"Hush now."
Debenetti’s Bakeshop squeezed in past Margrave Street, right in between The Bricks tenements and a caravan tire repair business as any bakery should be. Squat and yellow, the building wasn’t much for eyes on the outside but had a charming family-like interior, full of plush, fabric, and wood. This is what they say, anyway. The stairs to the basement had been pulled up and the door bricked up three years ago in exchange for a rope ladder by the trapdoor in the back, and there was a reason for this. There was also a reason the trapdoor was padded.
There was certainly a reason people ended up on the table down there. Many of them, actually, some utterly benign and some less so. Debenetti kept about three people for basement jobs at any given time. Smiles supposed she was lucky they took a risk in taking her in when she had no name for herself otherwise. A Pureblood, maybe Remnant, bulged at her now, likely sincere in word.
“I can get the cred. I can get it… for, for you too… You don’t have to do this. I swear, it’s d-d-dangerous to fuck with my company. I can… get… more…you… you’ll be rich…” She stopped hearing it so well. The longer they spoke the more it became the buzzing of the fridge pumps in the corner. “You must be… a child… I’ll get you out…whatever you owe… just help me…”
Words shake with water from its eyes. It’s speaking this way because visible sadness sometimes reminds others of their sadness. Seeing sadness hurts them somehow. Noted. I’ve asked so many of the workers down here why they didn’t do their job. Especially the ones what have risked their lives for it. The memory of sadness is painful to them, so they want it to stop. They help the crying one. Noted.
I have a confusion in me, as they admit those reasons as secondary. Mostly, they just keep saying “it’s right”.
The Pureblood man learned and was escorted out, shaken but still useful enough to be living. She unwrapped some bread from cheesecloth and ate it in silence until the next one was brought. But why?
“She is my only daughter. Please! Oh saints please, if you ever do one good thing…”
Angry the noisome fear machine of explosive movement. “It’s right.” Why would it be right?
The reddened slave received silence and a light touch of her thigh in response. Just enough to get her to turn over on the table. Just enough as needed. What would be right about ending your discomfort for a minute if it would kill you in a day? They see people suffering and the sickness manifests.
Ocean stormwaters had stained brown walls brown and the brown floors browner in a swirl of art. Decades of art. I could spend years looking at these walls.
Dry black splashes spattered the mattresses. I can’t tell if it’s mold or blood. No matter.
Spiral fists of light shook on ceiling wires like hanged men. There were about a dozen of these. They kicked when someone treaded too heavily on the floor above. Or two floors above. Then the shadows of the room shook like water. It’s shaking like water. Stress can induce miscarriages, but at this stage it’s not likely to hurt the woman’s health or the babe’s.
Waves of warm honey fresh sweetbread scent filled the lungs completely. This was alongside the smell of rank sweat and burnt skin. The meeting of two businesses was not always calamitous. It was a smoky, smooth odor that made some very hungry and others very sick, or sometimes both. Suppose I could afford food for the next three days now.
Typically a few layers overdressed for the weather and stiffer than something laid out to dry, the short young stick of a surgeon was faceless to most who came. The strangled lights above left wide black smears of shadow under the wide brim of a hat. Once or twice the surgeon peered at the light, revealing a strip of rotted flesh caked and hidden by mask and paint. Might spend the cred on better lighting instead. They often screamed as she altered flesh.
The paint might have grinned but grinning was not—never really was—an expression of anyone in the downstairs of Carla Debenetti’s Bakeshop.
Words spilled out onto the orange table like a vomit of tangled emotions. Every slave brought here had that. It bled out of them even if they kept their jaws wired and their faces waxed cold. The pregnant slave begged and moaned like an animal, and other emotions flashed between the cracks that she could not read.
Upset. It's upset.
Between the contractions of the slave breathed for the mercy its midwife didn’t seem to hear. Strain and sobs ripped the end off of every sentence.
“Push, now. You’re almost done.” The voice of the surgeon. Soft, insistent, devoid. The woman screamed as if this young sawbones was deaf. She was not. Her concentration was intensely focused.
How is saying your needs changing your environment? Hush now.
