I am obsessed with a freckle on my wrist. I track it. I circle it every day with a blue pen and take a picture. It is on my right wrist, which makes taking the picture awkward and difficult. I am emphatically right-handed.
I try to measure the freckle with a cloth ruler. The freckle is about a millimeter. Maybe two. The freckle does not change. It must be changing on the inside, I think, because it seems lately that everyone changes on the inside. You could see a friend for dinner one day and see her six weeks later and she’s exactly the same except that she’s carrying a baby the size of a grape inside her uterus. Things like that.
So I am convinced, too, that my freckle must be changing on the inside.
***
I go to the dermatologist for a skin check. I lie on the table in a thin paper gown while he inspects every inch of my body. It is nice to be seen and observed so objectively on a physical level instead of being questioned about your mood or your sleep or your stress levels. I like how straightforward it feels.
The freckle is nothing, according to the doctor. I don’t believe him. I Google, and spend hours making a list of everything it could be—a melanoma, a birth mark, a burn, a lethal bug bite. I stare at it all day. Where did you come from? I don’t ask. Have you always been here?
It could be anything, I think. It could be a freckle. It could be cancer. It could be a bird’s eye view of a beach umbrella, and underneath a sea witch protects herself from the sun.
My wrist cracks, and I hear her voice: “Witch?” she says. “You curse one child of one couple and everyone calls you a witch.”
Oh, I think. There you are.
“Do you want to know what they call you?” she asks.
I don’t.
“Didn’t think so.”
I am also obsessed with my own fertility. My husband and I have been trying for six months, and every time we get ready to test, I begin to bleed. I am ovulating again, and I text my husband a series of emoji—an egg, a water droplet, a winking face—to let him know.
“He’s at work,” the witch calls from the beach. Though the umbrella obscures her body, her voice is clear. High and crackly, like she’s finally talking after a long sleep. “Why are you bothering him at work? Don’t be needy.”
I don’t answer. I know it is rhetorical. I shake my wrist violently up and down, trying to dislodge her, to send her back into the sea.
“Dream on,” she says after I stop. My smartwatch asks: “Are you playing tennis?” She laughs. I do too.
My husband comes home early which is a nice surprise. We’ve agreed that we need to switch up our routine so that our sex doesn’t become a completely clinical procedure.
“Is this sex?” the witch calls. My wrist is behind my head, gripping the slats on our headboard. This makes it seem like she’s right on my shoulder, whispering down the tunnel of my ear canal. “Is this fun for you?”
It’s not, I don’t tell her, because it’s become so high-stakes. It used to be, I don’t tell her, when we were younger and trying in a different way than we are trying now. Like when we couldn’t find purchase in the bathtub, when I accidentally turned on the jets and he was so startled that he hit his head on the faucet, and a line of blood ran down the nape of his neck. Those days were sex. This is reproduction, or the attempt at it.
Unfortunately, after ovulation comes the worst part: the wait. Two weeks, give or take, depending on the length of my cycle, which has remained just unpredictable enough that I am convinced something is wrong with me. The numbers run across my brain like the disembodied parts of a high school locker combination: 28. 31. 28. 30. 29.
“Ba ba badada da da!” The witch laughs. She is doing the limbo song. I imagine her shaking her hips, I imagine the freckle spinning around like an umbrella in a tropical drink. “Come on, you know the song!”
How low can I go? I wondered. The two-week wait is a ritual nadir.
If I had made up a game for the word “limbo” it would not involve a pole.
Maybe I would see how long someone could last standing with just one leg in a pair of pants, the other leg bare and cold.
Or I would make every kid find a shadow on the sidewalk, from scaffolding or a store awning, and lie on the ground with the shadow line bisecting their body. Half in the light, half in the dark. They would have to move all day to ensure they remained evenly split no matter where the sun sat in the sky. Even if they eventually had to scooch into the middle of the road.
