. A character death stays between you and the page. Have you ever caused commuters to avert their gazes on public transport as people that were constructed out of ink, shapes on a page, someone else’s mind, died? ‍ ‍

‍ You are grieving for an idea. A possibility. You are bleeding the gathering of cells that were growing in your uterus but became unviable. There are few things lonelier than grieving for someone who never really existed, a fictional character who died just for you as you were surrounded by strangers, cells that were beginning to shape and multiply. Grief from a miscarriage can last just as long. Just as long as grief for a real person. ‍ ‍‍ ‍

10.26pm

‍ The stewardesses, wearing deflated life jackets, mime blowing a whistle. You look out of the window, the runway, the snow-speckled distant hills. You have taken this flight more times than you can remember. You are grieving more for an idea than for your granddad.

‍At the funeral, your brother – tall and broad like a Viking but still a kid really – was told he would carry granddad’s coffin. Suddenly he was shouldering the box down the aisle of the chapel. The only thing to do was put one foot in front of the other. He didn’t know what he was carrying but the weight of it was on his shoulder.

‍ ‍The nēmontēmi fall at the end of the Aztec festival of Izcalli, an extended leap day that resets the 365-day Xihuitl calendar. Caroline Dodds Pennock writes that these dead days fall, ‘out of time and out of life, ‘useless’ days of fasting in which the Aztecs feared the end of the world and awaited its renewal. During these days, no official business was conducted, cleaning was left undone, arguments were avoided and people walked cautiously to avoid the bad omen of stumbling.’‍ ‍ ‍

This calendar is cross-referenced with the other Aztec calendar, the 260-day tonalpohualli, where the twenty-day count represented by signs rather than numerals runs concurrently with the cycle of thirteen numerical coefficients.

‍There are a maelstrom of days, numbers, sigils, superstitions, feast and fast days to keep track of, but there is an order, a structure. The tonalpohualli carries more divinatory qualities, and theorists suggest it originated from women as it approximates the 266-day average duration of a pregnancy and is even closer to the 260 days from the first missed menstrual cycle to birth. It’s neat, tidy. Like the eighty days Aztec wives are required to mourn for battle-lost husbands. Eighty days is the time it takes for the spirit to reach the sun and the woman may not wash her clothes, body or hair, filth and tears mingling and this suffering drawing her closer to the gods. Finally, in what must have been an extremely satisfying shampoo, at the end of the mourning period she can cleanse herself, simultaneously washing off her grief and her grime.  

‍ ‍You have no such time. Less than a month after you staggered, dizzy and faint in the apathetic Glasgow dawn, uterus burning, and into the toilet fell your could-have-been, you are watching an air steward mime blowing a whistle. Your headphones are out so you can listen to the recorded safety instructions. What to do in the event of a crash. Your mum had the surgery on Tuesday. It’s Friday and she’s home. Your dad messaged you a picture of her lying on the sofa, looking wan. Her hair is see-through. This is because her best friend, the man you have known all your life, who brought a duffel bag of scissors and combs and hair dye every sixth Saturday since before you were born, who sat at the top table at your wedding, has pancreatic cancer, and the chemo stops him eating. The ripple effect is that Time, snapping at her heels for the past few years without ever catching hold, has accumulated and snared your mum overnight. ‍ ‍

He told her you were coming. She said you didn’t have to, you’re busy, you’ll have to take time off uni. She’s right. It isn’t a good time to go. Was that feeling resentment? Or resignation, as you dropped your toothbrush into a washbag. Stop it. You will regret not going more than going.[1]

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 The Christmas tree is still up, even though January trickles by. Your mum is pleased to see you, but you’ve never seen anyone look so unwell. She is flattened, wispy, still. It’s unsettling, to see someone who was in perpetual motion, hands in sudsy water, chopping onions, folding laundry, so shrunken. Her voice is raspy. She says you’ll have to help with the stitches, she knows you’re not a nursey-nurse. There’s somehow a challenge in the words. She doesn’t expect you to manage.‍ ‍

‍ It starts that night. The vomiting and diarrhoea. ‍ ‍‍ ‍

A bucket is by her bed because she can’t get to the toilet. This isn’t normal. This can’t be normal?‍ ‍

