Low Stakes Lore

The factory was small. Never quite up to safety standards, not the kind of factory that was new. Not clean, not with new machines that were automated to work on a schedule and a foreman who checks the code everyday to make sure it runs. No, this one, the one I pulled my laces up for everyday, was run almost entirely by people. Men mostly who work uniforms with cursive names over the left side of our chests. Just a small football sized building pumping out oil, pollution, and car parts - and I was there. Everyday.

Today, it smelled the way it always did before I even got through the door. I remembered it smelling like metal. Always metal. A particular kind of smog that gets into your clothes, into your skin, under your fingernails. Eventually, inevitably, into your lungs. Steel dust. Machine oil. Burnt coolant. The hot, dry smell of something being cut down into the shape somebody else wanted and cost you your own physical health everyday. Day after day, year after year.

But this was different. Today was different.

This was metal, in the air yes, but not clean metal. Not copper either, though my body wanted to name it that first. Blood always tries to disguise itself as something industrial when there’s enough of it. Pennies. Rust. Heat. A wet tang hiding under exhaust fumes and old fluorescent light.

The lobby looked smaller than I remembered.

The ceiling tiles were stained brown at the corners. The vending machine hummed with no lights on inside it. A plastic fern leaned in the corner, filmed gray with dust, like it had been dead for years and nobody had the decency to throw it out. Somewhere deeper in the building, a machine knocked once, then paused, then knocked again.

No rhythm. No worker at the controls. Just a sound like something trying to get someone’s attention.

The receptionist’s desk was empty, it always was.

The sign-in sheet had curled at the edges from moisture. A pen lay beside it, uncapped, leaking black ink into the paper. Before I could touch it, the front doors opened behind me.

A woman stumbled in like she had been running. She was blonde. That was the first thing I saw. Blonde hair stuck to her cheeks. Blue eyes wide and shining. She wore a pale jacket, too thin for the weather, and one sleeve was torn from wrist to elbow. Her hands were cupped in front of her chest like she was carrying a wounded bird.

“Please,” she said. Her voice was calm. That was what made me afraid, because she was so frantic.

“Please, I need help.”

I moved toward her before I understood what I was doing. There was blood dripping between her fingers, but not much, and not right - the way the blood fell, the viscosity of it wasn’t right, too thick, too stringy, clotted - I wanted to ask, “What happened?” But my mouth doesn’t move to make the words, my voice caught in my throat.

She didn’t answer. She just opened her hands.

At first, I thought it was some piece of meat, but after a terrifying moment, my eyes focused and it took shape.

It was small enough to fit in her palm. A baby. Or rather, a fetus that was the size of what I thought was perhaps an embryo. Curled at its waist, but missing pieces of itself. It didn’t look peaceful the way I’d imagined a fetus before, not warm, but pained - its limbs weren’t even attached. Right there in her palm, its arms and legs were detached. Violently, like it was torn. Tiny jointed things. Pale cords. A slick head too large for the rest of it. Its skin, if it was skin, looked translucent in places, gray-pink and shining.

It should not have looked formed enough to recognize.

It should not have looked unfinished enough to move.

But it moved, and my heart sank to my stomach and I felt cold at my fingertips. Because it fucking moved.

Not much. Not like a frightened or fragile animal might, not even like something just born might with unsure movements - not even like something alive. It pulsed, once, from the center outward. The woman made a noise in her throat and shoved her hands toward me.

“Don’t let it dry out,” she said.

I looked at her face, and I should have questioned it, I didn’t. She had blonde hair. Right? Blue eyes. Tear tracks. But now, she doesn’t. She’s…brunette. Nobody I’ve seen before. Not even the same face. But the voice - her voice didn’t change. I still couldn’t speak. It’s like my voice was lost in the smog and I couldn’t get it back.

“Please,” she said again.

I don’t know why I reached behind the desk. I don’t know why there was a box of plastic zip lock bags there, or how I knew there would be - the cheap kind with green lines at the seal. I took one out and shook it open.

“We need to call someone,” I said. Finally. Even though it felt like I had said it without conscious thought. And my voice was thick, not normal, like there was molasses stuck in my throat. Slow. “An ambulance. A doctor or something.”

“No police.”

Her voice cracked on that, finally. Too late. Too sharp.