Or I would have one kid stand at a door, a door that they would have to push open. Ten kids would stand behind them, leaning against their back with all their might, forcing them into the flat door until their cheek was pressed into the wood grain, until they could feel the door against their back molars. And I would select one kid to stand on the other side of the door, hand on the knob, ready to open it at any moment, knowing the entire line of children on the other side would come crashing down.
The witch keeps singing. She doesn’t know any of the words, just the tune.
***
The freckle hasn’t changed, and the witch won’t stop talking. “Would you rather have sand in your bed or your food? Would you rather be immune to the effects of deodorant or toothpaste? Fuck marry kill—your husband, yourself, and—oh, I don’t know, some third one. Why do you want a baby anyway?”
I don’t answer her because I don’t want to be seen talking to a freckle, even if I could pretend I was just checking the time, I could say I forgot my contacts and squint. I just let her talk. Sometimes I press down hard on the freckle with my thumb, feeling my pulse flutter under my skin. It’s uncomfortable, the pressure, but it doesn’t hurt.
I don’t want to kill her, I’ve decided. But I wouldn’t marry or fuck her either.
***
My sister has a beautiful baby girl. I love being an aunt, and I am good at it. I can invent banal games that make her laugh. She likes it when I put things on my head, and she is even happier when they fall. I can sit on the floor with her for hours, putting gum wrappers and plastic rings and paper cups on my head and letting them tumble down. She cackles when she laughs, and if she thinks it’s really funny, she shrieks.
“Now that thing sounds evil,” the witch says.
The baby’s eyes flash to my wrist for a moment, and I wonder if she can hear the witch. But no, my sister reminds me, she is obsessed with watches. My niece leans forward and puts her mouth on my wrist, licking the watch face, drooling on my hand.
“Oh my GOD,” I hear the witch’s voice, echoey in the damp cave of my niece’s mouth. “I’m going to be sick! Get that away from here or I’ll…”
I pull my wrist back, I kiss the baby’s cheek. My sister squeezes my shoulder and says, “Stop worrying so much.” She has been saying that for months. Everyone has.
“Want me to give her some big ol’ warts between her toes?” The casualness of her voice makes me imagine that she’s filing her nails, long, thick, shiny tips honed into severe points.
Then she says: “I have something in my teeth, so I’m gonna floss with one of your arm hairs. Why do you have so much hair on your arms?”
***
My periods are darker than I ever remember them being. The word I think of to describe the blood is “pure”. I saturate tampons every two hours, as though my body is taunting me.
I Google heavier periods while trying to conceive. The medical results are mostly unrelated, but Reddit goes crazy. Multiple threads across different channels, r/BabyBump, r/TTC, r/Pregnancy, with people hiding behind alphanumeric strings and anthropomorphized robot faces, detailing the ferocity of their flows. Wondering, like me, if this is the sign of a miscarriage.
it kind of is tho, right? because blood = shedding egg, so either that egg wasn’t fertilized or maybe wasn’t ready or smthg… so you are kind of having a mc?? She only gets a single upvote. No one wants this to be true, no one wants to open that discussion. I now picture the entire thread as a group of friends, I picture Realistic-Emu-29 turning to me and saying, “What nmk21285 said, I mean, obviously I’m sad, but we shouldn’t go there right? If the wrong person hears her say that, I don’t even want to know.” I will nod. I can’t bring myself to speak of my period as a miscarriage, but I can use the language secretly to help justify my sadness as I change my fourth tampon of the day.
“This is depressing,” the witch calls. I want to collapse the umbrella onto her, squeeze her in its spines.
I scratch at the freckle. Is it darker today?
“Leave me alone,” she says. “Pick at it and you’ll get worse than a bloody tampon.” I stick my tongue out at my wrist. “Real mature,” she says. “Really mature motherly material.”
Another cycle begins.
***
It’s still too soon in my “journey” to go to the fertility doctor. They don’t recommend it until you’ve been trying for nine to twelve months, and it’s only been six. I’m desperate for the attention of a specialist, any specialist, so I get a facial instead. Going off of birth control has brought back the acne I have been immune to for the fifteen years since going on the pill.
