SIX - She's Coming

Arous wasn’t hard to find. She had been leaning with her ear to the door of the Willing Room and had attempted to pretend that she and Edlawit were finger-painting in the hall: their pictures dry, hands clean. She heard nothing for all her efforts. Ricci gawked as I led her into the room. The reflection in his eyes heaved like a draft horse pulling an overloaded cart through the mud. I tilted back to a warm summer day not quite three years earlier when I first saw her willful eyes looking up into mine.


I remember her face was puffed, reddened by the screaming. She had been forced from her dark comfort into the bright light.

Bertha met us at the door of the house in Alippiana Cusp. She was a round woman who maintained impressive laugh lines on her forehead and around her mouth and eyes. That day, she sported a broken arm. I entered behind the Diofe and had yet to take off my hat when Bertha stopped and said: “My arm’s broke. You’re going to have to grab her. I can’t be expected to handle her like this.”

“But I -” I tried to protest.

“But someone’s got to be there to catch her when she’s born,” she said.

Dark wooden planks ran along the floor. They were not stained by some exotic dye but many feet and a long life. The ceilings ran high and many windows opened along the height of the walls. Smells of magnolia and cate jasmine infused the house, lessening and increasing, wafting through as a gentle spirit.

We walked up wide stairs into the bedroom where the young woman lay in her sweat-drenched bed. The white curtains in the room matched sun-blanched sheet on the four-poster bed which held the girl. The tired sheets hung off the mattress while curtains ebbed and flowed in the breeze. The windows opened to the sun and the fan, bobbing near the ceiling, whirled. Heat remained.


As we entered the room, the girl grasped the sheets in her hand. After a minute, she let them go and exhaled.

Bertha leaned over the bed. “Your time of running is about over. Relax now. Breathe. Don’t push. It’s not time yet.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed, near the foot. I would say that I wanted to get closer, but that would be a lie.

“You’re here,” the girl whispered just louder than the tick-whir of the fan above us.

“Yes. Miguel and the Diofe are here. Miguel’s here to help me out. He’ll be your little girl’s first contact with the human world,” said Bertha.

After a few minutes, Bertha turned to me as if I needed an update.

“They’re still 45 minutes apart.”

“It’s been hours,” the girl groaned.

 “Hush, sweet,” said Bertha.

A jealous cousin came in carrying a large glass pitcher of water and placed it on the bedside table. She stood there looking down at the young girl chewing her bottom lip.

“Pour a glass of water,” Bertha said to the cousin.

The smirking cousin poured.

Bertha put her hand under the laboring girl’s head and lifted her up so her that lips could meet the cool glass of water.

“I know you’re tired, darling, just try to drink some water.”

The cousin had propped herself up against the doorframe. “Shouldn’t have messed with that boy Ricci but what do you expect from a stupid Lunese. No wonder there not good for anything but slavery.”

“Now, you get out of here. The last thing we need is your negative spirit,” Bertha said as she threw a wet towel at her.



She would turn out to be anything but stupid.

Compared the locals, the Amalgamese, who were a mix of fair-skinned and dark-skinned races over 1000 years, she was abnormal. Her ivory skin hinted iridescence, fairylike. Like the face of the moon.

There’s a good explanation for that: she was from the moon.

Long ago, a people were found living below the surface of the moon in a vast network of underground villages. Modern underground cities are now based on that engineering model. The people were hospitable, so much so, they made it all the way to earth into their own private slavedom and given the name Lunese.

Not so long ago, they began to stop reproducing and dying. Their slavery was outlawed. That didn’t stop them from dying and they were soon all gone.

Bertha could never have children.

One day she found a baby girl lying in a moon-rock-filled crater in a field. She raised this Lunese girl as her own.

People thought she must carry diseases and thought she should be put out of her misery.

Bertha said, “No.”

Bertha was a stubborn woman.