Tombs Under the Sun
Emily Learman | Nonfiction, Fall 2026
The crooked sharp edges of coat hangers glinted in my mind, slim and metallic. The quicksilver flash of thin instruments. Dirty Dancing when Baby got her rich daddy to come help in the middle of the night, those prim white fingers tight on the leather handles of his doctor’s case. Dancing real slow, hips low and swanky, rubbing caressing grinding. Desire too hot in the dark of the campy night with the restless and infinite fireflies and the slickness of dew-soaked lawns. I carried a watermelon. I carried something until I bled, I bled, I bled until there was nothing left quickening inside of me anymore and I was barren with an habitual emptiness turned foreign and cruel.
The reality was winter in Berlin and the harsh leaden sky and the nauseating smell of cigarettes. Pills swallowed. Two of them. The first one down and I nearly vomited on the U-Bahn home with its terrible shuddering above the flat gray face of the river Spree. Hands on my womb under the covers, grasping at something on its way out, and the insipid glare of the television in the long hours of restless solitude.
They make you take them one at a time. In case of hemorrhage, when the body decides to spurt out all the red life that it has and be done with it. I had two weeks' worth of sicknotes; though my gynecologist told me with her head muffled between my legs that I was medically fine. My vagina was bare and dangling, with the steady seep of my blood–dark and syrupy–onto the laminate floor. Then it was over. Gone. Time to clean myself up.
_______________
We danced together, at the very beginning of things. Unrestrained and heady. That was many months before my own hollowing out, in the dark labyrinth of the club where we first met. Techno music ratcheting and banking, settling along nerve endings and fizzing around on the skin. Fishnets and fog machines. He wanted to share my cigarettes. Wanted to dance behind me, his lanky body mirroring the loose movements of my own like phantom limbs, the pale shudder of my arms and the baring of my sweaty neck, electric and high. After only a couple of weeks, he wanted to be mine. And I was his, too, for a while.
Then came the pills and I was emptied. He was swiftly freed of an unwelcome fatherhood, and I could not remember anymore the desire to dance with a stranger in the night, teeth flashing in the dark and knees tireless with the beat. After the pills, I tried my best not to look at things too closely: the stringy clots of mucousy blood, the fragments of something unwanted and then disposed of, my own living body and its sudden, ineffable foreignness, and his dark eyes, flattened and wary. Like unsheathed knives, words gained a sharpness, they slipped from our vocabularies. Dangerous. Not permitted on our tongues.
Abortion: abhorrent and not enough, a cataclysmic nonsense that covers up and distorts; a bad word, something hushed, something better forgotten, which ought to stay neatly tucked in the backs of throats.
Baby: not what it was and not what it ever will be, so it needs not be said. Never have to picture it or the round softness of its head, the sweet feel of its warm limbs.
Hysteria: as in the peripatetic ramblings of the womb, the unexpected sundering of uterine walls, the breaking of a woman from within her own body, the quivering uncertainty in her skull.
Better left unuttered, those words, but my head was teeming with them and their fertile offspring. Begetting and begetting and begetting.
_______________
Marrakesh is a hectic spasm of life. The sound of motorcycle engines rips through narrow alleys and the hot air of the desert shifts and mingles with the shimmering quality of the sun. Cobras coil out of baskets in the medina, their heads swiveling and wary, their scales dulled with dust, and trained pigeons sit in formations waiting to show a fine fold of wing, the snap of their small beaks. The souk vendors vie with their stares and shouts, their constant, raucous attempts at my attention. Madame, madame! The butchered bodies of small animals – chickens, fragments of goats – hang from open stalls and their warm rotten stench cloaks my senses. I am out of place. My obvious foreignness rankles. I sink my fingers deep into the colorful wool of woven carpets, seeking comfort.
The men here seem to bristle, or perhaps to silently heckle. They watch me with obvious eyes as they lounge drinking mint teas, bodies easy and big at small tables. Their women do not walk out uncovered or alone; they are hastened, in flowing veils and long skirts, on the arms of a proprietary man. I am too aware of the pale poke of my limbs through the sleeves of my dress and all of the bare places where those gazes land.
