The woman is exhausted, alone, spread thin and brittle, nerves needled like the bundle of twigs she’s throwing on her cooking fire. Don’t hold your baby so close to an open flame, don’t let the smoke fill her lungs. Kindling in her hands, the crying baby in her arms, she balances the upkeep of her home, her husband’s nourishment, and a new, fragile life. She’s exasperated, angry, how will she do it all when the baby needs her all. Fuck the husband. Sit down and dip your nipple in the baby’s sweet yearning mouth, kiss the head, stroke the hair. Instead, the woman places the crying baby in a basket and returns to her fire. Some older children have come to crouch near the basket. The woman loses her temper with them, curses them terribly. Woman madness. Something is wrong. Oh no, please no, is she going to put the baby in the fire?

The camera pans. Another woman, monstrously disfigured, skin raw and bloody like an exposed brain, strings of burnt hair jutting from her scalp, lips charred coal, yellow teeth slimy, she has perched herself near the baby’s basket. The mother pleads with her, makes logical arguments, this baby she’s a nuisance and why would she want a child anyway, she’s no use. I only get one spit, the bloody woman says. Why would I waste it on a baby? It’s fresh blood I need. The mother makes a deal, efficiently. Give me sixteen years with her, let me see her grow up, then you may have her to keep you company, you’ll never be alone. A blood pact is made. The charred woman reveals talons, with black talons, she marks the baby’s face, removes the baby’s voice. Back in the mother’s arms the baby is silent, wide-eyed, her mouth bloodied. 

No no no. I must hide from this image, it scratches me, stings, burns, this spitting image. I must hide. I run upstairs, in bed I bury my body under blankets, unbreathing. Sobs come, drool and spit. Help us, somebody. My husband says it’s ok. He almost understands, he asks, do you want to go look at her? She’s safe, sleeping in her crib. 

We only get one spit. Spitting image. My only baby daughter, my spitting image, in danger, these forces laying claim, and there’s nothing we can do about it, no way to preserve perfect innocence, soft bodies in pointed need of what only we can give, the mothers and the babies a pure closed circuit, two chambers of one heart. It’s too late, I say, predators come in as sure as smoke from a fire, spitting flames, phantoms of torture inflicted on others, the suffering as old as the world, it’s here with us, and it takes and burns and never stops eating our innocence. 

It’s a movie, not real, we don’t have to watch it. But it’s true. 

The mother goes to her god in a cave, she’s found a deep place, a nest in the earth, sacred protective walls of stone with an opening to the blue sky. Years pass, the mother becomes like a shadow, whispers and night, hay and water, milk and gruel, fear and love are indistinguishable to the mother and child, bound together inside a stone womb where life, whatever life is, does not happen, not yet, and yet. The mother comes and goes, but even outside in the world her life doesn’t happen, it lives in a cave growing into a woman. We accept the terms of love under threat. Would I give up two lives, my daughter’s and my own, our life together in the world, whatever it is, to believe I’ve thwarted fate, to believe she was safe, entombed, in-womb? 

Motherhood is madness. I act to keep, to protect, to protect I must possess at any cost. We’re shown to be the same, this charred witch, this mother, this me, afraid to be alone, unwilling to let our babies alone, tied to fresh blood. We don’t have to keep watching, my husband says. No, no, it’s too late. 

The witch returns for the child, defeats the whisper mother, replaces her as the charred mother. The child has learned only to nurture and protect, to hide in others, to wait in a womb. She fondles a baby rabbit, the charred mother snatches it away, snaps its neck, drinks deeply. I only get one spit. What a waste you are, she says. It’s fresh blood we need, wild sap, not walls, not whispers. To want a life, what a burning thing, strange, stinging, and yet. 

The child woman inhabits many bodies, or they inhabit her, their organs she stuffs into her body, an existence as vast as history, a never-ending speechless existence in search of a mother and a baby, two necessary units of one real life. The world outside the cave is a burning world, a stinging thing, such strangeness, and yet she is not alone. Odors and textures, everything too alive, too dying, roots, fur, thorns, spasming and sighing. Cinematography of color and shape, landscapes as cruel and beautiful as they are. She lives a while as a wife, as a young man, herself, a dog, roaming, voiceless, all eyes and nose and limbs, and one day she finds a girl dying or dead, stinging and scratching and burning the world with her leaving.

In this girl, or this girl in her, the speechless woman is cherished, braided, combed, pet, kissed, held, cultivated, how the world mothers a young girl when it can, with wheat and fruit and wool. 

The story of the charred woman finds her, it’s a world of burning at the stake, disease, trickery, and no life, alone. It will happen to you, too, just wait. A scene by a cooking fire, the old woman’s face weary, lighted gothically as she recites the tales we have, the old maid, the witch, the grieving monster, a thorn in the side of all people. But in this story we see in flashback the monsters that made her a monster, another woman, monstrous in her love for her child, a son, dying of disease, the woman she sacrifices so he may live on in seed, in fresh blood, a baby, she hopes, a family line. 

Speechlessness protects the girl, she is married to the boy she loves, an idiot, an innocent, a baby rabbit to whom she reveals her black talons, nothing more than onyx tendrils, long tender licks, as she bathes him in a mother cow’s milk and they come together, seed and flesh. He’ll put you on the fire himself, the charred mother warns, just wait and see. 

She is swollen with her baby when the charred mother becomes an animal and kills her husband, love and fear a penetrable mesh shredded by a boar, susceptible to envy and thirst, never alone, always the charred woman follows her, a shadow on her life, a parched phantom in a world that stings, never quenches, and yet. Birth among women, watch and learn how the blood is replaced with milk. 

The charred woman appears, perched by the baby’s cradle, a deadly shadow in a world which burned and offered no life, no mother, no baby, nothing for which to bleed, nothing to milk. She hasn’t another spit, only a lust for fresh blood, her spit left her and became a natural mother, more burning and no milk, alone. She swipes with her talon, but the mother acts fast, efficiently as her mother, grabbing her baby, hacking into her cow, she drinks and spits the blood in her face, protecting her, making her a witch, preserving her innocence, eating her life, giving her a thirst, strange and yet. Her baby, her spitting image, they’ll never be apart now, never alone. Then she takes the innards from the shadow, the charred woman with no life no longer burns in the world. The end. The beginning of no end. The end of the movie.

Leave her alone, my husband says, but I can’t. I lift my baby from her crib, she wiggles her half-sleeping body closer to my breast, her mouth roots for nipple, all instinct, my little piglet, my calf, these organs, this flesh that was nestled in my flesh, my organs, her feet under my ribs, her head on my bladder, small fists curling, uncurling. When she entered this world, they moved my organs to extract her, touching places inside me that I’ll never touch, suctioning blood, swiping fluids, and when she cries I still hear that first cry, and it burns me, and my milk flows.