The receptionist at the spa asks me to fill out a series of forms. Do I have any allergies? What medications am I currently on? Am I breastfeeding, pregnant, or actively trying?
I’m so happy to see that the state I’m in is an option, that something could change on a chemical level for me even if I have yet to succeed. I wave my wrist over the iPad, subtly I hope, so the witch can get a glance at the questionnaire and the legitimacy of my efforts. I hover the freckle-umbrella right near the last question.
“Oh please,” she says. “You’re taking comfort from a questionnaire before a cheap facial?” I narrow my eyes. “Don’t look at me like that. You couldn’t have thought I’d have something positive to say. When have I ever?”
This is true. I sign the form. I relish the one “yes” I got to check.
The facialist says I’m a good candidate for some extractions. She uses a small vibrating blade to help clean out the invisible buildup. The extractions around my nose hurt the most. Actually, the whole thing actively hurts, and my brain notices this though my body stays perfectly still. I remember my first facial, at sixteen, a desperate attempt to remedy the uneven, cratered skin on my forehead. The extractions were so painful I cried, barely able to sit still under the harsh white light. Now, I breathe deeply through the searing pain and think how our bodies can learn to endure anything, how we develop new standards for pain and we think these new standards make us stronger. But is it strength to bear pain silently? Or would it be stronger to yell stop, that hurts!
“Jesus Christ,” the witch says. I think I hear her wincing, that way that people in pain speak through their back teeth, clenched and tight. “This is a lot, even for me.”
***
The witch has become particular and demanding. I wake up with a circle of bright red dots around the freckle, a rosacea séance.
“What the fuck?” I ask the air.
“I should be asking you that,” the witch replies. “What the fuck lotion are you using? It smells awful.”
It was recommended by a friend. She swore by it—to do what, I now can’t remember. What else can you swear lotion will do other than soften your skin?
“I need fruitier scents. Peach, pear. Berry. Is there a Bath and Body Works around here?”
This is how I end up spending $300 on hand soaps and sanitizers and lotion that the witch deems pleasing and calming.
She demands: no more long sleeves, unless they’re 100% cotton. I must switch my watch to my right wrist. I can’t tuck my hand under my pillow to sleep. I can’t flick a pony tail holder on my wrist—a long-ago coping mechanism recommended by a lazy therapist who was trying to curb my mild OCD. I must wash my hands for two and a half happy birthdays. I let the soap slide up to the freckle, I hear her blubber and spit out the bubbles. “Stop that,” she says. “Palms only.”
She is making me angry. I am already, was already, angry. She is making me angrier. Everywhere I look, there is a firm, round belly pressing against spandex. Tight clothing meant to show off the growth beneath. I want to show off my wrist, I want to cradle it in line at the grocery store. I am growing something, too, I want to say. But it is meaner and harder to explain than yours.
***
Apparently a freckle that’s really a beach umbrella cannot stay that way forever, and I wake up one morning to a cluster of freckles on my wrist. I count five, imperfectly, because they are mostly a clump like a tiny brown flower. I Google freckle clump melanoma which is a welcome change from my usual ovary polyp symptoms, signs of male infertility, ovulation chart, signs of ovulation, how long before seeing infertility doctor, chances of healthy woman getting pregnant if sex on ovulation.
I tap at the clump, which feels ever so slightly raised. I scratch at it lightly, as though it were a fruit sticker I could peel off my skin. And because I’m home alone, I break my one rule and speak: “What’s going on over there?” I ask, barely louder than a whisper, lips close to the bones of my wrist. “Are there more of you?”
The witch’s laugh is so loud, I startle at the sudden cacophony coming from my own body. I move to pull away from the noise, but I can’t pull away from myself.
“No babe, just me,” she says. “Doing a little expansion. Some beachfront property, making myself at home, you know.”
I have questions, like how can you make yourself at home in another person’s body when I realize that’s exactly what I’m trying to do every month.