There is a loose thread within me, frayed just enough that those men could unravel me; they could be what ruptures me and strips me bare until my foreign body is just a spectacle of undone womanhood in the plainness of the dirt street. The sins of the flesh. Desire and fear and the infernal need to be held in the long expanse of the night. The sun is bright on the seams of me, and the children in the streets look at me with big eyes and hold out their small fingers. Madame, Madame! The slim alleyways are red; red like the steamy insides of a body, like the tight hot warmth of a womb. Visceral. S'il vous plaît, Madame!
There is no blueprint for this grief, but I am tainted and ruined with it.
_______________
Between the dancefloor and the jewel-blue lakes, waltzing between the clapboard cabins and down the pine needle-strewn paths: it was innocence, ratcheting up, bursting, receding, and then lost, tumbled down the sides of green mountains and settled into the too-easy swing of limbs in the summer nights. I first watched Dirty Dancing as a teenager, entrenched in virginity and an underlying rhetoric of Christian purity, the type which allowed me to condemn the girls who partook in sexual acts while craving them deeply myself. The brazen contact of legs and torsos, the low movements of hips and crotches against each other–that type of dancing was sex itself. It stirred my carefully latent desire, tainted me with the knowledge of my own lust. But in the center of it all was Baby, sweet and pure. Just like me.
Penny was Baby’s opposite. The blonde dancer, striking and provocative, whom Baby finds in the dark shadows of the resort kitchen, sobbing alone amidst the stainless steel. Then Johnny is there to sweep Penny’s shaking body up into his arms. I trail behind with Baby, uncertain but curious, untouched and unaware; Penny is a foreign being, her body different from my own, altered irrevocably. The harshness of her anger bites. The confirmation of my own naiveté: go back to your playpen, Baby.
It wasn’t Johnny who got her pregnant, not like Baby assumed. It was the slick waiter with his bright smile and Yale manners. But his hands were never bloodied; he could claim a false guiltlessness, shirk the responsibility, the burden of that coming child. He could insinuate, in his spotless white jacket, that he wasn’t the only man who had shared Penny’s bed. A lie which no one found difficult to believe.
Penny was a victim; yet I always held a condemnation toward her which I hate to inspect, which I could never quite name until the moment I lost my innocence in the same way. Penny was different from Baby. She wasn’t gentle like soft leg warmers, like floating over the grass in the dawn light after loving. Penny was long-ridden, sharp-tongued, hardened. She should have known better. (Wasn’t that insinuated, wasn’t that clear in the eyes of Baby’s father as he looked down at Penny, broken and pale, in her narrow bed?) The way she moved wasn’t like the coltish, cute, first-time hip swings of Baby, but blatant and slinky and wrong.
Since my own abortion I am preoccupied with those offscreen parts of the story which we never got to know. How Penny must have felt safe and seen and loved by that waiter. Those midnight trysts in the woods, by the dark mirror of a lake, between starched sheets. How she opened herself up to him and it was special, seldom; something like a lullaby shrouding her in the green ravines of those overgrown green Catskills. So trusting and open. Fleeting.
How Johnny must have used his teeth to tear off the tops of condom wrappers. Bent the strong column of his neck to fit its elasticity to himself, his hair falling over his cheekbones before the tangle of hips and lips and soft curls and limbs, still limned with the sweat of the dirty mambo. Nobody puts Baby in a corner. Nobody gets Baby into trouble. Not that lower-class-staff-cabin-backless-dress-open-legs-rhythmic-hip-thrusting sort of trouble. That Penny sort of trouble.
_______________
Our riad has a courtyard full of pale archways and palms, bedrooms partitioned off by tall wooden doors. There are carpet-covered divans and fat cushions, jewel-colored lamps that cast filigreed shadows. Our room is tiled in infinite turquoise squares which turn lapis in the cool light of the evenings. The other guests are far off, unheard in the nights. He has a brand-new pack of condoms in his backpack that we bought just for this trip; because we use protection now. Thin, rubbery, slightly lubricated. He used to enter me uncovered and his cum would spurt onto my abdomen, pool and slide in the curves of my stomach. Now we are careful. So careful that he doesn’t even want to touch me, even though I am gaping open with need. There is blood between us, yet his breaths in the night are solid and easy. Steady. No hitches no worries no black thoughts that come to take his sleep.
