My eyes blinked open slowly, the soft light of morning filtering into the room. The deep hazy nothing of sleep clung to me, weightless and slow. There was a brief moment of mercy before I went to stretch and my body remembered—skin pulling too tight, warped and unfamiliar, until the feeling curled me violently back into myself.

One deep breath in, one deep breath out—the realization sunk in again as it did every day.

Slowly, intentionally, I sat up, allowing my feet to touch the carpeted floor beneath me. I scuffed my soles against it—back and forth like a child dangling their legs off a too-tall chair—still, I felt nothing. The sensation was almost entirely gone, distant, as though someone else was feeling the brush of the fibers against their feet and describing it to me. The ache didn’t live in one place anymore—it echoed, restless, along my ribs.

The other side of the bed was cool to the touch as I brushed my hand across smooth sheets. That, I could still mostly feel. Each day, there was less and less sensation, the lines of demarcation between flesh and other spreading like vines across the fertile earth. Soon, there would be nothing left.

Noting the empty bassinet beside the bed, I guessed my husband had already taken Evangeline somewhere in the house to let me sleep. The feelings of relief warred with those of loneliness, as they so often did these days. I wanted them here, but I wanted them safe. I wanted them with me, but I wanted them far, far away from this cursed skin. Away from me. I closed my eyes for just a moment to breathe again before I went to find them.

The early sun was golden through the slats, catching dust motes in the deep orange bands of light as they spread across the room. I studied the dancing particles as they meandered lazily through the air, wondering if they ever went away. Perhaps they stayed, floating eternally, unchanging, simply flitting in and out of view. Had the dust motes seen everything? Did they remember how I used to be, too?

Stiff hands reached for the robe I knew was soft, hanging reliably on the back of the bedroom door. Pulling it tightly around me, I tried for the hall, hands tracking against the walls to steady myself. My feet dragged across polished wooden floors, feeling unnaturally heavy, dropping loudly with each step. Sometimes it woke the baby—a monster roaming the halls. I’d soothe her as much as I could, hands stiff and twisted as I tried to force the love I felt for her in my heart through my gnarled and horrid fingers. I begged her to feel it.

In the kitchen, Logan stood like someone from another life—steady and warm, holding a bottle in his hand and a smile in his eyes that still looked at me like I was whole. I sank into an armchair with a graceless thud, my body jerking and exhausted from the toll walking from the bedroom had taken, ashamed of how difficult everything had become.

“You didn’t need to take the first shift,” I murmured, watching closely, eyes seeking the gurgling baby tucked safely into his arms and ready to be handed to her mother.

“It wasn’t a problem. You were finally getting some sleep, and I was already up.” There was no edge to his words, no deserved annoyance, nothing but the sweet partnership he always met me with.

“Thank you.” The words were quiet as the guilt ate at the edges of me, but I reached out for my daughter instead, her tiny body coming happily to rest in my imperfect arms. Small, warm, and lovely—she was a gift. She had my husband’s bright eyes, wisps of my own hair that curled and swept her tiny forehead. Her skin was as soft as the underside of a fresh leaf, all velvety newness. She was completely perfect, life-changing, lovely. The very best parts of us.

Evangeline.

The name unfurled within me like a slow bloom, a thing of joy whispering warmly like a spring breeze against my skin. Or at least, what I remembered of it.

Logan gently arranged her against me, hands practiced and patient, and I brought the bottle to her lips. She smiled, gummy and trusting, then latched on effortlessly, suckling with delight. The weight of her against me was both grounding and impossibly delicate. While I felt her move against my chest, there was no indication across my arms, hardly any sensation left on my skin. The ache of the knowledge took my breath away, even as I watched her in quiet awe. Her heart beat against me, her tiny chest rising and falling, and mine mirroring hers.

What would happen when that day came where I felt nothing at all?

It had begun almost immediately after Evangeline’s birth, the hardness spreading from the incision on my stomach like concrete beneath muscle and tissue and flesh, branching out haphazardly from there. Before, I could feel it beneath the sutures when I pressed—a hardened lump of healing, bloody tissue. Normal, they told me, absolutely common with a forming scar. Normal where they’d sawed me open, removing organs and fluids and pieces of me, then placing it all back and stitching me together like a doll. But healing stopped, and something else took its place. A quiet petrification, creeping outward with no end, stealing sensation like a thief each time I slept, each time I moved, each time I held my child. I’d been told this was a part of healing, a symptomatic response while my body found its new normal.

Normal, normal, normal.

“Are you feeling okay?” Logan would ask in the early days of recovery, dark brows furrowed in concern as we lay in the bed, Evangeline on one of our chests as the sun passed over the sky.

