Marta had never wanted the child. She fell pregnant because it was the right thing to do and because everyone else was doing it. The pregnancy was easy. She craved peaches the first trimester and sex with men who weren’t her husband the second. She spent listless hours on the couch with the neighbour’s unemployed son while the baby kicked, and on the television a news anchor decried immigrants encroaching on the culture. She hated the way she looked pregnant, how large she became, how swollen her feet, how bloated her face. She took no pictures. Six months into the pregnancy, her husband came home to every mirror in the apartment shattered, and Marta on the couch, knuckles bloody. He wordlessly swept the glass from the floor and never replaced the mirrors. He had come to understand that his wife was not a complete woman. That, while able to conceive and carry his child, Marta was somehow barren.

Three weeks earlier than anticipated, on the last day of summer, Marta gave birth to a girl whom she called Martha, an anglicised version of her own name. Marta would hardly admit it to herself but she had great hopes pinned on Martha. She wished that someone would come and take her, someone who really wanted her, and give her a life far away from the paper-thin walls of their tenement apartment. She was a large newborn, with inquisitive eyes. Marta asked the nurses if she could leave her at the hospital for a few days while she went home to rest. The nurses looked at each other and shook their heads.

  “No, ma’am. You’ve got a healthy baby girl to take home,” the overweight one said to her. 

Marta thought about how tight the uniform looked around the nurse’s waist and watched her husband load the baby into a carrier. He walked ahead, arms full, while she was wheeled out behind him, carrying nothing but a small bag of nuts she had gotten from the hospital vending machine. While her husband placed the carrier down on the sidewalk and called a taxi, Marta lit a cigarette. A small breeze fluttered some ash over the baby’s blanket.

Marta never produced any breast milk. She never even brought the baby close to her breast to try. She was glad of this. The thought of her body producing a substance meant for human consumption disgusted her. She worried she’d poison the baby, that she’d cause irreparable damage to her minuscule organs. The husband was sent out to the store for baby formula. He always bought a strawberry variety, the most expensive flavour from the cheapest brand. For the first few weeks, while the husband was at work, Marta entertained the neighbour’s son. It no longer held the same appeal though, when right as he thrust into her, baby Martha would start crying from across the room.

“Don’t you have to go check on her?”

“It doesn’t matter. Come back into my arms.”

“I can’t do this while it’s - she’s-”

“Just ignore it. Like the whirring of a refrigerator.”

He stopped coming over. Marta took to lying on her back in the kitchen and counting the ceiling tiles. She somehow never got the same number twice.

Generally speaking, Martha was an agreeable toddler. Rarely fussed. The only tantrum she ever threw in public was at the grocery store, when she’d wanted peaches, but Marta ignored her. She threw herself on the cold floor of the fruit section and wailed. Marta was convinced that her little lungs would burst. She suddenly became incredibly frightened of this creature. She was sure Martha would explode right there in front of her, and that she would have to sweep her arms and legs–and her head which had just begun to grow a soft peach fuzz –from out of the various aisles of the store. She watched a man place a lamb chop into his cart. Marta hurried out into the parking lot, lit a cigarette, and drove home with the groceries, but without Martha.

“Where is Martha?”

“The grocery store.”

The husband thought he should hit her, and a part of Marta hoped that he would. But the moment passed and he got into their car, wordlessly. He drove in a hurry back to the neighbourhood store, where a swarm of concerned women had gathered around baby Martha. One had untied the scarf she had been wearing around her head and was wrapping it around Martha’s little shoulders. She wasn’t crying. She just looked up at the approaching car and stood, as though this was nothing out of the ordinary. The father sheepishly stepped out of the driver’s seat, and grabbed his daughter without so much as a “Hello.”

When they arrived home, Marta was on the kitchen floor. Her shoulders untensed when she saw the baby hadn’t, in fact, exploded. Martha was eating a peach.

“Where did she get that?”

“One of the ladies at the store gave it to her.”

“Make sure she doesn’t choke on the pit.”