In the dim mornings I am awakened by the adhan. Throaty and layered, climbing into the dawn sky like a minaret. Within me there is an urge to rise, go out, walk the fresh coolness of the predawn streets, prostrate myself, nose and mouth and forehead pressed to the ground, lowered down for a foreign god, my lips fervent with unknown prayers. I imagine that the air will be thick with incense and the suffocation of guilt, and I think my womb might collapse and drag me down into its uneasy depths, its perilous wanderings. He does not stir beside me. It bled clean right out of me, and I let it leak down the shower’s drain. Even the clots.
_______________
On our third morning I cannot get out of bed. This is worse than fumbling your dance moves, Baby. Worse than the fucking Pachanga. I am heavy with the badness, that ugliness, those should-have-known-betters. The curved white arch above the bed is like the pale jaw of an ancient beast in the gloom.
In Berlin we had a counselling session before the pills. There was a bearded man in a dull sweater, and he poured tea with a bland smile, and he told me: Du bist nicht schuldig. It is not your fault. Or, the literal translation: you are not guilty. I didn’t know until he said it how much I needed to hear it. How much I didn’t believe him. He gave us a large shiny booklet with colorful pictures of condoms and IUDs and blisters of hormonal birth control. He looked so deeply into my tired eyes and all I wanted was to look away, skittish at his kind attention.
He asked me how I thought I would feel when it was over with, and I had to ask my boyfriend what the German word for relieved was. Erleichtert. What else do you say when you have no money and you didn’t plan this and your boyfriend sits beside you and seems to radiate a steady pulse of annoyance that toys at the edges of your sorrow and makes it difficult to breathe, let alone sit still and speak German; and all you want is to be out of this shabby state-funded office with its blatant sterility? Erleichtert. Let me go now and be an emptied vessel. Bitte.
In Morocco my relief has vanished like a mirage seen from the slogging back of a camel in the sand. The air is warm and too heavy in my lungs.
When I do not come out to breakfast, he returns to find me. What is it? He sounds too calm. Somewhat wearied. You know what it is. I cannot say more, like there is something on my throat, choking off my air. The bed dips beneath the weight of him and I feel the broadening expanse of him, breaths pressing into my spine. The hot, vibrant, aliveness of him makes me angry in a vague and nameless way. I cannot say the word, what I’ve done, and it might break me.
I am weeping again. The shadow of the ceiling fan is undulating and chaotic. There is a clatter of breakfast plates in the courtyard; low voices muffled by the ornate wooden door. He tells me we should get out there, enjoy our vacation. He kisses my forehead; smoothes his warm hands down my nape, my back, my arms.
He said that to the man in Berlin, too. The counselor’s bearded head cocked to the side as he asked my boyfriend how he felt about it all. My eyes were hot on his lips when he shrugged and said: I just want to get this over with. Enjoy our trip to Morocco. That stole my breath from my lungs; but I looked out at the deadened gray expanse of the winter sky to hide it.
At breakfast I sip a coffee and smoke a couple of cigarettes as I watch the French family across the courtyard with their pretty toddler. He is blonde and precocious, and they dote on him with jam-smeared pancakes and kisses. The sun is already hot, and I am wretched from the cigarettes. The proprietor of our riad, Jean, comes to check on us. Ça va? We both smile; the smiles of liars. Oui, ça va. Très bien. Then the French child shrieks with delight. His curls are like tendrils of sunshine. I flinch; and a part of me wishes to take him into my arms and let him nuzzle into my neck, but my fingers are soiled with ash.
_______________
Months later he told me that it was over before things got messy, before either one of us had to bleed. Then it was summer, and I was still cold, and he told me with his eyes unfocused that even before the pills it had dissipated, whatever had been there before. That particular fleeting way in which he had loved me. But then you got pregnant. I remember the way that it had lingered in the warm air between us, the warm air that could not penetrate me. A verbal slap. You, he said. I remember that pronoun the most. As if it was only me who had done it. As if I had planned it or wanted it. As if I could have known that abortion would indeed feel like ending a life. That that ending would mark the loss of an innocence I could never get back.
_______________
The sprawl of the Jewish cemetery is like rows of teeth. Pale molars, worn with age, jutting from the red dirt of Marrakesh. The sky reaches up blue and endless, and I don’t know why we have come here. My hips are begging to saunter myself out of this place. I’ve had enough of death. Restless and overhot, I follow his slow steps. I am a tomb. I have made myself into a tomb. The sun is a reproach as it reflects on the low gravestones, and I feel as if I am going to collapse again, and he is going to tell me again with his lifeless mouth about the science of it; that it was not developed yet. Only cells.