But you remember the midwife telling you to go home and bleed out your baby. The pain of waiting to miscarry. The mystery of what else might be circulating in the plumbing of your four-storey tenement flat back in Glasgow. You thought some things had to take place in the nondescript sterility of the hospital. But apparently not. So perhaps this is normal. Homes turned alms houses.‍ ‍ ‍

She gets weaker, moaning incoherently. You lie awake, eyes wide open in the dark, listening. ‍ ‍‍ ‍

Cihuacoatl was the Aztec warrior goddess whose spirit infused labouring women. During parturition she possessed them as life and death met in the female body and they fought to capture a child. Women’s bodies were simultaneously the site of creation and of terrifying destruction. Your mum’s uterus has been removed completely so the potential for creation has gone.‍ ‍‍ ‍

The smell is indescribable. The 111 doctor says wait and see; the ward at the hospital is bizarrely closed at the weekend, as if surgical complications respect the working week. ‍‍

Your brother’s girlfriend is a nurse and has some antiemetics. Your mum manages almost seven hours without being sick, sleeping fitfully.

(You thought this word was only for women in the Gothic novels she loves so much. They sleep fitfully.)

But perhaps this is the turning point. You close your eyes but then your mum is calling for your dad. He can’t hear her, asleep downstairs on the sofa where the Christmas tree still stands. ‍ ‍‍ ‍

She is so much worse. You try 111 again – a Saturday night in southeast London – and they don’t return your call. You’re just waiting for them to ring back and tell you to call an ambulance even though your mum has told you not to, she’ll get better, she says. ‍ ‍‍ ‍

You ring 999. There is no more waiting.‍ ‍ ‍

The operator sounds impatient at first, as if expecting you to slur something from a club toilet about your friend choking on their own vomit. As soon as you explain about the hysterectomy, he sharpens up. ‍ ‍ ‍

They’ll be with you soon. ‍ ‍

Your mum passes out as the paramedics try and lift her, to take her to the ambulance, its blue lights roving across the room from the street. Your dad couldn’t speak to them when they came in, the words stuck in his throat and came out as an animal noise, so it was you who took them upstairs. You who tell them everything, reading from your notebook. Gathering letters and scraps of paper with numbers and names. Your mum is incoherent but you put things in a tote bag. Purse. Tissues. Medication. Phone. Charger. Knickers. Book. Charger? Tissues. Lip salve, fuck, what else? What else?‍ ‍ ‍

She is tiny as they wheel her out and you stand in the street listening as the siren wail gets further and further away.[2]

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None of you can visit. Bleary phone calls and impatient updates from put-upon nurses. Confused texts from your mum but, at last, she’s admitted.

10.32am

‍On the plane, they wheel trolleys up and down the aisles. Coffees and teas. Crisps and brownies. You have a cup of tea and when you open the plastic tube of milk it spurts out, the liquid going all over your hands. ‍ ‍‍

Strangely, you have quite a nice day. The relief that she’s somewhere safe, that you aren’t alone, that you’ve done the right thing fills you with an almost-giddiness. You did more than the right thing. You saved her life. ‍

‍You haven’t slept for thirty-six hours, but you roast beef for your dad and brother, cooking it exactly how your mum wouldn’t like it, pools of pink blood on the plate. You are proud when they compliment your roast potatoes. ‍‍ ‍

The next day, you and dad take down the Christmas tree and the decorations in a frenzy of productivity. Hoover the Labrador hair from the carpet. Dust the mantelpiece where the candles have sat since December, getting everything ready for when she comes home. And wait. And wait.‍ ‍

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And wait.

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You think you’re pregnant when rusty blood starts spotting the toilet tissue. This is how it started last time, when you confused implantation bleeding for a miscarriage on a desolate writing retreat in Shropshire. Surrounded by strangers, you believed you were losing a baby. It was only when you got home that you found out it was the opposite. Creation rather than destruction. ‍ ‍

You think that’s happening now but it’s only when the dark clots come, black and shiny as beetles, that you know it’s not. ‍ ‍ ‍

It’s too difficult to talk to anyone from the outside. How can you describe the early rising, the walks with your dad, the cooking and constant hospital calls. The emails from your supervisors at the uni, and attending classes on Zoom that are happening on another planet entirely. You are raw, uncooked meat in the middle of a sadness turkenduck. You create a schedule for researsals you don’t know if you’ll be in Scotland to run. You talk to the writer, the sound designer, from where you live now, on another planet. You communicate mostly through WhatsApp, messaging your husband late at night while everything else is paused. ‍ ‍

You put off sleep so you don’t have to wake up and get through another day.