The gasping and begging were acceptable to the surgeon. The screaming was not. A respectable business ran itself upstairs, one which did not want its non-bakeshop affairs disturbing those who only wanted a stack of honey-bread. Hush. The sawbones’ hand twisted in the screaming thing’s hair. Quick jolt of pain, enough to restore reason. The other clapped over the grooves of its face. Risk of more, slow increase. The thumb hooked in the valley under its eye. A bit of finger poked from gloves enough to feel the eggy softness of it—the pressure increased steadily alongside the woman’s thrashing until--there--they both went still. Solved.
Beautiful, the slave’s eyes. Clear, rare color. It knew what was needed. The Iron’s sweat red face and square jaw spoke of strength and ability, and pain made it honest. No deference in those two eyes. Good. She didn’t need or desire deference. Only a cursory adherence to the regulations. It would be polite of them.
For some reason the slaves spoke a lot to her. Maybe because she didn’t strike them or shout for talking. The sound didn’t particularly bother her, and sometimes she had questions what needed answering. If she didn’t, well, the city had a lot of noises—it wasn’t worse than the sound of the ocean. She pressed her hand under the hard ridge of its jaw now. The woman’s pulse thrashed against her hand, and she removed it.
“Push.”
The slave woman pushed. There. A new sound was added to the basement, not deterred by the snip of scissors. Not often the sawbones delivered babies. Only thing more challenging than getting something to enter life is getting it to leave. Both of these were occasionally her business. Aysea’s poor had a way of being versatile. Not meeting rent anywhere in this city was bloody without friends and sometimes bloodier with them. Doctors and sawbones alike kept their skills to themselves jealously, which made learning flat hard. Aysea breathed with an ugly yellow buzz. People either got out of it as fast as they could or found it was something they thrived in.
All of them are infected.
The birthing helped itself along without much fuss. The sawbones bent to the tub-like basin and washed the wailing little thing before swaddling it in cheesecloth. Strong lungs were a sign of health, and few Iron Slave children died after being born. Hardy things—if they survived the exhausted vessel’s months of working after their conception, little could deter their growth after separation.
Tangled in their own weakness, figure so.
“It’s my child,” the mother said numbly. It was not happy (the tears and the drawn zygomatic process). The sawbones could imagine the slave, all the events in sharp succession. P347, known by its friends as Pifrie, (outside the building, an offhand whisper when no one was looking) had been born to the mines of the midwest as a factory thing (the shape of the mark on its skin, the stitch of its pants but not its tunic) and had never imagined a life free from choking dust and the bell-like sound of steel on stone (speculation based on patterns). This was until its owner gifted it to a low-money Pureblood (the pants were still the same from the Iron Works) as some box-lifting muscle around Aysea and Old York (remnants of rust and splinter cuts on its hands). It knew, has known, all of its life of its dangerous hands and stupid head. (Irons often had this affliction of thought.) Pifrie had never questioned how fucked it would be without the benevolence of its masters and mistresses, or even just the other strains who tolerated its kind to live and kept them busy. Maybe until now. (Speculation based on a pattern of the 486 others she had seen on this job.) In the end, strains made little difference.
“It’s my child…” Though the sawbones had no way of knowing, Pifrie’s imagination blossomed then. For a few moments the slave thought that if this rotted surgeon could take the baby away, maybe it would get rotted too, and its brain would be smart, and it would be free. But even as she grasped the sawbones’ pantleg compulsively… Even as the sawbones backhanded her across the face with laughable weakness… Even as Pifrie wondered if the tiny surgeon was human at all for all the expression she gave… the bundled babe glowed faintly in the shadow. And all of P347’s hope died.
The silence stretched. One of them didn’t notice.
“What is its number?” Pifrie asked finally. Its brows lifted as the sawbones stepped to a chart on the wall, child still in arm crying. She returned.
“11.” The voice could have been that of the walls or the floor.
“What do I do now?”
The sawbones paused, watching anger recede in the woman like an exhausted tide. (Facial muscles relaxing except brows, relaxed eyelids.) The reality childbirth kicked into the Iron like a hemorrhage. Hard to read a slave’s face. They react to birthing differently. All of them. Feelings of protectiveness toward child near 74%. But what is it feeling? Happy? Sad? Nothing? Beginning to think they never just feel nothing. Amazing to think they do anything at all with all the guilt what comes with it. The baby was nudged gently into Pifrie’s arms, and the slave stared at it with shock.