I ponder the small rocks which have been placed on these graves to commemorate the long dead. I hate the sweat that coats me. I hate the emptiness which sits in the core of me and seeps into all of me. I hate the dead who have graves and physical substance, who are still allowed to receive small attentions from the living. I’m just exhausted from it. That’s all. From all of it. It is a confession. I am not sure he has heard me, or whether I have spoken aloud.
That man in Berlin in his ugly sweater: he said the word that I hadn’t even let myself think, not before the pills or since; but now it swells up inside of me and presses on my sinuses, my pinkish limbs, my uneasy lips. Guilt is tangible and crystalline; you could hold it in your palm and tell the whole merciless future of the world from the way its sharp edges catch the light and refract. Distort. Those pills cost 400€. I paid it all myself.
_______________
Jean has lent us his car for the afternoon. We have left Marrakesh behind, and the earth is ruddy as we drive through the flat landscape around the city, climb steadily up into the red rocks of the foothills. The hot air through the passenger window plays through my hair with stiff fingers, and the openness of the terrain after the closed-in space of the city is a confrontation with my own smallness. A pleasant sensation. My insignificance under the blue endless span of the hot sky, against the sprawl of Morocco’s dust. His posture is easy behind the wheel, his skin a darker brown from the sun, and here on the road I think that if we just keep going, only drive on with the wind on my cheeks, that maybe the emptiness inside of me could melt into nonexistence in the heat, it could be lost, fly clear out the gap of the open window.
There are possibilities which startle us, take our breath, mark us deeper than we even comprehend; they spin and undulate and dance within us, they leave imprints of such startling uncertainty, such capacities for emotion which we have never known to be ours. They are so altering that in the very moment we realize their poignancy, their touch is irrevocable. Inescapable. And it was false to think that it was a baby, it never was. It was only the possibility of one. A possibility, seen so briefly and new, an unexpected and potent dose of longing, taken away like a rug swept from beneath my feet.
When I knew that I was pregnant I felt it then within me. Something tiny and precious, so easily shattered. An imagined child. And larger, imagined too, but more real for its decades-long life: the falsehood of my very self, so long uncontested. A good girl like Baby, in the seemingly untouchable softness of youth. Sustained by the rhetoric of a world that forces the narrow dichotomy of good and bad onto womanhood itself. Until it is taken up into cells, into tissues, into movements and thoughts and everything that a woman is. Then I bled. I bled. I bled. Let it leak red and hot and raw from my body, that forced way of being in the world, that wretched paltry fallacy of goodness. And now echoing in the spacious cavities of me, seeking ways to escape from my aching lungs: there is a new truth of me. I am torn open and reborn, shaking and raw and wild in the world like the first pinkish streaks of dawn at the end of a desert night.
The Atlas loom rugged and snowcapped. We are higher up now. We have climbed to a village of small clusters of mud brick homes; their occupants watch us from doorways and the thin sliver of the road’s shoulder. Their children stream toward us in gaggles and then latch onto the car’s open windows and hang on like leeches as we drive. Madame, Madame, Madame! Their faces are terribly close to my own, and I am stricken with a dull horror at their nearness. We close the windows but still they cling, their small fingers finding grip on the thin ledge of the car door. I close my eyes, hold my breath as their small bodies linger. He speeds up, letting the dust spew behind us. They’ll be fine, he says to us both. They’ll be fine.
I cannot look at his face; I do not know him anymore. I have only just begun to know myself, sifting through the last broken remnants of an illusion. We are suspended in time for this moment; a precipice. An ending. A faltering, barren, unknown beginning. Then the last of the children drops off into the red road, unharmed but not quickly forgotten, and we must drive on, our faces tight and empty on the mountains ahead.
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“This story lay stuck deep within me for a couple of winters before I could excavate it. Before I could stomach the task of freeing it, dusting it off, inspecting its shape and boundaries and implications. This piece is an imprint of my soul after its transformation in the aftermath of my abortion; and my attempt at bravery by not staying quiet about my pain, a pain shared by many women.”
Emily Learman is an American expat living in Berlin. She is currently pursuing a masters in European Literature.