‍Your body turned killer. Within the female body is great creativity and the potential for destruction. Your body butchered something that, without interference, would grow into a human baby, you can only assume. At the time of writing, no babies have been born, human or otherwise.

‍‍A tzompantli is an Aztec skull rack. In 2017, when one was discovered in Mexico City, it confirmed people’s suspicions: the Aztecs were barbarous, murdering, cannibals. They had built a six-metre-wide tower of skulls at the base of their Great Temple in Tenochtitlan. The discovery was sensationalised and used by the media to depict the Aztecs as horrifying and vicious. As Caroline Dodds Pennock points out though, at the same time as the Aztecs were constructing their towers of skulls, the live burning of witches and heretics was rife across Europe.

‍‍You took the pregnancy test the night before you and your husband were due to fly to Paris. You still went, but discovered that Paris was not accommodating to an English woman with patchy French who in no way looked pregnant but turned down all their delicious French wines, the soft, buttery cheeses, the fragrant seared scallops – instead requesting boiled chicken. And then not even eating that. What a snobbery-filled foreigner, they must have sniggered behind the menus of the exceptionally nice restaurant you had booked, filled with the kind of hush only expensive carpets and heavy credit cards make. Where your husband was offered a choice of knife for his veal while you threw up in a soothingly dark and perfumed toilet. ‍‍ ‍

It was an odd trip, an unexpected trio that was never meant to be. You wanted to go to the catacombs, believed you found the skull of Robespierre. The French made entire rooms out of bones. The Aztec tzompantli is comparatively tame. In retrospect, you think you should have stayed above ground rather than venture, like Orpheus, into l’empire de la mort. Months later, you won’t visit the Necropolis in Glasgow after ovulation, in case being surrounded by all that death reignites your body’s lethal instincts. ‍ ‍ ‍

In the end, it’s your mum who tells you to go back. You need to go home to Glasgow. It’s the first and only time in six weeks that you have seen her. You honoured the hospital’s Covid no-visitors policy until your brother’s girlfriend-turned-detective found out that there were other visitors on your mum’s ward and you phoned, prepared for the showdown of the century, felt somewhat deflated when the ward sister just let you in.  

She is butter spread over too much bread. The worn heel of an age-softened sock. She didn’t tell her equally cancer-riddled best friend until you phoned her, told her that of course he’d worry, but imagine if their situations were reversed, wouldn’t she want to know? ‍‍ ‍

Now you’re here, and she’s saying you have to go. Book the flight. ‍

‍It’s too late to cancel the rehearsals. You’d be letting down so many people if you stayed. You’d be letting down so many people if you left.‍ ‍

Your taciturn brother asks if you can stay and the piece of your heart that breaks off when you tell him you can’t will never grow back.

In an alcove somewhere off a rubbery hospital corridor, you cry. Huge gulping sobs that suck in your dampening mask with every breath.‍

As you sip a metallic gin and tonic on the plane your mum is released. You both go home.[3]

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Rehearsals begin. You hear the music in your dreams. ‍‍ ‍

Ovulation tests begin. Calculated baby catching. Aztec women who died in their attempts had both the state of creation and destruction frozen within them forever, life and death, like an insect in amber. ‍‍ ‍ ‍

The Aztecs sent emissaries to their neighbours, the people of Culhuacan. Huitzilopochtli, their god of war and unrest, was not satisfied with the quality of the land, which, in fairness to him, the Culhuacans had only given the Aztecs because they thought it was snake-infested and barren. As reparation, Huitzilopochtli required a “Woman of Discord” so that the Aztecs might display their valour and might. Achitometl, the tlatoani or leader of Culhuacan, happily gave them his daughter for this, what he believed to be a great honour. He was invited to the temple, to perform reverences to his daughter, the new goddess, bride and mother of the great god. ‍‍ ‍