“I’ll collect your afterbirth and take measurements. You’ll give what I write down to your master in the lounge upstairs.”
For all their emotions, they don’t learn most times.
For the first time in her life, the slave wanted to run. She wanted to kill her child. She wanted to crawl up in a ball and die over and over again. She wanted her master to give her a pickaxe and a warm hand on the shoulder and tell her everything would be alright. She wanted this baby to stop bawling and be safe forever.
The times they do learn, it’s the wrong lesson more times than not.
The sawbones oranged the basin water with her gloves and dried them on a once-green towel. Her scabbed hands caught the light as she measured and took notes in clumsy capital letters on a thick piece of paper. She wanted to examine the child for days if she could. She wanted to learn why most plants were green and why people so greatly differed and why so few dug into the meat of meanings around them.
“It doesn’t like me,” P347 whispered. Pifrie likely knew it had already talked too much, but the surgeon didn’t seem to care either way, sound or silence, and it emboldened the slave. “It doesn’t…”
The sawbones paused in her sketching. The lights above shivered, and she smoothed the infant’s forehead with dry scabbed hands. The surgeon paused, evaluated, and returned to writing.
“Pet it. Rock it.”
Why is the slave looking at me like that? It asked a question. I answered.
The infant quieted as Pifrie sheltered it in her chest, shifting up against her as she fully straightened and could do so. The slave heeded the surgeon and turned on small angles. Instinctively, she began to make small soothing words and began crying silently when her child had stopped.
The sickness in them runs deep. Every word and frown cuts them. Every action is to avoid the pain of it. I understand. I have studied it. I understand. But not well enough to cure it yet.
It did not stop crying in the thirty minutes before its master came, but the slave with its seafoam eyes and strong bones took a moment to thank her in the softest of whispers.
How will they ever be fixed?
*****
Twelve years later, she reads the words of a letter.
“A bit lazy of you frankly, but still I will forgive you this one time - you've been through a bit of strain recently, poor thing, and so it is to be expected I suppose.” The sawbones lays the letter down on the cramped little table in the back of the caravan camp. She feels a swell of anger so intense that she nearly throws the damned thing into the fire. The feeling is almost like fire itself. Absolutely irrational. She had been trying to help, had been trying to get him to just see, to open his eyes for one bloody minute of his unlife, and then he has the nerve—! She calms herself instantly, returning to nothing. The feeling only lasted a quarter of a second—but the fact that it happened at all has her staring at the letter with wide eyes. She reminds herself that he does this on purpose, that it’s his intent. He teases. After a long moment the sawbones continues to read.
*****
Twelve years and a few months later, she cannot ignore the shape. She sets her elbow down on the cold bared teeth of the ground and stared at the person she had just crawled under a table for. This hurt him, didn’t it? Templeton Barnes was not a person to curl under a table, shaking as he hid his head in his arms. Trying to shut out everything.
She feels a deep burn of anger seeing him this way. She watches.
*****
Twelve years and a few months later, she cannot feel the cold ground with the flame-edged agony of her wounds. Everything is hot and bloody and fast. The claws lower to her head once, sinking deep against skull, and her eyes flicker up to the Sempre Mort drawing back his arms for a neck-severing blow. This is it, she thinks quietly, disconnected as her mouth fills with the word “Please!” and her throat tears shouting it. Another mouth, black and vision-stealing, yawns up across her eyes with the threat of the earth. But Templeton cuts into him and the Sempre Mort turns, and she watches.
*****
Thirteen years later, she stares down a Confederate grave robber in an old sunlit bar. She knows this woman hears the whispers she has heard. The drawl of the woman’s voice is as slow as the sunset.
“You’re a sentimental fool,” she responds flatly to Smiles. People avoid them.
“Often,” the sawbones acknowledges. She watches.
The eggshell under their feet is disguised as planking here, dead wood, undoubtedly thick. Still fractions of an inch between their weight and the miles of emptiness, and what waited under that. Unbelievably, heartstoppingly fragile, what people called solid ground... Her eyes are almost drawn to it before the woman answers.
“Ah find the hope refreshin’.”