Tombs Under the Sun
Emily Learman | Fiction, Fall 2026
The crooked sharp edges of coat hangers glinted in my mind, slim and metallic. The quicksilver flash of thin instruments. Dirty Dancing when Baby got her rich daddy to come help in the middle of the night, those prim white fingers tight on the leather handles of his doctor’s case. Dancing real slow, hips low and swanky, rubbing caressing grinding. Desire too hot in the dark of the campy night with the restless and infinite fireflies and the slickness of dew-soaked lawns. I carried a watermelon. I carried something until I bled, I bled, I bled until there was nothing left quickening inside of me anymore and I was barren with an habitual emptiness turned foreign and cruel.
The reality was winter in Berlin and the harsh leaden sky and the nauseating smell of cigarettes. Pills swallowed. Two of them. The first one down and I nearly vomited on the U-Bahn home with its terrible shuddering above the flat gray face of the river Spree. Hands on my womb under the covers, grasping at something on its way out, and the insipid glare of the television in the long hours of restless solitude.
They make you take them one at a time. In case of hemorrhage, when the body decides to spurt out all the red life that it has and be done with it. I had two weeks' worth of sicknotes; though my gynecologist told me with her head muffled between my legs that I was medically fine. My vagina was bare and dangling, with the steady seep of my blood–dark and syrupy–onto the laminate floor. Then it was over. Gone. Time to clean myself up.
_______________
We danced together, at the very beginning of things. Unrestrained and heady. That was many months before my own hollowing out, in the dark labyrinth of the club where we first met. Techno music ratcheting and banking, settling along nerve endings and fizzing around on the skin. Fishnets and fog machines. He wanted to share my cigarettes. Wanted to dance behind me, his lanky body mirroring the loose movements of my own like phantom limbs, the pale shudder of my arms and the baring of my sweaty neck, electric and high. After only a couple of weeks, he wanted to be mine. And I was his, too, for a while.
Then came the pills and I was emptied. He was swiftly freed of an unwelcome fatherhood, and I could not remember anymore the desire to dance with a stranger in the night, teeth flashing in the dark and knees tireless with the beat. After the pills, I tried my best not to look at things too closely: the stringy clots of mucousy blood, the fragments of something unwanted and then disposed of, my own living body and its sudden, ineffable foreignness, and his dark eyes, flattened and wary. Like unsheathed knives, words gained a sharpness, they slipped from our vocabularies. Dangerous. Not permitted on our tongues.
Abortion: abhorrent and not enough, a cataclysmic nonsense that covers up and distorts; a bad word, something hushed, something better forgotten, which ought to stay neatly tucked in the backs of throats.
Baby: not what it was and not what it ever will be, so it needs not be said. Never have to picture it or the round softness of its head, the sweet feel of its warm limbs.
Hysteria: as in the peripatetic ramblings of the womb, the unexpected sundering of uterine walls, the breaking of a woman from within her own body, the quivering uncertainty in her skull.
Better left unuttered, those words, but my head was teeming with them and their fertile offspring. Begetting and begetting and begetting.
_______________
Marrakesh is a hectic spasm of life. The sound of motorcycle engines rips through narrow alleys and the hot air of the desert shifts and mingles with the shimmering quality of the sun. Cobras coil out of baskets in the medina, their heads swiveling and wary, their scales dulled with dust, and trained pigeons sit in formations waiting to show a fine fold of wing, the snap of their small beaks. The souk vendors vie with their stares and shouts, their constant, raucous attempts at my attention. Madame, madame! The butchered bodies of small animals – chickens, fragments of goats – hang from open stalls and their warm rotten stench cloaks my senses. I am out of place. My obvious foreignness rankles. I sink my fingers deep into the colorful wool of woven carpets, seeking comfort.
The men here seem to bristle, or perhaps to silently heckle. They watch me with obvious eyes as they lounge drinking mint teas, bodies easy and big at small tables. Their women do not walk out uncovered or alone; they are hastened, in flowing veils and long skirts, on the arms of a proprietary man. I am too aware of the pale poke of my limbs through the sleeves of my dress and all of the bare places where those gazes land.
