to her vision caused by the old grounds in the coffee pot sticking to her pupil. She wanted to shed her body like a snake slews off its skin, or a spider leaves its old carapace to wither. She did not want to be trapped in a disfigured shell. In the darkness of her agonies, she feared that it was because she did not wish to see the corruption of her spirit reflected in her outer form.
Each time she woke the boy was there waiting, his ancient eyes like polluted pools against the pallor of his skin. He still had not uttered a word. As an infant he had rarely cried, and as a boy he had never spoken. The doctors who examined him, chosen for their trustworthiness, their commitment to the cause, could find no physical defect to explain the boy’s silence, and his mental functions were adjudged to be well above average for his age. As for the goiter upon his neck, that troubled them, and there had been discussions about removing it. She had demurred. It was part of him. After all, that was how she had known it was him. She had thought that it was possible when she felt him kicking in her womb. A sense of his presence had suffused her as though she were enveloped in his embrace, as though he were inside her more as a lover than a developing child, and it had grown in intensity throughout her second and third trimesters so that it became almost oppressive to her, like a cancerous growth in her belly. Expelling him from herself had come as a relief. Then she had looked upon him as he was placed in her arms, and her fingers had traced his lips, and his ears, and the delicacy of his hands, and had paused at the swelling upon his throat. She had gazed into his eyes, and from the blackness of them he had looked back at her, an old being resurrected in a new body.
And now he was beside her, stroking her hand as she moaned upon the sweat-dampened sheets. While they were finishing with Barbara Kelly, Darina had summoned help, but their nearest tame physician was in New York and it took time for him to reach her. Strangely, there was not as much pain as she might have anticipated, not at first. She attributed it to her rage at the bitch who had turned upon her, but as Kelly’s life slowly seeped from her beneath blades and fingers, so too the torment in Darina’s face seemed to increase, and when Kelly at last died it screamed into red life with her passing.
Deep second-degree burns: that was how they described them. Any more severe and there would have been serious nerve damage, which would at least have numbed the pain, she thought. There was still the possibility that grafts might be necessary, but the doctor had decided to hold off on that decision until a degree of healing had occurred. Some scarring was inevitable, he said, particularly around her injured eye, and there would be significant contracture of the eyelid as the scarring proceeded. The eye hurt more than anything else: it felt like needles were being pushed through it and into her brain.
The eye was patched, and would remain so even after the other dressings were removed. Already her skin was blistering badly. She had been given lubricant for the eye, as well as antibiotic drops. The boy took care of them all and salved her blistered face, and the physician visited each day and commended him on his efforts, even as he kept his distance from him, his nose wrinkling at the faint odor that seemed to rise from the boy regardless of how many showers he took or how clean his clothes were. His breath was the worst: it stank of decay. Darina had grown used to it from long exposure, but it was still unpleasant, even to her.
But then he was an unusual boy, mostly because he wasn’t really a boy at all.
‘Hurts,’ she said. She still had trouble speaking. If she moved her mouth more than a fraction, her lips bled.
The boy who was more than a boy put some gel on his fingers and gently applied it to her lips. He took a plastic bottle with a fixed straw in its cover, slipped the straw into the undamaged side of her mouth, and squeezed some water through. She nodded