Despite it all, Martha grew to be a spirited young girl. Her mother never looked directly at her. She didn’t really look through her either, exactly. When she spoke to her, her mother’s eyes always focused slightly over Martha’s shoulder, as though there was always something more deserving of attention happening a few metres behind her. Martha didn’t care, she craved her mother’s approval but not her warmth. She excelled in school because she knew her mother had never been able to. She’d parade her report cards around the apartment at the end of each school year and watch her mother stand a little taller when she’d read the results. Her mother never laid on the floor on the days she brought home the report cards. She liked her father, although found it hard to respect him. He would hold her hand when they crossed the street and Martha was never sure who was keeping who from running into oncoming traffic.

When she became a teenager, Martha began to pretend that she lived with a ghost. A ghost who occasionally turned the television on in the middle of the night to watch the foreign news, who’d leave the tap running for hours in the kitchen sink over a mountain of unclean dishes, who’d go for walks without closing the door properly so that sometimes one of the neighbours would pop their head into the apartment and look around. Her mother withdrew into herself. She spoke so infrequently, so softly, that Martha would startle whenever she’d hear her voice. By the time she graduated high school, she’d forgotten what it sounded like. She posed for pictures with friends and watched them get flustered and mockingly refuse kisses from their parents. She felt happy for them. Her parents hadn’t made it. Her father had to work and her mother was probably counting tiles. Martha walked home with her graduation cap in hand.

Later that summer, on the first cool evening after an oppressively hot few days, Martha walked home from the movies with a boyfriend whose name she could never remember. They passed her mother on one of her daily walks. She was wearing a kimono and somehow looked thinner than Martha recalled. Neither said anything to the other. Martha hoped that the ghost had remembered to close the front door.

“That was my mother,” Martha said to the boyfriend.

“Aren’t you gonna introduce me?”

“No.”

Months later, when all the leaves had fallen already, Martha’s father died unexpectedly of a liver complication. It was a rather awkward situation that, had they been more prominent of a family in the community, would surely have caused a stir. His clandestine alcohol consumption had caught up to him. Neither Marta nor Martha had ever seen him take a sip. They didn’t understand how this could be possible. After the modest funeral, Marta was sorting through his closet when she came across a loosened floorboard, revealing a decade’s worth of empty bottles. She put the floorboard back and threw away all of the clothing she had thought of bringing to the church for the rummage sale. Martha heard her mother muttering to herself from inside the closet.

“These things are cursed. This shirt belonged to a cursed man. I was a cursed man’s wife.”

So, she thought to herself, this ghost can speak.

Martha knew, at this point, that she had to leave town. The boyfriend whose name she often forgot had flirted with the idea of getting married but he had an adoring family and no intentions of ever moving away from them.

“I could never leave Brutus behind! I couldn’t live with myself,” he said.

Brutus was an elderly schnauzer with a penchant for looking a person directly in the eyes. Martha supposed that she understood. If she too had a Brutus, maybe she’d feel less inclined to leave.

She got it into her head that her only way out was money. Good money and fast. She started to frequent the ritziest bar in town–oysters, only one fried thing on the menu–and tried her best to seduce who she assumed were their richest patrons. Her understanding of wealth was fuzzy, and on more than one occasion she’d found herself in conversation with a man for hours before realising that his suit was rented, and his cologne cheap.

She was as stubborn as she was committed, and more than anything, she was desperate. On a slow night, when she was getting ready to go home after striking out, she saw Peter sitting in the corner. She knew immediately he was her ticket out. He worked in an office tower in the closest city and was visiting extended family for a weekend. He rarely ever came to the town. It was now or never. Martha struck up a conversation and knew exactly what to say, which way to toss her hair over her shoulder, and when it was appropriate to graze his arm. Peter was an unremarkable, charmless man who was used to women ignoring him. He fell for Martha quickly. After a few months of him visiting her every other weekend, he proposed. He knelt down in front of the neighbourhood post office. He was on both knees. She said yes. They married in town just a week later. The wedding was intimate. Martha invited no one. She wore a plain, beige, linen dress, and walked herself down the aisle.

She debated leaving without saying goodbye. There were, however, some things she wanted to take with her from the apartment. A childhood journal full of entries about a pretend mother whose hair smelled like baking, and a stuffed donkey she couldn’t bring herself to part with. She hoped her mother would be out when she stopped by. 

Marta was home. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a plate full of untouched ham in front of her.

“Mama. I’m leaving now.”

