Watch Your Step

Mating Season /

1922

There is hope for cursed women like us.

As I read that passage, I had not noticed that my eyes were shedding tears and the carriage had already stopped. I closed the journal's pages and stuffed it inside my suitcase. The chauffeur opened the door for me and held my hand to help me get down. The street was muddy so I had to grab a handful of my dress to lift it up. In a corner, I heard children singing a familiar rhyme of Jack and Jill. But the lyrics were different.

Their fins and gills are sharp to kill

They crawl out of the water

They'd snatch a lass and tore her dress

and put their seeds thereafter.

A cart carrying half-rotten fruits and vegetables rocked by, followed by flies and some hungry thieves. On the gentler slopes of the town, there were farms, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over the fields. Instead of livestock grazing in pasture, mills and factories were producing steam and smoke farthest where the eye could see. In plain sight, it was hardly recognizable that this town was once chronic with witch trials and monster legends.

With my leather case and shoes, I worked my way through the narrow alleys, squelching mud in the wet earth. I went inside a rustic house where the midwife looked exasperated at me while a woman in her mid-20's was lying down on a bed with a blanket over her round belly.

"Prepare the warm water and towels," the midwife said. I rummaged through the kitchen and fetched a bowl. I filled it with warm water and placed it beside the midwife. Then I opened my case and produced some cotton and scissors. I sanitized it with ethanol and laid it down together with the towel and bowl. The journal peeked behind the compartment of my suitcase and I immediately covered it up. I stared blankly on the side waiting for her next instructions — which is all what I am fairly good at. Following instructions...

A woman who can't bear a child has no purpose. My own father said to me. My loving father who instructed me to scrub the soles of his feet one night and made me remove my clothes. My own father who wanted children with me. But a couple of months later I was bleeding and a doctor told me that I was cursed to be fruitless. A woman who can't bear a child has no purpose, my father grunted. Since then he had lost interest in me. I could have run away from home but all I could do was follow his orders. Then before he died, he sent me away and by the wheel of fate, I ended up helping give birth to mothers.

"Get the towel" the midwife ordered and I wrapped the newborn with it and held it close to me like it was my own. The operation was a success and I couldn't help but think, Why would the heavens forbid me to experience this? What did I do to be deprived of such delectation?

"Give my baby to me," the woman who just gave birth said weakly.

"Of course," I replied.

The elders still warn everyone not to go near the lake. Although some people don't believe it anymore and some have forgotten about the monsters lurking in harbor. These days, the townsfolk look at it as nothing but the blabbering of a drunken man in the midst of daylight. "The third month to the seventh month beware," is usually what you could hear from an old, drunken man. "When the moon hides and the tides recede, these grisly creatures would snatch you from the lake. Their eyes glow at night and their scales can't be penetrated by normal spears. They stand almost two meters and swim so swiftly in the water. Their long tongues and thick limbs were covered with slimy..." I didn't hear the rest.

I stayed in an old inn, deep in the woods where no ax has ever been cut. The author of the journal lived here before. It was full of dark rooms and high ceilings where the eye could only find cobwebs and shadows. On my right were tumbled bricks of an old chimney. On my left was a dining area with one table and a rocking chair. The stones in the crumbling corridors seemed always hideously damped and there's an accursed fishy smell. I had no complaints about it, save that it was near the lake.

I thought I'd never want a child. But as I participated in many deliveries and abortions in the past, you may say that I tortured myself in developing a yearning — to know what it feels like to have a child. So I came to this town, not just as an assistant midwife but also to fulfill my long-yearned wish.

What's inside the journal I found contained the answers I was looking for. There is hope for cursed women like us, the author of the journal said. I wonder if others have read it before me and think of it as just some fabricated myth. Also, I wanted to see it for myself. What fearsome shadows lurked in the woods, what monstrosities once terrified this town, and the hope that the author was talking about from these creatures. I want to prove it. There was a reason why I had crossed faith with this journal because whoever wrote it resonated with me. Unlike the scream of a mother and a cry of her child which only reminds me that I am useless. A woman who can't bear a child...

I sprawled the journal and ignited a candle. Some of its pages were yellow, some torn, and some were so delicate the wind might rip it apart. I had found this journal in one of the houses I visited as an assistant midwife. I was never a thief but curiosity took over me, I ended up sneaking it in my dress. But the owner of the house saw me.

She marched towards me, expecting her to throw me out of the house. Yet, when she saw what I was holding, she remained calm, almost friendly, and said I could keep it. She wanted me to have it. I do not know if she's the author of the journal because from the looks of it, the journal was decades — maybe a century — older than her.

The dates in the journal were in the early 1700s. Since I still couldn't sleep a wink, I decided to review its contents from the very beginning. In case I forget something before doing the ritual myself.