Feed, burp, change, sleep. Feed, burp, change, sleep. Those first few weeks were an echoing routine as predictable as the beating of my heart, but even without me expressing my concerns, Logan understood something wasn’t entirely right.

“Just tired.” I’d smiled reassuringly, hands quietly pressing against the hardening skin beneath the cover of our quilt. I couldn’t feel the pressure of my fingers in some places, and I choked the panic down.

“I know it’s a lot lately,” he’d consoled, understanding. “But you know if there’s anything else, you can tell me, right?”

I’d nodded. He’d never been anything but supportive and kind. But something about this felt shameful—wrong. I was supposed to be biologically engineered to care for my child, to care for myself. This spreading numbness felt like I was failing at both, and he was already doing so much to make up for what I couldn’t. How could I tell him I thought something was wrong with me on top of all that? Would he think I was insane if I told him I might be turning to stone? Instead, I kept my concerns to myself, falling back into that now-familiar pattern and losing myself in the sweetness of our daughter.

Weeks passed, and still the stone spread, indifferent to the doctor’s reassurances. This wasn’t what I’d been told to expect. It was something else entirely, a heaviness in my body that grew with each day that passed. Why had no one warned me that this was a possibility? Where were the other women—the ones who cracked and calcified, turning brittle in their own silence, whose skin had betrayed them and hardened under this sorrow? Why weren’t they shouting from rooftops, warning the rest of us? Was it because their voices had already crumbled, the sound giving way to the silent sifting of the winds across weathered stone? Would I be silenced one day, encased entirely in a quiet mausoleum of my own skin and bones, too?

At my postpartum checkup, I expressed my worry again, shamefully explaining the hardening and numbness to my doctor who continued to dismiss my concerns. His voice was smooth and clinical, as though reading from a prompt, and his sympathy was distant and encased in latex. The words felt as cold and sterile as the white walls surrounding us. The bright fluorescent lights hummed overhead, indifferent to the panic that roared within me—this wasn’t normal, despite what he said. It couldn’t be normal to stop feeling everything, to see the parts of me that once bent and spun and arched turning immovable and useless.

“Most women experience this to some degree,” he’d told me, his fingers pressing into the marbled stone that mottled my skin.

“This doesn’t feel right,” I’d insisted, my fingers tugging my sleeves down as he sat in the rolling chair that squeaked harshly across the linoleum.

“You’re six weeks out now, right?”

I nodded, so hopeful that there were answers for me.

“Are you passing baseball-sized clots?”

“No.”

“Are you experiencing painful headaches?”

“No, I—”

“Do you have thoughts about harming your baby?”

“What? No, I—”

“Then you’re cleared to resume your normal activities.” And just like that, I was measured and dismissed. I tried not to cry as I walked through the halls toward the exit, the A/C so cold it burned the strange patches of my skin long after I left.

Here in my arms now, her warmth pressed against sections of my skin that could still feel her. The parts of me that were still unaffected were desperate to memorize how she felt against me, tucking the memories away for a time that I feared was coming faster than we could prevent. She fed with that solemnity reserved for infants, her gaze fixed on mine in pure, unfiltered awe in a mirror of my own wonder. I brushed a near-frozen finger against her skin, and she didn’t pull back. I traced her cheek with it slowly, reverently. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t know. But whether or not she understood wouldn’t stop it from consuming me whole.

I’d returned to the doctor’s office only a week after their dismissal of me, calling as soon as they’d opened and begging the indifferent receptionist for an appointment. The desperation was seeping from my pores, keeping me from sleep, from enjoying any of the parts of parenthood that I still could. Sitting again in a threadbare cotton gown, patchwork skin uncomfortable beneath me, the nurse had simply laid a hand on my shoulder after taking my blood pressure.

“This happens all the time,” she told me. “The weight of motherhood is heavy.”

But this was keeping me from motherhood, I’d wanted to insist.

“I’ll write you a prescription. Give it a few more months,” the doctor told me. “These things don’t just go away overnight.”

They all but shoved me out the doors of the medical office. I walked out clutching medicine meant to halt the spread—though it came with a warning: it could just as easily make it worse. I’d taken it anyway, desperate to feel anything again. I would have swallowed fire if they’d promised it would thaw me out again. The panic of losing sensation had sent me into a tailspin so violent that sometimes it felt hard to breathe. Even considering the risks, I was willing to try anything that might help.

Weeks passed and little changed—the spread seemed to slow a bit, shifting in nature, but it might have been wishful thinking on my part. The pills made me sick, made my vision blur and my head ache. Still, I took them religiously, hoping and praying each day would be the one for a better outcome. Parts of me felt so heavy inside.

