Figures by a Chamber Door Artwork by Steven Ostrowski
"My artwork always attempts to deepen the mystery of what it means to be human."
Steven Ostrowski is a novelist, poet, short fiction writer and painter whose work is widely-published. His first novel, “The Highway of Spirit and Bone,” has just been published (Lefora Publications) and a full-length book of poems called “Life Field” (Impspired Press, UK) will be out in January, 2024. www.stevenostrowski.org
The Packed-Too-Early Bag
Fiction by Maria Thomas
CW: Miscarriage
You pack your bag for hospital. It’s early, much too early, but you’re too excited. You pack your bag with the cute, white Babygro that you shouldn’t have bought – the one your mum was horrified at the bad-luck of buying - the cute white Babygro with the cute animals – koalas and baby hippos and arctic foxes – and the teeny tiny poppers where the small peach-fuzzed bum will be. You pack nappies and lanolin, big knickers and nursing bras, you pack pyjamas and slippers and a clutch of energy bars. A blanket, of course – another bad-luck purchase – soft and striped, Jellycat rabbit and dummies and big thick pads – because everyone tells you you’ll bleed.
When the bag is packed – all the compartments full, pockets compacted with cotton wool and cotton socks, and cotton cloths – you close it and place it in the corner of the room and you wait for that moment when you’ll wake your husband and tell him ‘it’s time’ and he’ll panic and run around trying to get dressed, falling over as he tries to force his leg into tracksuit pants, and you’ll tell him softly, in between the gritted pain, ‘calm down darling, we don’t need you in hospital too.’ And you’ll be calm because your bag is packed, your bag that has been packed for far too long, but you’re PREPARED, as you once promised in fleet-blue girl guide gear.
The packed-too-early bag sits in the corner of the room, watching as you grow, as the life inside you multiplies and your abdomen swells and discolours like a marrow. The packed-too-early bag sees as you bend over the toilet bowl heaving nothing, because there’s nothing you can eat without heaving, and it observes as you toss and turn in your too-small bed, toss and turn because there’s no comfort to be found on your back, or your side, and you can’t sleep on your front. It sits in sympathy as your pelvis aches and separates, as your skin fissures, and acid reflux fills your mouth and burns craters into the soft pink flesh of your cheeks.
The packed-too-early bag will keep you company as the much-too-early pains come. It will huddle into your side as you wait for the ambulance – whispering with you ‘please, please, please’. It will rest sensitively in the corner of the hospital room as the monitor doesn’t beep, as the doctor lowers his voice, as the hush tells you everything. The packed-too-early bag will vomit big, thick pads, as the blood begins to flow, as the too-small nest of cells disgorges into big knickers. The packed-too-early bag will expel the bad-luck Babygro, and the bad-luck blanket, and you will hold them to your face and weep.
Maria Thomas is an apple-shaped mum who has won Oxford Flash & was named Best Speculative Fiction by Welkin Prize. Maria also won Free Flash Fiction’s Comp 13, Retreat West’s April '22 Micro, and placed in LISP and Propelling Pencil in '22. @Appleshapedwriter (Instagram) @Applewriter (Twitter)