30 Shades Of Wednesday

There are two kinds of births in the city of Gutherlock. The first is the kind everyone agrees on. A woman screams, a child cries, a click ticks forward, indifferent. Somebody writes a name in a book, and somebody else pays for the room. The second kind happens when the universe is paying attention.

Isolde Crane was not the screaming type. Isolde had been the kind of girl in school who, when stung by a wasp on the back of her neck, had simply turned, examined the wasp with academic interest, and stepped on it. Isolde had been the kind of woman in love who, when her heart was broken in the backroom of a tracer by a man with two first names and no last one, had simply paid the bill and walked home through the rain without putting up her hood. Isolde had a face like a sentence that had been crossed out and then rewritten more beautifully. She did not scream. She did not, not even now with the contractions arriving like clockwork and the room smelling of iron and lavender and the particular electric that gathers in the air when something important is about to begin. She did not scream because she had been warned.

“Don't make a sound at the moment of birth,” the threshold-witch had told her seven months ago, in a voice like a moth landing on velvet. “If you make a sound, the world will know. If the world knows, the world will start watching. And the world, my girl, has terrible manners when it watches.”

So Isolde bit down on a strip of leather and let the pain pass through her in silence, like weather throughout a city. The midwife was a woman called Marta Brisk who had delivered four hundred and seventeen babies before Wednesday, and she would never deliver another one after. She was not the kind of midwife who hummed lullabies or cooked encouragement. She was the kind who said push once and meant it and didn't say it again because she didn't have to. Her hair was pinned with a small surgical knife. She didn't quit. She didn't retire. At eleven fifty-eight, Marta Brisk wiped sweat from her brow and said, “Almost. One more.” At eleven fifty-nine, Isolde closed her eyes and breathed out of her mouth the way she had been taught. At twelve, exactly twelve, with the bells of the cathedral of indecisions ringing, both noon and not-noon over the rooftops, Wednesday came into the world. Marta simply looked at what came out of Isolde Crane's womb in that particular Wednesday, at exactly twelve o’clock noon, on the twelfth day of the twelfth month, in a year that preferred not to be named and she understood, with the certainty of a woman who had not seen too much of life's beginnings to be easily frightened, that she had just witnessed something that would require her to sit down for her rest of her life. The baby didn't cry and she did not fail. And that was the first thing. Every bay marta had ever caught had announced itself to the world with a sound somewhere between fury and grief, that primal oh no not again if a consciousness suddenly realizing it was trapped in a body and would be for a very long time.

But this baby, this small, dark-haired, impossibly alert baby, opened her eyes instead. Black eyes. Not newborn—murky grey that would later decide on a color, but actually, completely and finally black. And the baby looked at Marta. And Marta felt, for the first time in sixty-three years on this earth, that she was being evaluated. Marta had never delivered a baby who looked at her like she was being inspected. And then she set the baby down on the table to wash her, and the light from the high window fell across the linen, and Marta Brisk looked at the floor, and the floor looked back at her with nothing on it. Nothing at all. The baby cast no shadow. Or rather the absence of one. Everything in that room cast a shadow. Everything except the baby. Marta was a practical woman. Marta held her up. She moved the candle. She moved the bag as well. She moved the candle again. She moved her through the shaft of light. Yet nothing. The light passed through her space in the world as if it didn't know what to do with her. The child's shadow did not appear; it did not exist. The light hit the child and did not bounce back. And that's one of the strangest things that has ever happened in the city of Gutherlock.

“Is she…” Isolde tried to sit up. “Is she alright?

“She is perfect,” Marta said. Which was true, and which was also, somehow, the most terrifying sentence she had ever spoken.

She placed the baby on Isolde’s chest and stepped back. The baby continues to look at things. At the windows. At the ceiling also. At her mother's face with an expression that, on a person of any other age, would have been described as "I expected this, but I hoped I was wrong."

“What will you name her? Marta asked, because it was what she always asked.

Isolde didn't hesitate. “Wednesday," she said. “Because that's what day it is. Because she arrived exactly when she said she would.”

Marta frowned. “She said…”

“The day that held the week together by virtue of being neither the beginning nor the end of anything. I know how that sounds.” Isolde strokes the baby's cheek. The baby turned her face into the touch like she was cataloguing it. “But three months ago, I woke up at noon on a Wednesday, and a voice said, 'I'm coming.' On a Wednesday. Name me after the day. And I thought I was dreaming. And then I realized I'd never been more awake in my life,” Isolde said.

Marta went home that afternoon. She sat in her armchair. She poured herself three fingers of something that had been in the cabinet since her husband died. She looked at the wall for a very long time. She never went back to the hospital.