What about the parts of me I couldn’t see? Was the stone weaving itself through lungs, liver, heart, and womb? I couldn’t return to work this way, the thought unfathomable as I struggled to do basic things like dress and shower and brush my teeth. When Logan touched me, I couldn’t feel it past quiet brushes of his fingertips across the shrinking skin that remained. At the grocery store, people unabashedly stared until the tears burned in my eyes, cold as they coursed along the rock to pool in the hollow of my neck. I became foreign and utterly useless as pieces of me solidified. I was numbing into something that felt as though it didn’t exist at all.

When I held Evangeline, I worried. Was the stone too cold for her skin? The edges of me turning too sharp to hold her? To love her? The thoughts plagued me constantly, keeping me awake at night even when Evangeline slept. I’d made a bottle one morning, the skin on my palms feeling tight, stretched beyond the bones, drawn out and pinned down like the wings of a butterfly. Soon after, my joints lost fluidity, the motions all dragging and clicking as my body fought me at every movement. My arms, my legs, and even my back were beginning to freeze, hardening into something unforgiving and motionless. Then, it wasn’t just my joints and skin anymore—it was all of me, stiffening, curling into itself like the roots of a tree buried deeply in the earth.

Now, she stretched in my arms as she finished her bottle, eyes wide and looking up for me, for her mother. I smiled back, hoping that she would remember me this way. Logan wasn’t in the kitchen anymore, so I shuffled carefully to my feet, lifting each with great, concentrated effort. I was cautious not to trip, stumble, or drop her, my body moving so meticulously to the open deck doors.

Out here, the breeze was warm and light, whispering against our skin. It was strange to feel it in only some places, the parts of me that felt nothing making everything else seem off. But the breeze delighted Evangeline as it tossed her hair. She grabbed at mine as it danced in the wind, tugging it softly as her eyes began to droop closed. In these moments, I didn’t feel like I was turning into something unfamiliar and horrifying. I felt almost whole again.

The feeling was fleeting, never lasting long. My legs creaked and groaned, stone grinding on stone as I lowered us into a deck chair. The effort was nearly too much on my body as I tried not to jostle her. How long would it be before I could no longer do even this?

“I’ve got her, love. Go shower. Take some time for yourself.” Logan’s voice on the deck caught me out of the swirling hole of self-pity, arms reaching to take our sweet, sleeping girl. He was vigilant and kind, doing all he could while I worried through this. I hadn’t put a name to it yet, to my nightmares about what might happen, what was happening, what was still to come.

The shower had once been an oasis for me, a sanctuary when things went wrong. But even the water, hot as I could stand it, didn’t seem to help now. I stood in the swirling steam, water coursing over the stone, and it didn’t change a thing. It wasn’t my muscles that were tight, not tension keeping me wound to the breaking point, but the very matter of me, changing beneath my fingers. I tried to remember what it had felt like to do something as vital and basic as showering, the feeling of it raining evenly on my skin and soothing away my aches and worries. I tried to remember what it was like to feel anything wholly across my skin at all.

The memory stayed just outside my grasp until the water turned cold and I twisted the faucet off.

After the shower, I sat wrapped in a towel, perched like a statue on the edge of the bed, watching the sun cross the sky. Laughter burbled up from down the hall, Logan’s voice teasing as he played with Evangeline.

Life was so good, he was so good, Evangeline was so good—my body had betrayed me.

Not knowing was almost worse than anything else. It hung over me like a pall, not sure if one day might be my last good one, my last tolerable one. There had to be an end point to all this, but having no inkling of what that endpoint entailed was torture. And what of Evangeline?

Logan encouraged me to hold her often, but what if I dropped her? What if she fell, my limbs turning fully to stone at the worst possible moment? What would I be without the warmth to soothe her, the gentleness to calm her, the ability to protect her? What would she remember of me then—of a mother who couldn’t even touch her?

It wasn’t the first time I’d considered the alternatives. Would it hurt us both less if I stopped trying now? If I pulled back and drew that line so that later, when she could remember more of me, she wouldn’t feel the loss? Could I remove myself entirely and let the rock consume me now so that they wouldn’t have to bear it later? Even considering it was torture, but I had to contemplate the possibilities. I would’ve let myself disappear, joyfully, if it spared them, but I wasn’t sure that it would. I was happy to put my pain secondary if I could be certain it would help—it was all always for them.

That evening, as the sun dipped below the horizon and I watched Evangeline sleep soundly in her bassinet, my feet cracked. The sharp, brittle noise echoed loudly through the room, the sound machine’s gentle noises keeping her from waking.

