Mother Box and Other Tales by Sarah Blackman

together in the aisle, happy to see them looking upon them, the seven sons, the brothers, the singular bride.
    “This is a shock to me too, you know,” she said. She felt a little peevish now, a little uncertain with the gift clock ticking, the bride advancing and holding out one indistinct, welcoming arm. Her husband beside her suddenly seemed too small for his suit and continued to shrink, dwindled in the aisle. But a number of years had passed for them, too many for their situation to change much now, and she said it in the way she would have said almost anything. What was there left to do but step forward, graciously, into her daughter-in-law's embrace?

A Terrible Thing
     
    No one would have disputed it was a terrible thing. It was a terrible thing. A thing that had happened, that frequently happened to very many people they had individually known and some whom they had known together. Everyone had a story about it. Their voices were hushed. It was not in dispute. There was nothing to dispute. Everyone had something to say.
    The same day it happened, they began to update each other. “She's resting comfortably,” one of them said to the other. Some of them would not comment. “I heard she took some soup,” some of them said to others of them who, leaving the tight group and traveling across the building, went on to say it to yet others who nodded, tight-lipped. Someone had seen an omen. On their drive in to work, someone had seen three crows by the side of the road. Another one had had an uneasy feeling for weeks. Mr. Haslip had nothing to say about any of it, but he was a confirmedbachelor. Mr. Haslip had round eyes, hard as cherries. Many of the women walked around all day touching each other. One would touch another on the small of the back. One would touch another on the hip. The light was very strange. They agreed.
    The women there did not sleep easily. At night they turned in their beds and wound themselves into their sheets. Their cheeks were flushed; they breathed heavily. In the cold mornings, everything had receded. Their sheets were cold and stiff as if the heat had gone out in the house overnight. It had already been an unusually cold winter. The women found they were very hungry. They told each other in the lunch room how hungry they were, but they could not bring themselves to eat, no single one of them, and they began to grow pale and taut like candles. Some of the women had husbands and some had lovers. Some of the women's lovers began to hate them, just a little bit. They wanted to hurt them, just a little bit, and that was okay with the women who felt they had fallen somehow out of the order of their lives. This was already the third day. She was still not back to work. “Are you alright?” the women asked each other. One woman took another woman's hands and pressed them to her cheeks. She moved her head all around with the woman's hands on her cheeks, the pad of one thumb on her lower lip, the tips of the middle fingers grazed by her eyelashes. There was a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. Someone sent an update: she had taken a turn for the worse.
    She was on the mend. She was out of the woods. Mr. Haslip was even more an enigma. He strode down the halls with his hands in his pockets. He stroked his long brown hair like a pet. The women could not help but be a little disappointed. Soon, it would be business as usual. Soon, it would be right as rain.Spring was coming, though the freeze had not broken. Some of the women had dreams in which they all lived together in an ice palace. The beds were made of ice, the chairs and cushions. For food they ate ice cakes and ice apples, ice gravies poured over cuts of ice meat. They looked in ice mirrors. They fixed the ends of their hair with ice combs.
    A long time earlier, the company had been young and they had been young. They had not known each other. A terrible thing had happened to some of their mothers, but no one said anything.