Grief's Grave

From their moment of birth, she was her sister’s greatest love, which, as the inevitabilities of fate decreed, meant she would also be her killer.

In the Long Before, when the world still sprung with youth, and words and their meanings had not yet calcified, the sharp cry of a woman pierced the night. Her labor pains had not subsided after nearly a full day, and the doctor realized a natural delivery was untenable. As the knife sank into and carved its way across her lower belly, splitting her open to liberate her beloveds from her loins, her punctuating cries coalesced into a single, long wail. With neither anesthesia nor alcohol available to protect her, she had no option but to lean into the pain, confronting it in full consciousness and embracing her suffering in all its terrible glory. This arduous journey had begun nine months earlier, in a moment of intimate ecstasy, and now, it seemed, she would need to experience intimacy with agony at the conclusion.

The wail grew ever louder as the doctor plunged his hands into the incision and began to pry and yank at her lacerated flesh. As he spread her open, the wail simultaneously became clearer, emanating from a place so deep in the core of her body and being that, the doctor would later swear to his colleagues, the babies’ bodies quivered and vibrated from the resonance, as if assuaged by a blanket of sound. It had taken on a life of its own, this wail, using her body as a puppet and her vocal chords as the strings, dictating and controlling her every movement, from her squirming torso to her bucking knees to her hand clenched in a death grip around her husband’s hand. Rivers of blood, sweat, and tears gushed from her every orifice. No longer did a conscious mind with a distinct sense of identity and self occupy the body; she was instead one with the pain, one with the wail, for her memories and acute sensations had all merged and fused with its tune and pitch. And then, as the doctor finally retrieved her babies and lifted them out of her womb and into the world, the wail ceased.

The first baby had eyes that glimmered like diamonds when she finally opened them, cheeks that radiated with a rosy hue, and a nose that, when she smiled, crinkled as if it had its own smile. None of this commanded anyone’s attention at first, however, for the father and doctor were both preoccupied with her low birth weight and the fact that a pair of hands had been clasped around her neck. Those belonged to the second baby, whose existence was unexpected, and who in contrast had entered the world with a high birth weight and was clinging to the first baby as if for dear life. Through deliberate historical neglect, the details of her face have been lost to time. The father named the first child Joy, as he and the deceased mother had previously agreed, and named the second child Grief, a derivative of the Latin word “gravis,” which means “weighty” or “heavy.”

Much as they had in the womb, the two girls remained close as they grew. They were perpetually at each other's side, shared the same secrets, fantasized about the same boys, and knew each other's thoughts and cadence well enough to finish each other's sentences. Sometimes, they would even agree before going to bed that they would dream about a certain subject that night–magically flying high in the sky across the entire land, or playing in a meadow full of flowers, speaking with a distant king, for instance–and when they awoke in the morning, they would find that they had seen the same landmarks, counted the same number and color of flowers, and exchanged the same words and wishes with the king. Neighbors marveled that the girls seemed to be but an extension of the same mind, two sides of a coin.

As the girls reached adolescence, however, the ties of their relationship began to fray. Grief began to sense that her father didn't love her quite as much as he loved Joy–if he truly loved her at all. His lips would utter “Father loves you girls dearly” but Grief would notice his eyes focused only on Joy when he said this. When he smiled at Joy, those same lips would curl upwards in a gorgeous arc, his cheeks would crest and peak like mountains, and a warm spark would illuminate his eyes like so many fireflies. When he smiled at grief, however, his cheeks merely twitched and bristled, the light in his eyes was dull and dim, and the curve of his lips stayed far more flat–though Grief never knew this, the lip line would’ve perfectly resembled her mother’s scar had she survived the birth. Though Father never explicitly admitted it, Grief suspected that deep down, he harbored simmering resentment towards her and blamed her for Mother’s death–perhaps if Grief hadn’t been so large at birth, Mother would’ve survived. Or perhaps Mother would’ve lived if Grief hadn’t formed in the womb at all, as Father and Mother and the doctor had originally expected. Joy had been planned and wanted from the beginning, but Grief entered the world piggybacking onto Joy as a stranger, a stowaway, an intruder.

Additionally, as the girls’ bodies began to change and develop, Grief realized that she was beginning to look quite unlike Joy, and that others in turn perceived the girls rather differently. Joy’s body began to taper inward at the waist and flare back out at the hips, forming a sleek, aesthetic hourglass figure, while Grief’s body remained wider in all its regions, plumper and more elongated like an apple. Joy was light on her feet and seemed to bound off the earth with each dainty step, gliding and springing like a ballerina, while Grief was comparatively stout and heavyset, trodding and lumbering across the ground. Joy’s belly was smooth and flat as the plains in which she danced, her navel enticing to the eye in its symmetry, while Grief, no matter how hard she inhaled, struggled to contain the surplus of flesh spilling across the top of her trousers or swelling beneath the front of her dress. Boys–the same boys Grief and Joy had giddily gossipped and fantasized about–would turn their heads as if on a swivel when Joy strode past, their eyes burgeoning and mouths watering and bellies burning with lust.