I looked down again. In her hands - The thing - the baby - if it was that - in her hands had begun to coat itself. That smell - the copper - or not copper - was thicker than ever. The wetness was not simply blood. It was making more of it. A viscous, red-black slime pushed out from the folds of its tiny body, swelling over it, slicking the woman’s palms. The more I looked, the more there was. It gathered like a clot, a mucus, a wound trying to seal shut.

I held the bag open. She tried putting it in and the mucus made it difficult.

The moment its head passed the lip of the bag, the slime thickened. It clung to her fingers and stretched in ropes. She made a small, irritated sound, not disgusted, not horrified. Irritated. Like a mother trying to get a child into a coat.

“Careful,” she said, as if I was doing anything but holding the bag - but I reached to help. The thing, it should have been cold - I thought. If it was dead, but I didn’t think it was dead. Because it moved. And it wasn’t cold - it was warm. Hot, actually, even though no steam seemed to come off it. It felt like a machine that had been running too long. Like metal left under a lamp. Heat radiated from it in a way that made my knuckles ache.

The slime slid over my thumb. I felt it tighten as if a response to my skin, foreign and protecting itself.

For one insane second, I thought it had grabbed me. Then the woman tilted her hands and the thing rolled into the bag with a wet sound so small and obscene that my entire lobby seemed to feel a disgust that just wasn’t right.

I sealed the top. The bag immediately fogged from the inside. I stared at it, the thing.

Inside, the thing floated in its own red slick, limbs drifting around it like weeds in lake water. The head turned. Or the bag shifted. Or the light moved. I told myself it was one of those things, because the other possibility was that it knew where I was.

The woman was breathing hard.

I set the bag on the receptionist’s desk and grabbed for the phone there. The receiver was heavy and yellowed, the cord twisted around itself. When I lifted it, there was no dial tone. Just a faint sound on the other end like someone breathing through a clogged throat, almost at the same exact pattern the woman was breathing. I hung up.

“Whose is it?” I asked.

The woman looked at me. Her hair had been blonde. Then brown. Now red. New eyes. A new face looking back at me again.

I stopped. It wasn’t a trick of the light. It wasn’t damp blonde hair made darker by sweat. It was red now, a deep red, cut differently around her jaw. Her eyes were gray. The torn sleeve was still torn. The pale jacket still hung off her shoulders. Her hands were still red to the wrist.

But she was not the same woman and I could tell she was noticing me noticing her.

“What?” she asked. Her voice was exactly the same. I took a step back.

“Is it yours?”

“No.”

“Then where did you get it?”

Her gaze flicked to the bag. The plastic had begun to flex. It started to tighten, like a vacuum seal, then release as if breathing - a faint in-and-out movement, as though something inside it was breathing without lungs.

“There was an accident,” she said. “At the lake.”

“What lake?” - I knew there was no lake, and yet a part of me, a terrified part of me wanted to believe it.

“The one a few blocks away.”

There was no lake a few blocks away. I knew that. The factory sat in a dead stretch of road and cracked parking lots, chain-link fences, other warehouses with blown-out windows and graffiti on the sides. No lake. No boats. No water except in ditches after rain.

But behind her, through the lobby doors, I saw light move like sunlight on waves. I smelled algae. I smelled gasoline. I smelled the sharp green stink of something dragged up from the bottom of something I didn’t want to examine too much.

“A boat hit her,” the woman said.

“Hit who?”

“The mother.”

Something knocked from inside the factory. Once. Then again. Not a machine though, it was too clean for that - and it moved. The sound moved. Closer this time.

Knock.

The woman smiled with only the bottom half of her face. Her upper lip doesn’t move but the lower one pulls into a smile.

“She’s gone now.”

I looked at the bag. The thing had unfolded, despite there not being enough of it not enough of it to do so, not enough bone, not enough anything. But it pressed itself against the plastic from the inside, spreading wider than it should have been able to. Its limbs were wrong. Not unattached, I realized now - together, like somehow sewn back together. Waiting.

The limbs slid toward the central body like magnets finding metal. The slime joined them together. One by one. I backed away until my hip hit the desk.

“We need to leave,” I said.

“No,” the woman said. “It needs to be preserved.”

“For what?”