“Can’t you go somewhere else?” I ask dumbly. “I could get you severed off you know. Scraped. I could slide a knife across you myself.”
The witch is quiet for a moment. I think I can hear her breathing but really, I can only hear my own exhales.
“You wouldn’t though,” she says. “You’d be lonely, wouldn’t you?”
Lonely isn’t the right word. I feel obsessive and disappointed and angry and confused and desperate all the time, often all at once. And because the witch is buried into my skin, I assume she understands this bundle of feelings without me having to explain. I appreciate this. But would I miss her?
“Do you want to hear a story?” she asks, but starts to tell me anyway.
“For a long time, I lived next door to a couple that desperately wanted a child. More than anything. I heard her cry every month when she bled—wails!—just unsettling really, and I was deep into a breadmaking phase then, and it quite disturbed my peace. And my patience. I liked to keep to myself. I didn’t make a habit of doing magic in the neighborhood. I kept deer out of my garden, sure, and there was a nosy mailman, but otherwise, I was like any old woman. But this girl’s cries… she was getting under my skin.
Her husband, he’d go off on walks alone every morning—real morose—for over an hour. So one morning I go over there. I knock on the door, I’m polite, and she answers, all teary and snotty and red cheeks and embarrassed. I introduce myself, who I am, what I can do, and it wasn’t hard to convince her that I know a few things beyond normal abilities.
What people don’t realize about spells is that every spell is really a curse. Getting something is never enough. You give something up. So I said, I can give you a baby, but those morning walks your husband takes? They’ll get longer, longer, longer, and one day, he won’t come home. I don’t know when, but that will be the cost. That will be the way I have to rearrange the fabric here. He will leave one day.
And because she’s a human and because humans don’t think past the things they most want, she said yes. Didn’t even talk to him, didn’t even ask him. I know why: because she thought she could keep him.
And they had a beautiful baby. She sent me a huge—massive!—edible arrangement. The baby wasn’t a great sleeper, a crier like his mother, and so I moved. Wandered around a little until I ended up here.” She stops. I wait. I wait another minute.
“That’s it?” I ask. “Did he leave?”
“How should I know?” she says. “But I know that the woman was okay with that. The thing she wanted was worth giving him up. What else do you need to know?”
“I don’t understand, why would you tell me this?”
“Because,” she says. “You’re not ready to give me up.”
***
The witch’s parable gets to me. I’m not even sure if it’s a real story—the beginning feels lifted from the opening scenes in Into the Woods. And yet, I wonder what I could lose.
I make a list. On one side COULD LOSE. On the other, COULD GAIN.
The list of loss goes like this:
Space (personal/physical) / Time / Body / Memory (mom brain?) / Money / Attention span / Quiet time / Alone time / Time with my husband / Time with my friends / Spontaneity / Ability to cross street when there’s no walk sign / Ability to eat cheese sticks/chips/popcorn/cherries for dinner / Sleeping in / Staying up late / Current organ positions / My hair? I think?
I stop, because it’s getting depressing. “And you haven’t even scratched the surface,” the witch says. “And yes, you’ll lose your hair. Though, if you’re lucky, some will be on your arms.”
In the second column, I can only think of one thing:
Love?
With a big question mark.
***
I ask my husband why he wants a child. He looks at me strangely, like, Isn’t it a little late to be asking this? But instead he asks, “Is it time to test yet? Are you late?”
“Not yet. Just go with it,” I say.
He’s folding his boxers, fresh from the laundry. They are making a leaning, cottony pile on the bed. “I want a kid because I want a family.”
“I am your family.”
“I want a growing family. I want to teach someone new things. I want to be a parent. I don’t know… don’t we want kids?”
I nod. “We do, I just think it’s funny that it’s hard to articulate why.”
“I’m sure part of it is evolutionary,” he says, because of course he does. “There must be some kind of ancient reptilian signal that was activated in our brains, and it won’t shut up until we fulfill it.”