Logan was beside me in an instant, panic in his eyes. But the coldness was creeping up my legs now, enveloping me in a way it hadn’t before.

“Are you okay?” His voice trembled when he asked.

But how could I explain what I could barely understand? It wasn’t pain I was feeling—it was something worse. A quiet resignation, like my body was slowly withdrawing from the world, turning into something not quite alive, but not quite dead either.

“I’m afraid,” I whispered, voice trembling with tears I couldn’t force back, “that I’m turning to stone.” I watched his pupils dilate in fear, watched his jaw tic as he saw the situation for what it was. His own eyes glinted with silver at my admission.

“Don’t say that. We’ll find a way to fix this.”

But there was no fixing this, I didn’t think. Not now, not this far gone. The warmth, the tenderness, the soft curve of motherhood that I had so briefly known, was all slipping away faster than I could remember it. What remained was a hollow echo, a grief too vast to name. All that was left to do at this point was wait. I began to feel the panic less, lost in the overwhelming nature of being swallowed alive by stone, something I had strangely started to become more complacent about. I was growing used to the numbness, cradling it to me like a second child. I tried the doctor’s office again, but the phone simply rang and rang.

The end came faster than I thought it would. Within a week, my legs were solid stone, rooted in place, and my arms were nothing more than marbled extensions of my body. Logan moved me around the house, pulling and tugging my body to the places I liked to go. My breaths grew shallow, as though even air was too heavy to bear. Logan needed to set the baby into my arms, onto my chest, to settle her in. I couldn’t feel her there anymore as I looked at her lovely little face. I stood in the yard, the sun spilling over me like something sacred, and felt nothing.

Logan stayed by my side, his voice a constant, desperate murmur of love, but his words began to lose meaning. My eyes grew distant as I watched him care for our girl, the pain of seeing the life ahead without me both reassuring and too much to bear. Though each breath became a fight, every movement a rebellion against the stone that sought to claim me, I pushed on. The rapidity with which it was taking me had stoked my panic, but with it, my need to fight. If Evangeline saw me give up, would she think I hadn’t loved her enough? She reached for me, even like this, even with everything that was wrong. She loved me. My willingness to let the rock consume me whole was warring with the need for her to know I’d given absolutely everything to stay.

The stone pulled at me with a weight so all-encompassing that it hurt, but I held on to my baby’s face in my mind, imagining the soft glow of her smile, the sound of her laugh. It was that which kept me from giving in entirely, even when it surrounded me and squeezed at my lungs. I remembered the warmth of her body tucked against mine, the heat of her soft skin and beating heart pressed into my very marrow.

At night, in the quiet stillness, when all the world fell away and only her breath remained, I thought about her. What would she remember when she thought of me, when people spoke my name like a memory? Would she remember the curve of my body around hers, the way I held her as she drifted to sleep? Would she remember my voice? Or would she remember me as a monument in our home? A hardened shell of the person I used to be who she never really got to know?

Would she know that, from the moment I saw her, I loved her more than I’d ever loved anything else?

I refused to let go.

In bed, my face felt frozen, no longer capable of expressions of joy or grief or love. Instead, I stared at the ceiling, the shadows dancing across it. I wondered idly if those dust motes still floated in the dark, if they still wandered the room even when we couldn’t see them. Would they settle on me when I solidified completely, finding on me a place to rest until they were needed again in the sun?

Beside me, I could hear her breathing in the bassinet, slow and steady, little puffs of air in the soft night. I sank into the mattress, deeper and deeper, the stone creeping along the final vestiges of flesh as they gave way to the encroaching weight.

I couldn’t reach out to touch her anymore, no matter how badly I wanted to.

Would I even wake up tomorrow? Would I ever see the sun again?

It would be so easy to let the cold rock swallow me entirely, a final acceptance that would allow me to rest, to stop fighting. But her little sounds anchored me, brought me back into the pain, the ache of knowing I couldn’t touch her, couldn’t love her how she deserved. She would know how I fought for her— how fiercely I loved her. I would give her that knowledge to keep with her forever.

I recited quietly through the agony the same thing I did every night—somewhere between a prayer and a plea—the cadence matching the rise and fall of my daughter’s chest.

Just one more day, one more day, one more day. 

For her, just one more day. 

And in the dark, I felt the promising twitch of a single finger.

With a B.A. in English and Creative Writing, Colleen Morrison is passionate about crafting stories that explore strength in the face of adversity and the sometimes dull horrors of day-to-day life. When she’s not making questionable Google searches for research, you can find her exploring the Blue Ridge Mountains with her family, reading, or gathering inspiration for her next project. Her work has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine.