Storied By Josh

She was already a single mother, and I was just twenty two when she told me she was pregnant. The feelings were that of disbelief, a vague excitedness, and it felt fake, surreal. I felt like she wasn’t telling me but that I was watching her tell someone else. I felt like this wasn’t real and yet I felt something deep and far away. A feeling no word exists for. But mostly I felt numb, like I was hearing the weather from a stranger. By that time in our relationship, we were both in shambles. She had been in shambles when I had first met her, and I was barely holding on. I had a dream of something but I was so young I didn’t know what it was. I still don’t. I’m not entirely convinced I ever will.

I wasn’t able to save her downward spiral of poor choices, self harm, and ignorance. She, instead pulled me down. Our fights weren’t really fights at that point, just the continuation of a singular argument. It found its way into everything we talked about. I had stuck around for that long because I was young and stupid and the sex was great. I was convinced that her conviction of becoming a better person and advancing herself to becoming more than the convicted criminal she was, was right around the corner. It never became a reality. After a particularly nasty fight she moved into a friend’s trailer home, and I moved out of the city. I tried to call her many times at first. I wanted to know how the pregnancy was going. I had told her I would start over, find a stable job that would provide food for all four of us and come back to her. Our phone conversations began to become shorter and then more infrequent.

Finally I had enough money to make it to the city and visit her. I called and she answered. I told her and she said that we would meet, across the street from our old apartment. We met and I tried to kiss her long and deeply, a reassurance of sorts that I would soon be back and we would be off to the races. She kissed me for a little and then pulled away. I put my arm around her and touched her stomach. I asked how it was going and she began to cry. She walked back to the waiting SUV and I never saw her again.

I called a few times but she never answered.

It never clicked really. I hired a man once to find her. He did and she had moved away from the city. He told me she only had one child. I was convinced she had put my child up for adoption. He searched records around the state and finally broke it to me. She had an abortion. A sense of relief and deep seated sadness rolled through my body as I held the phone to my ear.

Did he have proof? No. But children never just disappeared without turning up dead. If she had the baby he would have found it. He told me he was sorry and that he wouldn’t charge me for his time. I hung up the phone.

My mother asked me if I was fine. I said yes. I slowly put on my shoes and took out the box of memories of her that I had saved. I took it out to the burn barrel and lit it on fire. I stood there and watched for a while. When all that was left were smoldering pictures, I walked for the eternity of a half hour.

And then I cried.

I suppose now I have made my peace with our relationship and the colossal ship wreck that it was. I’ve made my peace with the fact that she killed my child without telling me. I found solace for a while in the fact that his body was used for medical research. Now I think fleetingly to what could have been, sometimes. But this is as useless as the memory box, really. It is nothing but a pile of junk, important to no one after the end.

It hit me harder than it should have. I have always been pro-choice. But my experience with abortion has turned it sour for me. I see it as a right, much like the right to kill to defend one’s self. Important but nothing to be celebrated. It is after all, not Christmas. It is a life we take, whether or not it is a child’s life is not important to me, it is a life all the same, but this is a thing that must happen sometimes.

Months afterword I scrounged up enough money to leave the country. They told me it’d be expensive and that I couldn’t just stay, that I would have to come back some day. But I was over the flag waving, the empty and fat people. I was sick of the death and the poor and the pathetic and the shrines to Jesus that were revered and ignored when it was tough to remember his sermons.

I found my home in a village that sat in the shadow of a mountain. It was bisected by a large creek. The locals called it Das Leben Wasser. Or Das Leben for short. It ran just past the village church and beyond it a field of grass which stretched to the beginning of the mountains and the trees that grew up them. The people were beautiful and they had their own problems but they always shared their everything. A priest let me live on his couch while I set myself up. He was not a normal Catholic and his English was better than mine sometimes. After a while, I had a few people coming up to me and asking me to fix this in their house, to fix that. They didn’t have money, we were all poor, but they would feed me and give me clothes that they did not need. I walked everywhere I needed to go.

There was a man who did not speak anything but his mother tongue. He would give me rides into the town so I could check my email. Our rides were usually quiet except for the few times he would point at something and mutter in his language. Sometimes he would ask me what words were in English. He loved the English word: marvelous. I do not know why.

My mother would send me stories of where I grew up. She told me how my brothers and sisters were doing. My old friends would sometimes swap stories of me, but like all people, I wasn’t important to them after a while. My mother always loved me, as all good mothers do and my family would scan a picture onto their computer and she would dutifully send it to me. I think secretly she was trying to get me to come back. But for me the place would always be an empty husk. A place of dark and hopeless feelings.

I became a de facto laborer in the village hills. I helped milk the cows and slaughter the chickens. Old women would have the priest send me to fix leaky roofs, pipes and broken things. After a while an old man fixed up a shed for me to live in. The winters were cold and my beard needed to be shaved. The barber would trade me janitor work for a haircut and shave when I needed it.

I met a girl who spoke English and was not beautiful but simple and elegant like the mountains where we lived. She took me into her and we were fine for a while. We would find time together in the fields of in the shadow of the mountains. She took me hiking up to a few peaks. I was fat and she was fit but she would wait for me anyway. It went on like this until her father met me in front of the market and told me that it wasn’t acceptable unless we married. I told him I could not get a marriage license as I wasn’t there legally. She left me some time after that. I wasn’t sad and she wasn’t either. We were only for each other an arrangement until something better came along. She had found it, but I was still waiting.

I would drink too much beer sometimes, it was cheap. I would then sit by a brook until I passed out. The priest came to look for me at first but after a while he let me alone and then would ask me things. I would sometimes answer. The immigration office eventually caught up to me. I think the father of the girl must have called them. They told me that I needed to apply for a worker visa if I was to stay. I did but it was declined. A clerk told me that she knew it would be and that this was just a formality. She then told me I had three weeks to leave before they kicked me out and never let me back in. I told her I had no money for a ticket home and she said I had two weeks to come up with something. I thanked her, for some reason, and the Old man drove me back to the village. The Priest was waiting and I told him what happened. He said Gott would fix it if it was meant to be.

Three days afterword I was drinking too much by the creek. There were boys and girls sneaking out as they always did. A girl tried to jump across and slipped. She hit her head. I ran over and she was bleeding all over her beautifully blonde hair. The boys pulled her out of the water and she lay on the rocks. She couldn’t see and her ears were ringing she said. I picked her up and we woke up the priest and he called the doctor and by the time the doctor arrived she had passed out. The doctor said she would die if they did not take her to the city. The family wanted to know what I was doing running around with the children drunk and late at night. I told them I had just witnessed it and that I was drunk because I drank too much sometimes. The father said he understood but the mother thought I was a devil. The boys stood up for me and that was all that I heard from her mother til the funeral. The girl died on the way to the city.

The village mourned deeply the next few days. I went to the funeral. The little girl’s mother walked up to me. She said in English that her daughter’s name was Engleberta. It is an old and good name. She thanked me for trying to save her daughter and asked me to sit with her and her husband. I said yes. She held my hand. and the priest was distraught as he had ever been. His speech was in dialect but it was something like, the Father sometimes calls the children to him before we think they are ready to. He knew this in his heart but it did nothing for him now because all he knew was that there was a mother who would never push her daughter on a swing again. There was a father who would never hold his daughter’s hand as they ran through the field in the shadow of the mountain. And there was a church that would always have one missing voice when the songs were sung.

That night the Priest drank with me down on the creek. We tried to laugh but his heart was broken against his Gott and I knew he’d never be the same the way I probably was. He offered to baptize me but I told him we were too drunk. The water was too cold. He said it was good to be cold because it would protect me better from the fires of hell. He cried then and I cried too but I did not really know why because I barely knew the girl.

The next Sunday he handed me a check with the amount I needed to get back to my old country. He told me he only wrote it so that I would have the option of coming back to visit, because if I did not leave soon the Immigration police would not allow me back to their village again. I left for my country that Wednesday. The barber gave me a haircut and a shave. The old women made a feast the night before and the village came to say goodbye. The old man hugged me for a long time when he dropped me off at the airport in the city.

I landed and my mother was there to pick me up. She told me that I had grown older since she had seen me. We drove home in silence. After they had a welcome home party for me and it was good to see my family again. But I missed the Priest. I missed the fields under the mountain. I missed Engleberta. I missed the old man who didn’t speak English.

I visited many times in my dreams and once awake.

The Priest had died by then but a girl in the village had memory of me. She gave me a crucifix that the Priest had saved for me. She told me that he never was the same after the little girl died. He found religion in a bottle and the village had protected him from the Church until he died of liver damage. She said he seemed happy to be able to rest in the end. I asked about Engleberta’s parents. She said they moved to the city a few years ago because they could not take care of the farm anymore.

The girl I had seen for a time had gotten married. Her father had me over for dinner and showed me pictures of his grandchildren with pride. He asked me about my family. I told him I had none. He said he was not surprised. Men like me would never find a family until they found peace. He jokingly said that the village needed another priest. I was insulted and told him that I enjoyed fornication too much. He was not offended and instead laughed and laughed. In the spirit of my return he and I drank a beer down by Das Leben Wasser. We drank to the Priest. We sat, he told me stories about his childhood and I told him of my old country. We watched the sun set behind the mountain. He said this was Gott’s Land. I knew that I could never be truly happy anymore because I would never again be able to visit home.