“Interesting,” I say. I like the idea that having a child is answering a prehistoric biological call.
“Why do you want a child?” he asks.
“I don’t really know,” I say. “I just really, really do.”
***
The cluster of freckles has gotten larger. It looks like I spread caramel across my wrist, or that I’m wearing a badly misshapen band aid. “You’re the size of a speck of dust,” I say. “Why do you keep expanding?”
The witch doesn’t answer, which is a first. “Hello?” I call again.
I hear a muffled voice, like someone is speaking from beneath a stack of pillows. I tap the freckle cluster.
“Sorry,” she says. “I overslept. How’s my ambivalent mommy doing today?”
“Why did the woman want a child?” I ask.
“What woman?”
“The one from your story. Your neighbor. Why did she cry so much? Why did she want a child?”
“I never asked,” the witch says. “I never cared. It was a noise issue, for me. I wanted the crying to stop.”
“Do you think she would have ever had a child without your help?”
“I’m sorry, have you mistaken me for a doctor? I’m a witch.”
Everything is so mysterious. I wish that all of the women who are trying all over the world could get together and compare notes, compare urges, compare tactics and trackers and biometrics. I wish I didn’t have to rely on relentless Google searches and a tiny witch hiding under a freckle-sized beach umbrella. But I am too scared to wish for these things out loud—if the story taught me one thing, it’s that I don’t want her involved.
“Can you roll up your sleeves? Way too hot over here.”
***
I go back to the dermatologist and proffer my wrist.
“Hm,” he says. He runs his thumb over it, almost tenderly, and I hear the witch moan with pleasure. “I still think this is a version of seborrheic keratosis, it’s benign, but definitely more noticeable than it was last time.”
“I want it removed,” I say.
“What?” the witch.
“Lasered off, or cut, something like that.”
“Excuse me?”
The doctor: “There’s really no need, it’s benign.”
The witch: “There’s no need! What the hell?”
Me: “I understand, but it’s cosmetic. Can you remove it?”
The doctor can. He goes to talk to the nurse, to get whatever supplies are needed for this removal. I’m alone in the examination room.
The witch is screaming. “No warning! No goodbye! I have things here—all of my—are you crazy? Is this what you’ll do with a child that aggravates you? That says things you don’t want to hear?”
“No,” I say. “I won’t get my child lasered away at the dermatologist.”
“You know what I meant, psycho. What is wrong with you? Why couldn’t you ask me to leave like a normal person?”
“You never would have left.”
A pause. “You know, you’ve never asked me for a child. I told you about that couple, that I could bring you a child, and you’ve never asked me for one. I could get one for you and you’d never know.”
“I know you could.”
“And?”
“And you think that story was supposed to make me want to ask you for something? So that I could spend every day afraid I’d lose my husband or or or my left arm?”
“I could have—it doesn’t always have to go like that!”
“It’s too late,” I say. There’s a knock on the door, and the doctor returns.
“This shouldn’t take too long. We’ll freeze it using a little liquid nitrogen, it’ll scab over in a few days—don’t pick at it—and it’ll fall off and take that freckle with it.”
“Holy shit,” she says. I picture her with suitcases under her arms, maybe a backpack, throwing belongings from a second-story window. I picture her running along the shore, panting, trying to outpace the freezing cold. I picture her jumping into the sea, the saltwater stinging her eyes for a moment.
The doctor dabs the area with a soaked cotton ball. It stings for a minute, and then nothing. The doctor says I can call him if there’s a problem.
I cross my fingers that I won’t have to.
***
At home, I watch my wrist. The area is red and irritated, but it doesn’t hurt. “Hello?” I whisper. “Are you there?”
I sit and wait for an answer. Unbelievably, my eyes fill with tears. I chose that chaotic goodbye, and yet I miss her. She was funny.
I feel the pain in my lower back that precedes my period. In the bathroom, sure enough, there is blood. I am crushingly disappointed, again and again.
Come back, I want to whisper. Come back. I didn’t mean to lose you.
