compass
by miles meth
We were knee-deep in the water at the fountain near Oma’s house when I asked you, “Mama, how long did you wait before telling anyone?”
The last of summer’s heat shimmered in a dandelion sun. Dozens of people surrounded us, wading into the relief of the water, but to them we were just another splash, another murmur.
You didn’t say anything for a long time, but it wasn’t a mean silence. The question hung easy, like the stork gliding overhead. It wasn’t like you to be so quiet, and it wasn’t like me either. I meant to speak, but, in one of those moments where my body outsmarted my mind, all I could do was cough.
When you finally turned to me your face sank into a heavy smile. “Not long enough, meine Kleine,” you said. “Most secrets are dark and consuming. But when you find out you are pregnant—there’s nothing like it—it’s the most beautiful secret you will ever know. Don’t you tell anyone but yourself, at least for a day. You deserve that.”
The brownshirts arrived two weeks later. These days, we don’t speak of that night. But the memory lives between us, in our silences, an apparition.
When the Heckers knocked on our door and insisted we come for dinner, they didn’t need to tell us to pack our bags. No other gentiles would have risked having us in their home. No one spoke it aloud, but it was known; we would not return.
We left under dark clouds, wisps of black cotton against the purpling sky. Papa locked the door behind us. You and I played along, pretending. As if a locked door would stop them.
The Heckers’ house was warm with the smell of rosemary and roast chicken. They brought out the china and the good schnapps, as if in apology, as if to say, we hate them too.
We all knew it was coming, and there was nothing we could do.
After dinner, I sat in a leather chair in the parlor, staring out the window towards our darkened house and listened to the crackling remains of the fire.
On your way to bed, you paced next to me. When you stopped and opened your mouth it hung for a terrible moment, as if stuck in a scream. When you finally spoke, your voice was thin and pleading: “Come to bed.” I hated that fear could do that to you.
My fury had nowhere to go. I replied in my iciest voice, “I’m reading.” But we both knew the book was nothing but a prop. My gaze was fixed through the window on the silhouette of our house across the street. I blew out the last candle and sat in the darkness, my mind aflame.
I heard the laughter of the Brownshirts before I saw them. Lit by the weak moonlight, they descended on our home, bit by bit, like flies to a carcass. There was the clink of the windows pierced by stones. The thump of Papa’s harp knocked to the floor, an almost human shriek from the snapping strings. I felt like one of those strings—taut and twisted until something within me broke.
In the month since that night, there has been no future. Only the humid darkness of living in the maw of fear, waiting for it to swallow us whole.
But this morning, as I knelt on the washroom floor and felt the cool of the Heckers’ porcelain toilet on my palms, it dawned on me that my monthly should have arrived two weeks ago.
I expected to feel dread. Or at least the grim, knifing clarity that we would call the midwife, that she would help me end it. I didn’t expect to be greeted by calm. As I heaved, my forehead blanketed in cold sweat, a thought echoed up from a previously unknown corridor within my mind. It said: I am yours.
I felt the glimmering tenderness of a child within me, growing patiently, indifferent to what it will be forced to endure. The baby’s march towards life made me know there was a future ahead.
Yesterday I would have scoffed. “Impossible,” I would have said.
But when I close my eyes now, the terrors retreat, their grip loosening. I can only see you, Mama, holding my baby in the crook of your arm and I know, in an animal way—like how the stork knows north—that I will see that day.
Miles Meth (they/them) is a queer, Jewish organizer and writer living in Boston MA. They are a candidate for an MFA at the University of Southern Maine and have previously published or are forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Globe, Cleaver Magazine, The Healing Muse, The Stonecoast Review, The Forward, The Bias and more and were a finalist for the Saints and Sinners LGBTQ Literary Award.