Her eyes changed while I was looking at them this time - Gray to something pale and almost yellow. Her face rippled with the smallest possible adjustment. Cheeks narrowing, her mouth softening, the slope of her nose shifting a fraction to the left. It was not transformation like in movies. It was worse than that. It was casual. Effortless. Like she was trying on expressions from people she had seen and not quite remembering which one belonged to her.

“Is it human?” I asked, again, my mouth speaking before my brain or my breath could catch up. The question came out before I meant it to. The lobby went quiet. Deadly quiet. Even the vending machine stopped humming. The thing in the bag pressed one tiny hand to the plastic. Five fingers. Then six.

Too many.

The woman tilted her head. Blonde again now, or almost blonde, except the roots were black and the ends moved like they were floating underwater.

“What do you think human means?” she asked, her voice far too casual. Not panicked.

I could hear the factory breathing behind her. Not the machines. The building itself. The walls inhaling. The ducts shivering. The old presses waiting in the dark with their mouths open.

I looked at the sign-in sheet. My name was there - I hadn’t wrote it. How did it get there? How did it get crossed out?

And worse, under my name, I see my own handwriting, scrawled across the page in large bold letters that I never wrote.

YOU LET IT IN.

The bag split. The red-black fluid spilled across the desk and moved against gravity, threading itself toward the edge closest to me. The thing inside did not fall out. It climbed. Or assembled. Or remembered how. The woman stepped closer.

Her face was my wife’s for half a second.

Then my mother’s.

Then no one’s.

Then everyone’s.

I tried to scream, but the air tasted like metal and lake water and something ancient warming under plastic. Behind her, in the dark hallway of the factory, something much larger than the thing in the bag shifted its weight.

The woman smiled.

There is a kind of romance that does not arrive dressed as romance.

It is not always flowers on a table or music swelling at the exact right moment. It is not always a hand on the small of my back in a crowded room, not a confession under rain, not the kind of love that makes itself obvious enough for anyone watching to understand it.

Sometimes it is late at night, and I am tired, and I missed an exit.

Sometimes it is me alone in the car, somewhere I did not mean to be, staring at roads that should have made sense and did not. The sky was dark in that way that makes every street feel like it’s simultaneously one you know you’ve seen before but don’t recognize at all.

I had a phone in my hand. I had maps. I had a small glowing machine built to know exactly where I was and how to get me anywhere I wanted to go.

But I didn’t open Maps first. That is the part I keep returning to.

My body didn’t reach for the app. My mind did not reach for the most logical solution.

Some older, quieter part of me reached for him.

There is a shortcut on my phone to call him, and without thinking, thats what my thumb found. Not because I was helpless. Not because I didn’t know there were other ways home. But because instinct is honest in a way the rest of us are not always brave enough to be. Instinct does not explain itself. It does not build a case. It simply reaches for what it trusts.

And in the dark, lost and tired and past the point of wanting to be capable, I trusted him. I reached for him.

He answered on the second ring, and I was annoyed at myself. I could hear it in my own voice, the embarrassment under the frustration, the way being lost felt bigger than it was because I was already so worn down. I told him I had gone the wrong way, that I didn’t know where I was, that I needed help getting home.

And he laughed.

Not meanly. Not like I was foolish, though I am. Not like the wrong turn was evidence of anything wrong in me. I could hear the smile in his voice.

He laughed like a he knew me. Like of course this is where the night had gone. Like of course I had managed to miss an exit and turn a simple drive into a small, private disaster. Like of course I was calling him instead of putting it into maps.

There is a tenderness in being known that deeply, even when what is known is ridiculous.

He told me to give him a second. I could hear him shifting, pulling up my location, finding the little dot that was me on a map somewhere away from where I was supposed to be. And then he did what he has done in more ways than I think either of us have counted.

He found me.

Not dramatically. Not with some grand declaration. He found me in the practical, ordinary way. The way love often survives when it is no longer new enough to perform for anyone. He looked at where I was, figured out where I needed to go, and started guiding me back.

“Turn there.”

“No, not that one.”

“Keep going. Past that light.”

“You’re okay.”

“I’ve got you.”

