Red on red

Fiction by Cath Barton

The waitress brings my order. A flat white and a cupcake. My Easter treat. The cake has three small chocolate eggs on top, and I eat them, one by one. They are sweeter than sweet. Then, I peel the paper from the cake. My hand is halfway to my mouth when I see, out of the corner of my eye, the first drops of blood on my shoe. No one knows my thoughts, but I have to be careful because I know what people are like. There’s a fizz in the air around me.

I’m quite normal, I’m saying it in my head. Then I say it out loud and realise a micro-second too late what I’ve done. The fizz has turned into a loud buzz. Some of those people heard me, and I have been judged. I will not react. I will not let them know. I will simply get up and leave, in a normal way. I look at the cupcake, my Easter treat, and wrap it in a dark blue napkin, feeling relieved that it’s blue and not red, though the colour may still run. It’s a risk I have to take.

I pick up the neatly wrapped parcel of cake and tuck it into the front left-hand corner of my satchel. I’m pleased with how well it fits there. I might have left the space deliberately. I close the buckles, the left, and then the right. Everything is in order. I do not look down at my shoe. I pull the strap of my satchel over my head and down, firmly, so that the bag sits on my left hip as the baby will.

Would.

Will, I tell myself, because I am incubating the egg. It’s in an oven glove on the shelf above the radiator in the kitchen. I check the egg every morning. It feels warm. My hand shook when I realised this morning that my egg was moving a little.

I get up and walk out of the café feeling eyes on my back. Soon, I will be home. I’m normal. I say it in my head—only in my head. I’m quite sure of that. I keep moving, pulling the satchel into my hip, like the baby I’m nurturing. I think of the egg all alone and quicken my pace. My baby needs me.

I smile. It is a smile for myself. And for the baby, yes of course, but not for anyone else. Not for the red-haired man coming towards me who smiles back as if it was for him. He knows me, so it would seem, though I don’t recognise him. I would have remembered a person with that colour hair. He asks about the baby. Maria has told him, he says, and he is so delighted for me. “You’re clearly blooming,” he says. “It must be due any day, and you’re excited, aren’t you? Sure, you are. I can see.”

“I am excited,” I say, but I’m not looking at him. I’m looking down at the bloodstain on my shoe. Red on red. “Yes, I am excited,” I say again, looking up at him now and arranging my face into the kind of expression he expects to see. He looks relieved and says he hopes all will go well now and—to be sure—that he feels it will and to look after myself right enough.

I stand for a minute after he’s moved away, holding the satchel close and thinking of the cake inside. When I get home, I will open the napkin and eat it slowly, crumb by crumb. I think of lifting those delicate morsels, one by one, to my mouth. Fingers in my mouth, sucking like the baby will.

Would.

Will.

It was Maria who gave me the idea to use the oven glove. She was laughing when she told me what her daughter had done. “It’s her job to collect the eggs from our chickens every morning, and she likes to find safe places for them,” Maria told me. One day, she was taking a pie out of the oven, her hand in the oven glove, before she realised what her child had nestled in it. An egg, broken and sticky on her hand. “What a terrible mess it made, but you have to laugh don’t you?” she said. Children will be children.

My egg is no laughing matter, and I keep it very safe. Now, I’m home, taking off my satchel and my coat, checking on the oven glove, feeling the egg warm and just rocking a little.

I sit down at my kitchen table, unbuckle the satchel, get out the neat dark blue parcel, and open it up. The colour hasn’t run, and I feel relieved. Then, I remember the blood on my shoe. I look down and there are fresh drops. The egg is gently pulsing on the windowsill. It won’t be long. I roll a soft, yellow crumb of cupcake under my fingers, but it’s not enough. I need more. It’s past the time to be cautious. I take a big bite. The sweetness of the cake explodes on my tongue, and I flop back in my chair. The blood is dripping faster now. I know but don’t care because it is time. “I am normal,” I say the words out loud, the words coming back at me from the four corners of my kitchen.

I eat the cake, every last fragment, but I crave more. On the windowsill, the egg has broken, as it had to, but what’s in there is wrong. My heart turns over. I go to it and reach out my hands. Now, there is blood on my fingers—dark, sticky and warm, red on red. I put my bloodied hands on my belly, then I lift them once more to my ever-hungry mouth, and I suck and suck and suck. Like the baby would have done.

BIO: Cath Barton is an English writer who lives in Wales. Her most recent novella, The Geography of the Heart (Arroyo Seco Press, 2023) is available here. A pamphlet of her short stories, Mr Bosch and His Owls, is forthcoming from Atomic Bohemian.