There is a loose thread within me, frayed just enough that those men could unravel me; they could be what ruptures me and strips me bare until my foreign body is just a spectacle of undone womanhood in the plainness of the dirt street. The sins of the flesh. Desire and fear and the infernal need to be held in the long expanse of the night. The sun is bright on the seams of me, and the children in the streets look at me with big eyes and hold out their small fingers. Madame, Madame! The slim alleyways are red; red like the steamy insides of a body, like the tight hot warmth of a womb. Visceral. S'il vous plaît, Madame!
There is no blueprint for this grief, but I am tainted and ruined with it.
_______________
Between the dancefloor and the jewel-blue lakes, waltzing between the clapboard cabins and down the pine needle-strewn paths: it was innocence, ratcheting up, bursting, receding, and then lost, tumbled down the sides of green mountains and settled into the too-easy swing of limbs in the summer nights. I first watched Dirty Dancing as a teenager, entrenched in virginity and an underlying rhetoric of Christian purity, the type which allowed me to condemn the girls who partook in sexual acts while craving them deeply myself. The brazen contact of legs and torsos, the low movements of hips and crotches against each other–that type of dancing was sex itself. It stirred my carefully latent desire, tainted me with the knowledge of my own lust. But in the center of it all was Baby, sweet and pure. Just like me.
Penny was Baby’s opposite. The blonde dancer, striking and provocative, whom Baby finds in the dark shadows of the resort kitchen, sobbing alone amidst the stainless steel. Then Johnny is there to sweep Penny’s shaking body up into his arms. I trail behind with Baby, uncertain but curious, untouched and unaware; Penny is a foreign being, her body different from my own, altered irrevocably. The harshness of her anger bites. The confirmation of my own naiveté: go back to your playpen, Baby.
It wasn’t Johnny who got her pregnant, not like Baby assumed. It was the slick waiter with his bright smile and Yale manners. But his hands were never bloodied; he could claim a false guiltlessness, shirk the responsibility, the burden of that coming child. He could insinuate, in his spotless white jacket, that he wasn’t the only man who had shared Penny’s bed. A lie which no one found difficult to believe.
Penny was a victim; yet I always held a condemnation toward her which I hate to inspect, which I could never quite name until the moment I lost my innocence in the same way. Penny was different from Baby. She wasn’t gentle like soft leg warmers, like floating over the grass in the dawn light after loving. Penny was long-ridden, sharp-tongued, hardened. She should have known better. (Wasn’t that insinuated, wasn’t that clear in the eyes of Baby’s father as he looked down at Penny, broken and pale, in her narrow bed?) The way she moved wasn’t like the coltish, cute, first-time hip swings of Baby, but blatant and slinky and wrong.
Since my own abortion I am preoccupied with those offscreen parts of the story which we never got to know. How Penny must have felt safe and seen and loved by that waiter. Those midnight trysts in the woods, by the dark mirror of a lake, between starched sheets. How she opened herself up to him and it was special, seldom; something like a lullaby shrouding her in the green ravines of those overgrown green Catskills. So trusting and open. Fleeting.
How Johnny must have used his teeth to tear off the tops of condom wrappers. Bent the strong column of his neck to fit its elasticity to himself, his hair falling over his cheekbones before the tangle of hips and lips and soft curls and limbs, still limned with the sweat of the dirty mambo. Nobody puts Baby in a corner. Nobody gets Baby into trouble. Not that lower-class-staff-cabin-backless-dress-open-legs-rhythmic-hip-thrusting sort of trouble. That Penny sort of trouble.
_______________
Our riad has a courtyard full of pale archways and palms, bedrooms partitioned off by tall wooden doors. There are carpet-covered divans and fat cushions, jewel-colored lamps that cast filigreed shadows. Our room is tiled in infinite turquoise squares which turn lapis in the cool light of the evenings. The other guests are far off, unheard in the nights. He has a brand-new pack of condoms in his backpack that we bought just for this trip; because we use protection now. Thin, rubbery, slightly lubricated. He used to enter me uncovered and his cum would spurt onto my abdomen, pool and slide in the curves of my stomach. Now we are careful. So careful that he doesn’t even want to touch me, even though I am gaping open with need. There is blood between us, yet his breaths in the night are solid and easy. Steady. No hitches no worries no black thoughts that come to take his sleep.