Debenetti’s Bakeshop squeezed in past Margrave Street, right in between The Bricks tenements and a caravan tire repair business as any bakery should be. Squat and yellow, the building wasn’t much for eyes on the outside but had a charming family-like interior, full of plush, fabric, and wood. This is what they say, anyway. The stairs to the basement had been pulled up and the door bricked up three years ago in exchange for a rope ladder by the trapdoor in the back, and there was a reason for this. There was also a reason the trapdoor was padded.
There was certainly a reason people ended up on the table down there. Many of them, actually, some utterly benign and some less so. Debenetti kept about three people for basement jobs at any given time. Smiles supposed she was lucky they took a risk in taking her in when she had no name for herself otherwise. A Pureblood, maybe Remnant, bulged at her now, likely sincere in word.
“I can get the cred. I can get it… for, for you too… You don’t have to do this. I swear, it’s d-d-dangerous to fuck with my company. I can… get… more…you… you’ll be rich…” She stopped hearing it so well. The longer they spoke the more it became the buzzing of the fridge pumps in the corner. “You must be… a child… I’ll get you out…whatever you owe… just help me…”
Words shake with water from its eyes. It’s speaking this way because visible sadness sometimes reminds others of their sadness. Seeing sadness hurts them somehow. Noted. I’ve asked so many of the workers down here why they didn’t do their job. Especially the ones what have risked their lives for it. The memory of sadness is painful to them, so they want it to stop. They help the crying one. Noted.
I have a confusion in me, as they admit those reasons as secondary. Mostly, they just keep saying “it’s right”.
The Pureblood man learned and was escorted out, shaken but still useful enough to be living. She unwrapped some bread from cheesecloth and ate it in silence until the next one was brought. But why?
“She is my only daughter. Please! Oh saints please, if you ever do one good thing…”
Angry the noisome fear machine of explosive movement. “It’s right.” Why would it be right?
The reddened slave received silence and a light touch of her thigh in response. Just enough to get her to turn over on the table. Just enough as needed. What would be right about ending your discomfort for a minute if it would kill you in a day? They see people suffering and the sickness manifests.
Ocean stormwaters had stained brown walls brown and the brown floors browner in a swirl of art. Decades of art. I could spend years looking at these walls.
Dry black splashes spattered the mattresses. I can’t tell if it’s mold or blood. No matter.
Spiral fists of light shook on ceiling wires like hanged men. There were about a dozen of these. They kicked when someone treaded too heavily on the floor above. Or two floors above. Then the shadows of the room shook like water. It’s shaking like water. Stress can induce miscarriages, but at this stage it’s not likely to hurt the woman’s health or the babe’s.
Waves of warm honey fresh sweetbread scent filled the lungs completely. This was alongside the smell of rank sweat and burnt skin. The meeting of two businesses was not always calamitous. It was a smoky, smooth odor that made some very hungry and others very sick, or sometimes both. Suppose I could afford food for the next three days now.
Typically a few layers overdressed for the weather and stiffer than something laid out to dry, the short young stick of a surgeon was faceless to most who came. The strangled lights above left wide black smears of shadow under the wide brim of a hat. Once or twice the surgeon peered at the light, revealing a strip of rotted flesh caked and hidden by mask and paint. Might spend the cred on better lighting instead. They often screamed as she altered flesh.
The paint might have grinned but grinning was not—never really was—an expression of anyone in the downstairs of Carla Debenetti’s Bakeshop.
Words spilled out onto the orange table like a vomit of tangled emotions. Every slave brought here had that. It bled out of them even if they kept their jaws wired and their faces waxed cold. The pregnant slave begged and moaned like an animal, and other emotions flashed between the cracks that she could not read.
Upset. It's upset.
Between the contractions of the slave breathed for the mercy its midwife didn’t seem to hear. Strain and sobs ripped the end off of every sentence.
“Push, now. You’re almost done.” The voice of the surgeon. Soft, insistent, devoid. The woman screamed as if this young sawbones was deaf. She was not. Her concentration was intensely focused.
How is saying your needs changing your environment? Hush now.