Imagine his surprise when a flame illuminated the temple and he was confronted by a priest, dressed in the flayed skin of his daughter. She was an ixiptlatl, the most visceral personification of the Earth Goddess. No longer a daughter, but a horrifying facsimile. You look exactly the same, people recognise you and talk to you as if you haven’t become something else. Something other, that can never be returned to its original state.  There is not always a path back out, a way to unknit and undo.‍‍ ‍

On day three of rehearsal, you get a phone call. Your mum is back in hospital. Dangerously low potassium levels showing on a blood test. They sent an ambulance. ‍

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10.35am‍ ‍

Sometimes you sleep on these flights. You have taken them at six in the morning, hoisting your little suitcase onto the DLR and watching the lights flash by in the tunnel as you hurtle under the Thames. If you sleep, you miss the sun’s pink glow on the top of the pillowy clouds. The coffee that tastes like dust and sweating bacon buns. You made the mistake of the bacon bun once – never again. ‍

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It’s easier when your husband doesn’t come. There is guilt in thinking this, finding it easier to just get out of the car at Glasgow airport and get back on the plane to London. Up and down, up and down. Hours in the airport limbo, the timelessness of flight. ‍

When you get back you have sex. Again, and again, and again. According to the will of smiling ovulation tests that indicates a surge of LH hormone and the release of an egg. You will start IVF in just under a year, and everything you hear and read seems designed to further your transformation from woman to chicken.

‍Are you still alive? The days are elastic, but you sleep well. No dreams. You wonder sometimes if you are an ixiptlatl, an impersonator of the self you were before all this. Before you were briefly a mother. Before you almost lost your mother.‍‍ ‍ ‍

This is not good sex. You hadn’t been not-trying before, when you had the first and only pregnancy in three years, but this is different. This is calendars and phone alerts. There are few things more arousing than setting your phone alarm twenty minutes early so you can try to fertilise an egg and then hoping that it happens in ten so you can go back to sleep. The singular thing that stops you getting a basal thermometer is the brand on Amazon is called ‘Pre Mom’ and you won’t have it in the house.

‍You try the sperm meets egg plan, which is essentially when you are so full of sperm in varying stages of their swan song at every conceivable point that the odds of conceiving are weighed in your favour. If you have a job, or any kind of other commitment, this is too much sex.

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You try and try.

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The Aztec women who died in childbirth, their spirits went skywards to the sun, along with the men who died in battle. Labour was a battlefield and these Aztecs equally venerated. Except the men had the glorious task of rolling the sun up the sky until midday when, predictably, women were responsible for the undoing, the wiping clean of the sky as they settled the sun back beneath the earth in the land of Mictlan, the dead. The sun must fight his way through Mictland before emerging, victorious, to celebrate with his warrior kin at dawn.

‍‍Your mum is in hospital for months, potassium impossibly low.

‍‍After four years of sun-tidying, the childbirth warriors became cihuateteo, spirits doomed to return to earth to torture humanity. This wasn’t the end though – they then arose as tzitzimime. Recognisable by the skeletal faces, clawed hands and feet, and necklaces of hands and hearts, ‘they presided of a day sign of ‘evil, vice, misery, orphanhood affliction, suffering, anguish, misfortune and indigence.’ … This transformation from nurturing mother figure into goddess of destruction is typical of the obsession with death … a fine line separated the powerful life-giving female creativity from its binary opposite power for harm.’

‍‍When other people tell you about their pregnancies, it is with a funereal air. It is also, exclusively, on their terms. You hate it when pregnant women, assuming that you are completely childless, tell you about pregnancy as if it has never happened to you. You are angry, vengeful. Malevolent. A spirit dragged back to earth to inflict torment. When an apparently infertile friend, your wife in misery, announces her pregnancy, you wonder if she’ll miscarry so you’ll both be in the same state of stasis again where disappointment and hope crystallise. You are separate from everyone else in the world, like the cihuateteo, cut off from rejoining humanity so destined to bring only pain.[4]