In the dim mornings I am awakened by the adhan. Throaty and layered, climbing into the dawn sky like a minaret. Within me there is an urge to rise, go out, walk the fresh coolness of the predawn streets, prostrate myself, nose and mouth and forehead pressed to the ground, lowered down for a foreign god, my lips fervent with unknown prayers. I imagine that the air will be thick with incense and the suffocation of guilt, and I think my womb might collapse and drag me down into its uneasy depths, its perilous wanderings. He does not stir beside me. It bled clean right out of me, and I let it leak down the shower’s drain. Even the clots.
_______________
On our third morning I cannot get out of bed. This is worse than fumbling your dance moves, Baby. Worse than the fucking Pachanga. I am heavy with the badness, that ugliness, those should-have-known-betters. The curved white arch above the bed is like the pale jaw of an ancient beast in the gloom.
In Berlin we had a counselling session before the pills. There was a bearded man in a dull sweater, and he poured tea with a bland smile, and he told me: Du bist nicht schuldig. It is not your fault. Or, the literal translation: you are not guilty. I didn’t know until he said it how much I needed to hear it. How much I didn’t believe him. He gave us a large shiny booklet with colorful pictures of condoms and IUDs and blisters of hormonal birth control. He looked so deeply into my tired eyes and all I wanted was to look away, skittish at his kind attention.
He asked me how I thought I would feel when it was over with, and I had to ask my boyfriend what the German word for relieved was. Erleichtert. What else do you say when you have no money and you didn’t plan this and your boyfriend sits beside you and seems to radiate a steady pulse of annoyance that toys at the edges of your sorrow and makes it difficult to breathe, let alone sit still and speak German; and all you want is to be out of this shabby state-funded office with its blatant sterility? Erleichtert. Let me go now and be an emptied vessel. Bitte.
In Morocco my relief has vanished like a mirage seen from the slogging back of a camel in the sand. The air is warm and too heavy in my lungs.
When I do not come out to breakfast, he returns to find me. What is it? He sounds too calm. Somewhat wearied. You know what it is. I cannot say more, like there is something on my throat, choking off my air. The bed dips beneath the weight of him and I feel the broadening expanse of him, breaths pressing into my spine. The hot, vibrant, aliveness of him makes me angry in a vague and nameless way. I cannot say the word, what I’ve done, and it might break me.
I am weeping again. The shadow of the ceiling fan is undulating and chaotic. There is a clatter of breakfast plates in the courtyard; low voices muffled by the ornate wooden door. He tells me we should get out there, enjoy our vacation. He kisses my forehead; smoothes his warm hands down my nape, my back, my arms.
He said that to the man in Berlin, too. The counselor’s bearded head cocked to the side as he asked my boyfriend how he felt about it all. My eyes were hot on his lips when he shrugged and said: I just want to get this over with. Enjoy our trip to Morocco. That stole my breath from my lungs; but I looked out at the deadened gray expanse of the winter sky to hide it.
At breakfast I sip a coffee and smoke a couple of cigarettes as I watch the French family across the courtyard with their pretty toddler. He is blonde and precocious, and they dote on him with jam-smeared pancakes and kisses. The sun is already hot, and I am wretched from the cigarettes. The proprietor of our riad, Jean, comes to check on us. Ça va? We both smile; the smiles of liars. Oui, ça va. Très bien. Then the French child shrieks with delight. His curls are like tendrils of sunshine. I flinch; and a part of me wishes to take him into my arms and let him nuzzle into my neck, but my fingers are soiled with ash.
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Months later he told me that it was over before things got messy, before either one of us had to bleed. Then it was summer, and I was still cold, and he told me with his eyes unfocused that even before the pills it had dissipated, whatever had been there before. That particular fleeting way in which he had loved me. But then you got pregnant. I remember the way that it had lingered in the warm air between us, the warm air that could not penetrate me. A verbal slap. You, he said. I remember that pronoun the most. As if it was only me who had done it. As if I had planned it or wanted it. As if I could have known that abortion would indeed feel like ending a life. That that ending would mark the loss of an innocence I could never get back.
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The sprawl of the Jewish cemetery is like rows of teeth. Pale molars, worn with age, jutting from the red dirt of Marrakesh. The sky reaches up blue and endless, and I don’t know why we have come here. My hips are begging to saunter myself out of this place. I’ve had enough of death. Restless and overhot, I follow his slow steps. I am a tomb. I have made myself into a tomb. The sun is a reproach as it reflects on the low gravestones, and I feel as if I am going to collapse again, and he is going to tell me again with his lifeless mouth about the science of it; that it was not developed yet. Only cells.