The gasping and begging were acceptable to the surgeon. The screaming was not. A respectable business ran itself upstairs, one which did not want its non-bakeshop affairs disturbing those who only wanted a stack of honey-bread. Hush. The sawbones’ hand twisted in the screaming thing’s hair. Quick jolt of pain, enough to restore reason. The other clapped over the grooves of its face. Risk of more, slow increase. The thumb hooked in the valley under its eye. A bit of finger poked from gloves enough to feel the eggy softness of it—the pressure increased steadily alongside the woman’s thrashing until--there--they both went still. Solved.
Beautiful, the slave’s eyes. Clear, rare color. It knew what was needed. The Iron’s sweat red face and square jaw spoke of strength and ability, and pain made it honest. No deference in those two eyes. Good. She didn’t need or desire deference. Only a cursory adherence to the regulations. It would be polite of them.
For some reason the slaves spoke a lot to her. Maybe because she didn’t strike them or shout for talking. The sound didn’t particularly bother her, and sometimes she had questions what needed answering. If she didn’t, well, the city had a lot of noises—it wasn’t worse than the sound of the ocean. She pressed her hand under the hard ridge of its jaw now. The woman’s pulse thrashed against her hand, and she removed it.
“Push.”
The slave woman pushed. There. A new sound was added to the basement, not deterred by the snip of scissors. Not often the sawbones delivered babies. Only thing more challenging than getting something to enter life is getting it to leave. Both of these were occasionally her business. Aysea’s poor had a way of being versatile. Not meeting rent anywhere in this city was bloody without friends and sometimes bloodier with them. Doctors and sawbones alike kept their skills to themselves jealously, which made learning flat hard. Aysea breathed with an ugly yellow buzz. People either got out of it as fast as they could or found it was something they thrived in.
All of them are infected.
The birthing helped itself along without much fuss. The sawbones bent to the tub-like basin and washed the wailing little thing before swaddling it in cheesecloth. Strong lungs were a sign of health, and few Iron Slave children died after being born. Hardy things—if they survived the exhausted vessel’s months of working after their conception, little could deter their growth after separation.
Tangled in their own weakness, figure so.
“It’s my child,” the mother said numbly. It was not happy (the tears and the drawn zygomatic process). The sawbones could imagine the slave, all the events in sharp succession. P347, known by its friends as Pifrie, (outside the building, an offhand whisper when no one was looking) had been born to the mines of the midwest as a factory thing (the shape of the mark on its skin, the stitch of its pants but not its tunic) and had never imagined a life free from choking dust and the bell-like sound of steel on stone (speculation based on patterns). This was until its owner gifted it to a low-money Pureblood (the pants were still the same from the Iron Works) as some box-lifting muscle around Aysea and Old York (remnants of rust and splinter cuts on its hands). It knew, has known, all of its life of its dangerous hands and stupid head. (Irons often had this affliction of thought.) Pifrie had never questioned how fucked it would be without the benevolence of its masters and mistresses, or even just the other strains who tolerated its kind to live and kept them busy. Maybe until now. (Speculation based on a pattern of the 486 others she had seen on this job.) In the end, strains made little difference.
“It’s my child…” Though the sawbones had no way of knowing, Pifrie’s imagination blossomed then. For a few moments the slave thought that if this rotted surgeon could take the baby away, maybe it would get rotted too, and its brain would be smart, and it would be free. But even as she grasped the sawbones’ pantleg compulsively… Even as the sawbones backhanded her across the face with laughable weakness… Even as Pifrie wondered if the tiny surgeon was human at all for all the expression she gave… the bundled babe glowed faintly in the shadow. And all of P347’s hope died.
The silence stretched. One of them didn’t notice.
“What is its number?” Pifrie asked finally. Its brows lifted as the sawbones stepped to a chart on the wall, child still in arm crying. She returned.
“11.” The voice could have been that of the walls or the floor.
“What do I do now?”
The sawbones paused, watching anger recede in the woman like an exhausted tide. (Facial muscles relaxing except brows, relaxed eyelids.) The reality childbirth kicked into the Iron like a hemorrhage. Hard to read a slave’s face. They react to birthing differently. All of them. Feelings of protectiveness toward child near 74%. But what is it feeling? Happy? Sad? Nothing? Beginning to think they never just feel nothing. Amazing to think they do anything at all with all the guilt what comes with it. The baby was nudged gently into Pifrie’s arms, and the slave stared at it with shock.
