The Lamb

by Lucy Rose

The person she used to be was gone, pulled apart and spread to places she couldn’t reach. Something in the alchemy of her blood changed.’

Perhaps she meant when I was inside her, safe and sound in her warm belly. When I was only the idea of a person.

There wasn’t enough love to go around. It was finite and I wanted it all for myself.

‘When you were small, you were so easy to love. You’d do anything for me. Every word I spoke was gospel and you looked at me like I was the most beautiful woman in the world. But something has changed, Little One,’

She kept her grief subdued and quiet – so much so, it had begun to rot.

‘It’s the thing she’s best at, making people love her. Fall in love with her. She turns them into something broken. Something that only wants and something that can’t think. But she falls out of love so easily.’

I would be moments and memories scattered through the minerals and roots.

To Eden, the potential of who I’d become was so much more beautiful than the way I spoke back.

It’s impossible to truly know someone who hides so much of themselves and consumes so much of others.

Everything and anything she could take to fill the hungry void. Now she was unravelling, because at the centre of it all there was nothing keeping her together.

‘After everything I’ve done for you,’ Mama said, gritting her teeth. ‘After everything I’ve sacrificed. Every meal I’ve put on the table. Every piece of clothing I’ve put on your back.’ ‘She’s just afraid,’ Eden said. ‘And she needn’t be. There’s nothing to fear.’ ‘I didn’t want to carry a child!’ Mama shouted. ‘I never wanted to be a mama. I just wanted to be a person. None of this was supposed to happen.’

‘You make me hate myself,’ she said, glowering at me. ‘You don’t mean that,’ Eden said again. ‘You make me hate myself too,’ I spat. ‘You make me want to disappear.’

Love had changed her. She wasn’t frightening anymore, the way she used to be. Instead, I saw something as fragile as glass. Always on the edge of breaking.

Their attention felt like a promise that I’d be loved and looked after for the rest of my life. A human sort of love.’

I wondered if this was what being a real human was: accepting you were pieces of other people too. The people you loved and the people you hurt.

I wondered why we couldn’t fit together like other mamas and their kits. I wondered if we were born with something broken inside us. Maybe it was in the deepest marrow of our bones, some place we couldn’t see or touch. Maybe that’s why we couldn’t love each other the way we were supposed to.

watched her face shift, her mouth changing, still deciding whether to land on grief or desire – but I supposed she had always lived caught between those two worlds.

Even in death, they craved touch.

I wasn’t sure how much time was passing, but I felt ancient, like a long-forgotten standing stone or a language no longer spoken. As old as hills, as old as water, and as old as the beginning itself. Soon enough, the landscape would shift, the beck becoming a stream and the stream becoming a river. Then, one day, hot and bothered, this earth would become an ocean and forget all about us.

Slumbering, keeping out of trouble, the monsters were fated to dream. Because I made it so, this ground was safe for the strangers to tread.