I ponder the small rocks which have been placed on these graves to commemorate the long dead. I hate the sweat that coats me. I hate the emptiness which sits in the core of me and seeps into all of me. I hate the dead who have graves and physical substance, who are still allowed to receive small attentions from the living. I’m just exhausted from it. That’s all. From all of it. It is a confession. I am not sure he has heard me, or whether I have spoken aloud.
That man in Berlin in his ugly sweater: he said the word that I hadn’t even let myself think, not before the pills or since; but now it swells up inside of me and presses on my sinuses, my pinkish limbs, my uneasy lips. Guilt is tangible and crystalline; you could hold it in your palm and tell the whole merciless future of the world from the way its sharp edges catch the light and refract. Distort. Those pills cost 400€. I paid it all myself.
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Jean has lent us his car for the afternoon. We have left Marrakesh behind, and the earth is ruddy as we drive through the flat landscape around the city, climb steadily up into the red rocks of the foothills. The hot air through the passenger window plays through my hair with stiff fingers, and the openness of the terrain after the closed-in space of the city is a confrontation with my own smallness. A pleasant sensation. My insignificance under the blue endless span of the hot sky, against the sprawl of Morocco’s dust. His posture is easy behind the wheel, his skin a darker brown from the sun, and here on the road I think that if we just keep going, only drive on with the wind on my cheeks, that maybe the emptiness inside of me could melt into nonexistence in the heat, it could be lost, fly clear out the gap of the open window.
There are possibilities which startle us, take our breath, mark us deeper than we even comprehend; they spin and undulate and dance within us, they leave imprints of such startling uncertainty, such capacities for emotion which we have never known to be ours. They are so altering that in the very moment we realize their poignancy, their touch is irrevocable. Inescapable. And it was false to think that it was a baby, it never was. It was only the possibility of one. A possibility, seen so briefly and new, an unexpected and potent dose of longing, taken away like a rug swept from beneath my feet.
When I knew that I was pregnant I felt it then within me. Something tiny and precious, so easily shattered. An imagined child. And larger, imagined too, but more real for its decades-long life: the falsehood of my very self, so long uncontested. A good girl like Baby, in the seemingly untouchable softness of youth. Sustained by the rhetoric of a world that forces the narrow dichotomy of good and bad onto womanhood itself. Until it is taken up into cells, into tissues, into movements and thoughts and everything that a woman is. Then I bled. I bled. I bled. Let it leak red and hot and raw from my body, that forced way of being in the world, that wretched paltry fallacy of goodness. And now echoing in the spacious cavities of me, seeking ways to escape from my aching lungs: there is a new truth of me. I am torn open and reborn, shaking and raw and wild in the world like the first pinkish streaks of dawn at the end of a desert night.
The Atlas loom rugged and snowcapped. We are higher up now. We have climbed to a village of small clusters of mud brick homes; their occupants watch us from doorways and the thin sliver of the road’s shoulder. Their children stream toward us in gaggles and then latch onto the car’s open windows and hang on like leeches as we drive. Madame, Madame, Madame! Their faces are terribly close to my own, and I am stricken with a dull horror at their nearness. We close the windows but still they cling, their small fingers finding grip on the thin ledge of the car door. I close my eyes, hold my breath as their small bodies linger. He speeds up, letting the dust spew behind us. They’ll be fine, he says to us both. They’ll be fine.
I cannot look at his face; I do not know him anymore. I have only just begun to know myself, sifting through the last broken remnants of an illusion. We are suspended in time for this moment; a precipice. An ending. A faltering, barren, unknown beginning. Then the last of the children drops off into the red road, unharmed but not quickly forgotten, and we must drive on, our faces tight and empty on the mountains ahead.
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Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“This story lay stuck deep within me for a couple of winters before I could excavate it. Before I could stomach the task of freeing it, dusting it off, inspecting its shape and boundaries and implications. This piece is an imprint of my soul after its transformation in the aftermath of my abortion; and my attempt at bravery by not staying quiet about my pain, a pain shared by many women.”
Emily Learman is an American expat living in Berlin. She is currently pursuing a masters in European Literature.