“Would you like some cold cuts? I set them out, but I’m not hungry.”

Martha felt a lump in her throat. This was the closest she’d felt to her mother in years.

“No, mama. Did you hear me? I said I’m leaving now.”

“I heard you.”

“Well, goodbye?”

“Will you call me?”

This startled Martha, who’d never been asked to do anything for her mother.

“Yes–yes of course I’ll call you. I’ll call you every day. Would you like that?”

“Too much.”

“Okay. How often would you like? Once a week?”

“Yes, good. Once a week–good.”

Martha, perhaps taken aback by the exceptional moment or misreading it altogether, bent down to kiss her mother on the cheek. Her mother remained still and brought her hand to her face. Martha wasn’t sure if her mother’s intent was to wipe away the kiss or to preserve it on her cheek for a moment longer. She dropped her hand without much emotion.

“Goodbye, Mama. I’ll call you in one week.”

“Goodbye. May God be with you.”

The new apartment was grand. She’d never seen it before moving in and it exceeded her expectations. It was triple the size of where she had grown up. Peter was banal. She liked to think of him as part of the decor, like an old lamp that she wasn’t allowed to get rid of. A lamp with a bank account. He was generally uninterested in sex with her, thankfully, and she sought to satisfy her needs with a young grocery store clerk who bagged her items with extra care and precaution.

He would come over when Peter was at work, and they would drink expensive wines while listening to reggae records that Peter had collected while in college. They would take edibles and hold hands while lying side by side on a thirty-thousand-dollar rug. She wanted for nothing. She began losing hair, plagued by the thought of getting pregnant and birthing a daughter who would inherit her mother’s soul. She’d step out of the shower and have to fish out hairballs the size of rats.

She had called Marta weekly after moving for about four months but her mother had never picked up, and she’d stopped trying–except on New Year’s Eve, when she’d call and leave a message on the answering machine wishing her mother all the best in the new year and remind her to visit her father’s grave.

When she least expected it–certain she had been careful with the grocer boy and, on the rare occasions, with Peter–Martha became pregnant. She worried the child would have the grocer boy’s olive complexion and that Peter would notice. She hoped he wouldn’t mind. The fears were impossible to quell. She opted not to sleep in order to avoid having the same nightmares night after night. The ones in which she birthed her mother, in which her daughter comes out still, unmoving, lying on the floor, never making eye contact and never calling. The ones in which her daughter comes out a ghost, or even a hairball the size of a rat.

The phone rang on a winter evening when Martha was in her eighth month of pregnancy. It was her former boyfriend–the one with the dog.

“I’m so sorry, Martha. Your mother’s passed.”

“My mother’s what?”

“Passed. Passed away. She died overnight. Heart attack, they said.”

“Oh.”

“I’m really sorry, Martha.”

“Thanks. What’s gonna happen?”

“What do you mean?”

“To the body?”

“I mean, aren’t you going to come back for it? It’s really your decision.”

“Tell them they can sell it to the hospital. I don’t know. Tell them to slice her brain open and study it.”

“I -”

“How’s Brutus?”

“He’s still alive. The vet says it’s a miracle he’s lived this long.”

“That’s wonderful news. I have to go now. Goodnight.”

As she hung up the phone, Martha felt a contraction. Please no. Not yet–not right now, not now, please. She called for Peter in a panic and he rushed her to the nearest hospital. It ranked among the best in the country. The nurses were slim and beautiful.

Flat on her back, she closed her eyes and demanded a sedative. She wanted so badly to avoid the reality of what was happening to her. She felt helpless. Pathetic. She squeezed a hand, Peter’s or maybe one of the beautiful nurses’ and pushed just like they asked her to. Pushed and squeezed.

A guttural sound escaped her, and it took her a moment to realise that it hadn’t come from her. 

“It’s a boy,” they said. A screeching, loud boy with pale skin. He continued to wail until they placed him on her breast, where he latched onto her nipple almost immediately.

“That’s quicker than any baby I’ve ever seen,” the thinnest of the nurses said. “He must really love his mommy.”

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Ari Mazur is in her final semester in Concordia University’s creative writing program. She finds joy in writing, walking around, and apartment hunting. She hopes to continue pursuing these hobbies for a long time.