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One morning, when the ovulation stick starts to grin, you have a slight cold. Nothing major, but you cannot have sex. You slide back into the bed, cautiously so neither your husband nor the black cat perched on top on his stomach are disturbed, and you plan a holiday. You want to feel the sun on your skin and drink aperol spritz and speak Italian. ‍‍ ‍

Your mum visits in the summertime. ‍‍ ‍

You write a scene where a character who is a teacher loses her shit when covering a sex ed class, and tells the students that no, in fact, you cannot get pregnant every time you have unprotected sex – this is a lie to stop you being careless with condoms. Even if you do have sex on the approximately two days a month you could get pregnant, your chances are still only 25%. And then, after all that, you still have a 25% chance that you’ll miscarry. The fact that any of us are here at all is ridiculous. The Rachel/Ross storyline is a fantasy. The frustration and the upset form stark letters on the page and give space to the grief that has been trapped inside for months, chinks of light breaking through your stone skin. ‍‍ ‍

Your mum teaches you how to rake out the invasive three-leaf wood sorrel and buys daffodil bulbs. In a few months, when you visit, she will send you back to Glasgow with a bulb planter which somehow makes it through airport security. You dig, and plant roses in the stony earth, and deadhead flowers. She tells you she’s proud of you. You take her out to dinner for her birthday. She is sixty-nine.‍‍ ‍

Christmas. It has been a year. Her best friend is there, thinner and narrower, but still there. So is your mum, overcooking beef and under-sherrying the trifle. ‍‍ ‍

You catch a cold. It is day 364, almost a year since the dead thing fell out of you. In something resembling irony, you are on your period. It’s so heavy that, when you pull out a tampon, a bloody string flys from it and hit the wall. The stain is not recognisably blood, so that’s fine. Then your noise starts to bleed as you stare through the hollow triangle of your legs into the toilet. Bright spots on your bare thighs. You are not a nosebleeder, never have been. You wodge toilet roll and try to remember if you tip backwards or forwards and wait for it all to stop. ‍‍ ‍

She calls one flat January Monday. Yesterday. It’s gone. There is no trace of the cancer. It’s gone. She cries with relief, sitting outside the London hospital and talking to you five hundred miles away. She cries with guilt. Her best friend’s cancer is back. He needs more chemotherapy. She would take his cancer if she could – your mum would never come back as a tzitzimime.‍ ‍

You can see the garden from the window while you tell her it’s okay. The daffodils are pushing through the soil. You thought the bulbs were too shallow, the soil was stony and impossible. But they made it.‍‍ ‍

The plane touches down, you are no longer held by the liminal space of flight.

The girl-pyramid is building. Demolishing. Some walls stay, some walls go. Things continue to grow. Like a tributary of death flowing into life, or vice versa, she is both life and death, the perfect encapsulation of Schröedinger. If he had been a woman, there would have been no need for any cats in order to realise that life and death coexist. You know that now. You are the box. You are the pyramid. There are dead ends and trick floors and unsolved riddles. IVF is a maze you are currently wandering, fuelled by frustration and wrong turns. One day perhaps, you will get to the centre.‍‍‍‍‍

THE YEAR OF DEAD DAYS was originally pubilshed in Wild Hyacinth in 2024 and is included here with permission. ‍

[1] No one notices her start to turn into a pyramid. Layer by layer, each outer pyramid nestling within an existing one. Inside, all is dark.

[2] Inside the girl-pyramid are voids of space where the scientists, with their probing and prodding, their cosmic radiation found only darkness. There is a bomb of potential, an unexploded fragment of possibility that lies behind a secret door at the end of a long tunnel. It has been made to look like the end of the passageway, to deter thieves and graverobbers. But, behind that wall, there is the treasure chamber.

[3] The secret passages are riddled with traps. Murals that should be tickled in precisely the right way to reveal a set of stairs. Flaming torch holders that should be levered in a specific way to slide up the stone barricade and reveal glimmering treasure within. The girl who is now a pyramid keeps things buried, burns the treasure maps and seals the doors.

[4] The girl-pyramid is delighted by the tickle of brushes painting her insides with gold. Reverberates with the sonorous chanting of the priests. She is strong, impermeable. Then her secret chambers change, those most private, secret parts become repositories for mummies. She is filled with death.