30

30

F lora's boots crunch the snow as she walks deeper and deeper into the woods. A theater kid she dated in college taught her that cornstarch packed into a tea towel produces a sound like footsteps in snow.

Memory is a funny thing.

It must be the middle of the night. Or the very earliest hours of the morning. The moon was surprisingly bright in the backyard, but here in the woods it is obscured by branches and what little foliage remains this late in the season.

Iris has fallen asleep, cocooned in the oversized coat. Flora fantasizes about switching places with her baby. What she wouldn't give to be cuddled up warm and safe and lulled into a deep slumber. Instead, her back screams with every step, and her weary legs ache. She curses the snow for making the trek that much harder, but she's also grateful for the road map. Her mother's prints are a clear trail.

Dead branches catch on the fabric of her coat as she walks. Each scratch makes a zip sound as she trudges forward. One grazes her cheek, stinging. She wonders if it broke the skin, but her face is too numb to tell. Her nose drips into her mouth, and all she tastes is cold, cold, cold.

Iris stirs slightly in her sleep, turning her head from one side to the other, and, as she does, a warm, wet liquid slides down Flora's chest between her breasts.

you've gotta be fucking kidding me

The spit-up travels quickly down her belly to the waistline of her pants. She's desperate to wipe it off, get herself clean, but it's under layers of clothes and a sleeping baby. There's no way. She takes one exhausted step after another, the spit-up getting tacky and sticky and

I just wanna GET IT OFF

But then the trail of footprints ends. Right in front of her. It's darker here, the woods more dense, and she squints as she wills her eyes to adjust or maybe develop some kind of superpower so she can see through the darkness. And then, to her right: a dull crackling, some lit embers. The afterthoughts of a fire.

She pivots and maneuvers herself over a large log, sitting and swinging her legs around to the other side. And that's when she finds her mother, leaning with her back against the log facing the other direction, eyes closed.

"Mom? Jesus, Mom ?" Flora jostles her mother's shoulder. Jodi groans just enough of a response for Flora to know she is alive.

Flora surveys the area and finds her mother's boots a few feet away in the snow. Sure enough, when she looks back at Jodi, Flora sees that she is barefoot. Not even any socks.

"Are you insane?" she asks, gingerly crouching down in the snow to inspect her mother's feet.

"Don't… touch…" Jodi murmurs, and Flora can see that her mother's feet are injured, though she can't determine to what degree in the dark.

"What were you doing out here?"

Jodi shakes her head, and Flora again looks around for any clues to her mother's motivations. Something in the ash of the fire catches her eye. She stands, one hand under Iris for extra support, and grabs a large stick, which she uses to dig around in the fire's remnants. The end of the stick hits something hard. She fishes the item out of the embers and pushes it into a pile of snow. Flora touches it quickly with her fingertips to assess the temperature. It's only warm, so she lifts it to her face to see it more clearly.

The birth tusk.

Was her mother trying to burn it? Does she really believe that strongly that it's cursed? The hippo's tooth is made of ivory; of course it didn't burn. And how did her attempt fail so spectacularly that she injured her feet in the process?

Flora stands, her knees popping. She slips the tusk into her pocket. Her mother is not in a state to answer questions right now, but she will. Flora will demand it.

First, though, there is the issue of getting them all home. Through the snow. In the dark. Without the use of Jodi's feet.

She considers walking back to the house, dropping off Iris, and bringing back a sled in order to drag her mother home. But she shouldn't leave Jodi out here for that long, alone and cold and in pain.

"Can you move at all, Mom?" she asks.

Jodi opens her eyes, takes a breath, and nods. She puts weight on her hands and leans forward.

"Great," Flora encourages, "that's great. I'm going to squat down, and I just need you to climb onto my back, okay?"

Her mother nods.

After much awkward finagling and a fussy Iris expressing her annoyance at having been woken up, they are finally back on the trail home, retracing their earlier footprints. Flora leans forward with the weight of Iris on her chest and her mother on her back. Flora's arms hook under her mother's legs, which wrap around Flora's waist and, subsequently, Iris's little body. With her mother's head above her own, and little Iris's below, the three of them are like a generational totem pole.

She thinks of that phrase "it takes a village" and snorts. A village would be nice right now. Real nice.

it takes a village

idiom, proverb

1. the notion that a child's upbringing is a communal effort

2. a phrase people throw around in a way that ultimately belittles how fucking impossible it is to raise a child without support