My Name Will Still Be Simone

The days have started getting longer again. And for the past three, it’s been unusually warm for the end of March. 

But today is dark. The sky is somber and humming and umming to decide whether it needs a good cry.

This kind of day relaxes her eyes, Simone’s eyes that is, not to squint, ruffles the fur on her arms and lifts strands behind her ears as it whooooofs gusts of wind through the open kitchen window. 

The window frames a crisp sea of green, lush and pungent of all its ancestral inhabitants’ droppings, baaahhing and mooooing. 

The hens, Sylvia and Gloria chatter about the ghastly shade of Margaret’s eggs and of course the weather, otherwise Simone would be worried. Arthur, with his flared bottom pants and feathers of royal hues, rolls his eyes as he passes the two hens, or at least Simone imagines that he is the kind of rooster that would. 

She can feel the something inside her scratching to get out, not a hen, not a rooster, something that doesn’t care for the weather or for the shade of one’s eggs, something whose eyes are not open to roll. 

“It’s a boy,” they had told her. 

Of course she’d heard this and suddenly wished he was a girl. But that isn’t truly the case, she knows it's only when people are given two equally desirable possibilities, that the one we aren’t granted becomes immediately more attractive.

How selfish we can be, she attests to herself.

And yet somehow she is expected, by the voices of bodies she does not know the names of, to poof away all that self for someone she’s never met, a stranger by definition, but just a drooling babe in actuality.

In thinking of this word selfish, Simone smirks darkly to herself as she asks, to surrender the self, am I meant to just be a fish then? 

My name will still be Simone, she tells her self, well of course.

Today, she hears him practicing the breaths that will run him through the congregation of hens and sea of green in front of her. She feels him practicing the three steps he’ll take to stand up on the stool next to her at this sink, but please mummy, just one more.

It starts to rain sideways into the kitchen sink inside, abruptly, interrupting her mental movie. 

The hens faff and whine as Arthur guides them towards their little home.

Roan mucks in through the back door, but places the door closed so gently, it clicks thank you for being so kind. 

“Got the girls in!”

The girls are Mabyn and Calista, the dairy cows.

“Well done, darling.”

“And how are we inside here?”

Roan kisses her cheek from behind where she still watches Arthur finish up his duties.

“And inside here?”

Roan scoops his arms underneath Simone’s belly to take his turn in carrying the weight, our calf, our chick, a boy, rustling at the sound of his familiar father’s voice, the voice he’s been listening to for the last few weeks. 

“Oh just fine, but we’re quite ready for this storm.” 

---

As it showers outside, Louise—first just a midwife, now a beloved friend, Roan and Simone are huddled in the bathroom upstairs. 

From afar, for the spiders neither her nor Roan can reach in some of their old house’s corners, it might look as though they are all telling each other secrets, or painting Simone’s toenails. 

But she wouldn’t know what the whole event really looks like, because her eyes remain closed. She hears the grass drinking the much needed rain and the shingles on the roof shaking off every drop. 

And feels everything, parts of herself she wasn’t aware she carried down there, ripping and wincing, the characters of her, my name is still Simone, she didn’t know she possessed, laughing and screaming back at her after every push. 

But she chooses to really feel Roan firmly tracing ovals up and down her back and repeatedly moving the hair out of her face, even if there isn’t any to move. 

She wants to be completely alone. And yet, to be completely held, as if she’ll fall through the floor, and the grass, and the earth if no one holds on to her. 

When she hears that boy clucking, booooing to go back inside his burrow, suddenly Simone feels angry. 

Who is this?! He is not a boy, but a little mess of bloody bones and bluish translucent skin. This is what I’ve labored for?

Roan does not stop drawing on her back, he glances at the boy with all the pride she’s ever seen on his face all collected into one moment, and immediately returns his gaze back to her.

He sees her eyes trying to understand what they think, and he lets them—just holds their stare into his own open armed eyes, so that her eyes don’t fall through the earth. 

What feels like too long later, he says,

“well done, darling, it’s alright now.”

It’s not alright. But this comes in tears, not in words.

Louise is placing this mess of flesh Simone has just discarded into her arms. She’s not sure she even wants Louise to. 

“I know love, I know,” Louise’s liquid Cork accent chills her spine and her eyes tell her that she really does know.  

“But just hold him for me while I sort you out,” she says as she arranges the squishy limbs into Simone’s limp limbs.

She's asking for help, Simone thinks, a trick, so that she believes Louise needs her, someone she loves and knows and might owe help to, rather than his boy she has never met. 

How clever.

Simone looks at the little squirming thing, warm, breathing real life full breaths that will carry him fast and far, way further than that little green sea she’d pictured him running through only just a few hours ago now. 

His eyes are ordinarily brown, without nuances of mustard or hazel, just brown. 

A calm, unwavering brown, stable and sturdy and more than warm enough to hold someone’s daughter from falling through the earth someday.