His voice came through the car speakers, calm and familiar, and I followed it. I followed it the way I have followed his presence through so many versions of myself. The girl I was. The woman I became. The person I am still becoming. I have changed so many times inside this one life, and somehow there he was, still on the other end of the line, still finding the shape of me on a map, still telling me how to come home.

It should have been a small thing. Maybe it was a small thing. But sometimes the smallest moments tell the truth most cleanly.

Because there I was, lost in the dark, and the truest thing in me still knew where to reach.

There are loves that feel like beginnings. There are loves that arrive like an open door, like a first page, like a spark catching where everything is dry and ready. But there is another kind of love too. A love that feels less like beginning and more like return. A love that is not always easy, not always soft, not always fluent in the language I wish it spoke, but still woven into the body so deeply that even tiredness knows its name.

He is woven into me like that.

Not only in the beautiful places. Not only in the easy memories or the photographs where we look young enough to believe time will make everything simple. He is woven into the difficult places too. Into the years where we loved each other badly because we were still learning what love required. Into the silences. Into the missed chances. Into the hurts that shaped me, not because hurting is sacred, but because surviving it made me more honest. More careful. More aware of what I need. More unwilling to let love become something assumed instead of tended.

There are things I carry because of him that are heavy.

There are also things I carry because of him that are sacred.

And sometimes they are tangled so tightly together that I cannot separate one from the other without losing the truth of the whole story.

I do not believe love is proven by pain. I do not believe suffering is what makes something real. But I do believe that a real life leaves marks, and he is part of the life that marked me. He is in the architecture. In the beams and load-bearing walls. In the rooms I have outgrown and the rooms I am still trying to make livable. He is in the foundation, not because foundations cannot crack, but because even a cracked foundation can still be worth repairing when the house is home.

And he is home.

Not because everything is easy there. Not because I have never felt lonely in the rooms we built. Not because the lights have always been on.

But because when I am lost, I still call.

Because when the night gets too dark and I can’t find the road, some part of me still believes his voice will know how to reach me.

That is not a small kind of love. It is not the kind that always knows what to say. It is not the kind that always arrives polished, poetic, or dressed in the exact words I was aching to hear. Sometimes it is clumsy. Sometimes it misses. Sometimes it stands in the doorway holding the wrong tool, trying to fix a wound it does not understand yet. Sometimes it loves me in a language I have to translate before I can feel it.

And still, it is love.

Still, it is the voice on the other end of the line. Still, it is the laugh that knows me. Still, it is the person who does not need me to be graceful before helping me home.

There are moments in a relationship that look too ordinary to keep. They slip past without ceremony. Someone fills a water bottle. Someone takes the trash out. Someone warms up the car. Someone answers the phone when the other person is lost and too tired to pretend they are not. No one writes songs about these things. No one tells you, when you are young, that this is where the vows hide after the wedding is over.

But I think vows live there more than anywhere else. Not in the saying of forever, but in the small returns.

The answer. The search. The voice saying, I see where you are. The patience to guide someone back, even if they should have known the way. The willingness to be called.

The willingness to come home.

I think about that night and I think about how love can be both a wound and a compass. How someone can hurt you and still be the person your body trusts in the dark. How a marriage can feel strained and still contain moments so tender they almost ache to look at directly. How it is possible to miss someone while they are beside you. How it is possible to love someone and still be trying to find them again.

Maybe that is what we are doing. Maybe we are not beginning. Maybe we are returning.

Not to the people we were when we first loved each other. Not to the old versions, preserved in memory, easier to hold because they ask nothing new of us. Not to the fourteen-year-old girl and the sixteen-year-old boy who could not have known what time would do. Not even to the newly married versions who thought love would keep translating itself without being asked.

The return is not backward. The return is toward. Toward the people we are now. Toward the harder honesty. Toward the kind of love that has to learn new roads because the old ones no longer take us where we need to go.

That night, I didn’t need him to make me feel better by pretending I had not taken the wrong turn. I did not need him to tell me the dark was not dark. I did not need him to rescue me from the fact that I was tired, turned around, and frustrated.

I only needed him to find me there. Exactly there. And he did. He found me without making me prove I deserved finding. He found me without turning my wrong turn into a failure. He found me without asking any questions about why I missed the exit.

He found me and brought me back.