“I’ll collect your afterbirth and take measurements. You’ll give what I write down to your master in the lounge upstairs.”
For all their emotions, they don’t learn most times.
For the first time in her life, the slave wanted to run. She wanted to kill her child. She wanted to crawl up in a ball and die over and over again. She wanted her master to give her a pickaxe and a warm hand on the shoulder and tell her everything would be alright. She wanted this baby to stop bawling and be safe forever.
The times they do learn, it’s the wrong lesson more times than not.
The sawbones oranged the basin water with her gloves and dried them on a once-green towel. Her scabbed hands caught the light as she measured and took notes in clumsy capital letters on a thick piece of paper. She wanted to examine the child for days if she could. She wanted to learn why most plants were green and why people so greatly differed and why so few dug into the meat of meanings around them.
“It doesn’t like me,” P347 whispered. Pifrie likely knew it had already talked too much, but the surgeon didn’t seem to care either way, sound or silence, and it emboldened the slave. “It doesn’t…”
The sawbones paused in her sketching. The lights above shivered, and she smoothed the infant’s forehead with dry scabbed hands. The surgeon paused, evaluated, and returned to writing.
“Pet it. Rock it.”
Why is the slave looking at me like that? It asked a question. I answered.
The infant quieted as Pifrie sheltered it in her chest, shifting up against her as she fully straightened and could do so. The slave heeded the surgeon and turned on small angles. Instinctively, she began to make small soothing words and began crying silently when her child had stopped.
The sickness in them runs deep. Every word and frown cuts them. Every action is to avoid the pain of it. I understand. I have studied it. I understand. But not well enough to cure it yet.
It did not stop crying in the thirty minutes before its master came, but the slave with its seafoam eyes and strong bones took a moment to thank her in the softest of whispers.
How will they ever be fixed?
*****
Twelve years later, she reads the words of a letter.
“A bit lazy of you frankly, but still I will forgive you this one time - you've been through a bit of strain recently, poor thing, and so it is to be expected I suppose.” The sawbones lays the letter down on the cramped little table in the back of the caravan camp. She feels a swell of anger so intense that she nearly throws the damned thing into the fire. The feeling is almost like fire itself. Absolutely irrational. She had been trying to help, had been trying to get him to just see, to open his eyes for one bloody minute of his unlife, and then he has the nerve—! She calms herself instantly, returning to nothing. The feeling only lasted a quarter of a second—but the fact that it happened at all has her staring at the letter with wide eyes. She reminds herself that he does this on purpose, that it’s his intent. He teases. After a long moment the sawbones continues to read.
*****
Twelve years and a few months later, she cannot ignore the shape. She sets her elbow down on the cold bared teeth of the ground and stared at the person she had just crawled under a table for. This hurt him, didn’t it? Templeton Barnes was not a person to curl under a table, shaking as he hid his head in his arms. Trying to shut out everything.
She feels a deep burn of anger seeing him this way. She watches.
*****
Twelve years and a few months later, she cannot feel the cold ground with the flame-edged agony of her wounds. Everything is hot and bloody and fast. The claws lower to her head once, sinking deep against skull, and her eyes flicker up to the Sempre Mort drawing back his arms for a neck-severing blow. This is it, she thinks quietly, disconnected as her mouth fills with the word “Please!” and her throat tears shouting it. Another mouth, black and vision-stealing, yawns up across her eyes with the threat of the earth. But Templeton cuts into him and the Sempre Mort turns, and she watches.
*****
Thirteen years later, she stares down a Confederate grave robber in an old sunlit bar. She knows this woman hears the whispers she has heard. The drawl of the woman’s voice is as slow as the sunset.
“You’re a sentimental fool,” she responds flatly to Smiles. People avoid them.
“Often,” the sawbones acknowledges. She watches.
The eggshell under their feet is disguised as planking here, dead wood, undoubtedly thick. Still fractions of an inch between their weight and the miles of emptiness, and what waited under that. Unbelievably, heartstoppingly fragile, what people called solid ground... Her eyes are almost drawn to it before the woman answers.
“Ah find the hope refreshin’.”