I think that is the kind of love I am still reaching for. Not perfect love. Not effortless love. Not love that never loses the road. But love that can say, from wherever we are, I see you. I am here. Turn toward me. Keep going. You are not too far. We can still get home.

And maybe that is why the memory keeps glowing in me. Because it was late, and I was tired, and I was lost.

In the dream, I was bleeding.

At first, it was ordinary enough to be dismissed. A familiar ache. It’s in my core, my legs, my hips. The dull pull low in my body. The private inconvenience of blood. I moved through it the way I always do, with the practiced rituals of containment: period underwear. Except that wasn’t enough this time. It was coming too fast. So it resorted to more: pads, tampons, dark clothing, checking the chair when I stood everywhere I went.

But the blood did not stop.

It became something with an appetite.

Hours passed. Then days. Dream-days, which stretch without mercy, each one longer than the last. I bled through everything I put between myself and the world. Every barrier failed. Every clean thing became soaked. Every attempt to manage it felt childish, almost insulting, as if my body had opened itself into a wound and I was trying to hold back a flood with cotton.

Eventually, I gave up on being clean.

I climbed into the bathtub and sat there, bare and shaking, letting the blood go where it wanted. The porcelain was cold beneath me. No water. I didn’t bother filling it up and sitting in a literal cauldron of my own blood. But there was enough blood it was doing that itself. Filling up. The water around my hips blushed pink, then red, then darkened into something deeper, something almost black where it gathered between my thighs.

I watched it leave me.

That was the worst part at first. Not the pain. Not even the fear. The watching.

I thought, genuinely, that the body is supposed to be private on the inside. You are not supposed to see what it releases in shapes. You are not supposed to recognize its work.

The first clot came loose, as if revealing itself to me.

It slipped from me in a long, stringing mass, unfolding into the bathtub with the slow grace of something drowned. I reached for it before I understood why. My fingers closed around it, slick and warm, and when I pulled, more followed.

Too much.

It came out in globs, in literal ropes, in dark red pieces too large to belong to me. But it did belong to me. I knew it did.

It was bigger than my hand. Bigger than anything my body should have been able to make and survive. I kept pulling because the dream gave me no other choice. There was always more. Always another weight inside me, dragging downward, asking to be delivered.

Then something caught.

Not tissue. Not blood.

Something tangled.

I pinched it between my fingers and drew it out slowly.

Hair.

A thick, wet wad of hair slid from between my legs and gathered in my hands. Not a few strands, not the ordinary shedding of a body that loses pieces of itself every day. This was handfuls. Fistfuls. Dark brown and matted and endless, like every brush I had ever cleaned had been emptied into me and left there to rot.

I pulled, and it kept coming.

It coiled over my wrists. It lay across my lap. It clung to my thighs in dark ribbons, intimate and obscene. My stomach turned, but my hands did not stop. They knew what to do without my conscious thought - without my permission. They kept reaching into the red. They kept finding more.

And then I heard it.

A small sound.

Clink.

So delicate I almost missed it.

Then again.

Clink.

I looked down into the tub.

At first I thought the tub was breaking. I thought the porcelain had begun to crack beneath me, that even the room had reached its limit. But then something white rolled against my knee.

A tooth.

Small. Hard. Perfectly shaped. Adult size. A molar.

Another fell after it, disappearing into the blood before surfacing again near my ankle. The feeling of the teeth against the titanium in my ankle felt like some kind of sick poetry, living leaving me and life that had restored me.

Then another.

And another.

They came from me with tiny, awful sounds. Teeth dropping into the tub one by one, bright as bone. They clicked against the porcelain. They clicked against each other. They collected beneath the blood like a mouth being assembled where no mouth should be. Like a smile I didn’t want to see.

Clink.

Clink.

Clink.

I wanted to scream, but in the dream my voice had been taken from me too.

All I could do was sit there while my body emptied itself of impossible things. Blood. Hair. Teeth. Evidence of some hidden life. Some unfinished creature. Some secret room inside me where my body had been making and unmaking something without my knowledge.

I remember thinking: this is mine.

I remember thinking: how long has this been inside me?

And still, mercilessly, I did not wake up.

Not when the blood got so plentiful that it turned dark and came to my hips in the tub.

Not when the hair wrapped around my fingers.

Not when the teeth kept falling.

Not for what felt like forever.