CW: Implied sexual violence, misogyny.
It felt a little like fucking.
Reminded Magdalene of the first time she’d ever let a boy get a hand up her skirt, long before Ben but he didn’t know that, she wore white on her wedding day. Couldn’t even remember his name, that boy, just that he’d died in The War and how he’d fucked her that first time.
That’s what the headache felt like. Getting fucked for the first time.
Something hard and blunt poking around in all the wrong spots, looking for an opening and then, finally finding it, ignoring how unwelcome it was and plowing through. A handful of thrusts that weren’t really because it was still trying to get in. Endlessly trying to get in.
“I’ve got the most terrible headache,” she said to Ben who sat in his armchair reading the paper, just like always, the wind howling outside.
“Take an aspirin. There’s a bottle in the medicine cabinet,” he responded without looking up.
She knew already. She was the one that put it there. Doctor said it was for his heart, but her head was just killing her.
Magdalene walked down the hall of their little cabin and the sound of the wind followed her, crying at her back and arms through the walls. Ben said it wasn’t so bad but she could hear it all the time.
He said everything wasn’t so bad. The move. The little house. The wide-open country with its big white clouds so thick they cast shadows on the ground as they passed. They moved for a job, factory work with a little factory town they could live in. Good pay, good benefits and he’d just been laid off, and didn’t she know how hard it was for a Black man to find a good job? Never mind that she was the same kind of Black—she was a woman. Wives okay, but there was no school for children. They wanted settled men so there wouldn’t be any bar fights and youngblood getting restless in all that open space. Ben was fifty-three and Magdalene was past the age of having children.
Wasn’t so bad at first.
Rubbing her head, she went for the bathroom, the little hall still foreign after four months. The little house for a little couple on a row of little houses just the same. The sky above, impossibly blue and endless, filled with clouds like castles.
And then the season changed, and the wind came.
The bathroom window, hidden behind a pale curtain, rattled in its frame to greet her.
Her face was as washed out as the curtain. Ashen. Pain made her eyes glass. She opened the cabinet, sick of looking at herself. The aspirin sat right where she’d left it.
Her hands shook opening the bottle. The pills were bitter on her tongue. The water was coppery in her mouth but the people that brought them there said it was fine to drink. So, she drank it to take the aspirin prescribed for her husband’s heart, because there was nothing else for her.
She lay down in her bed alone, the headache pulsing eager in the soft pink of her brain. It felt heavy and wet when she woke up to make dinner.
• • • •
“The headache? Oh a lot of women complain about them out here!” The doctor said, laughing. “It’s nothing. Sensitive to the change in air pressure.”
“But if it happens to a lot of women, isn’t it something?” Magdalene asked, voice pain-soft. The hospital room had no windows but she could still hear it, the wind.
Ben had driven her to the ER. She threw up as soon as she woke, couldn’t keep her feet under her. He gripped the steering wheel and eyed her distrustfully. Music turned up on the radio to drown out the wind that chased them.
“Good I got this job. Can’t afford anything serious,” he said.
The doctor said it was nothing serious.
“Women complain about a lot of things.” She could hear the eye roll, the dismissal. He wrote a prescription with hasty hands, folded it in half before handing it over. “Take this to the pharmacy. They’ll take care of you.”
“Another one,” the pharmacist said shaking his head when she walked up to the counter, before he even saw the little paper she clutched. “I say it’s hysteria. All in your heads.”
“Well, it is a headache,” Magdalene said, response pain-sharp.
The woman behind her laughed and the pharmacist made a disapproving sound in his throat before he went about his business. He didn’t even unfold the paper, tossed it aside and went to count pills. Magdalene turned to say something to the woman and saw her cheeks were raw under bloodshot, unfocused eyes, so she just nodded. The woman nodded back and the pharmacist returned with Magdalene’s prescription.
“Another one,” she heard him say as she left, like a broken record.
Outside, the wind danced around her, played at the edge of her skirts, sang its high song.
“What did they say?” Ben hounded her as she slid into the seat.
She swallowed the pills dry, hoped they worked quickly. Turned off the radio. “Just give me a few minutes, dear,” she said, leaning against the window. It vibrated with the hum of the engine against her skull and she wished it would shatter, shoot past the bone and into the mess of pulsing meat that it held.
• • • •
Magdalene dropped dinner.
The casserole slipped from her shaking fingers, shattered on the floor.
The medicine made her fuzzy, forgetful. Nothing stopped the pain. Nothing stopped the wind. Pressure change, the other women said, it would be over soon, they said.
“Jesus Christ! What is wrong with you?” Ben shouted, slamming his fist on the table. It’d been weeks of late dinner, no breakfast, messy lunches, and wrinkled shirts. The house was dusty. A ring around the tub. Cabinets emptying. His boss was cranky, the men short-tempered because of the wives. A pressure change.
I don’t know, I don’t know, she thought through the howling storm inside and outside. “My head,” she said.
“Your head, your head,” he mocked. “Take your medicine! You heard the doctor, it’s nothing! Why can’t you just be happy?”
“I’ll make you a sandwich,” she said staring at the shattered, sloppy mess. “We have some fresh detergent in the pantry, some cauliflower from the butcher.”
But Ben wasn’t listening, already half out of the room. “No, I’ll get something out. Can’t deal with this, man works all day . . .” he grumbled, storming off, out the door into the howling wind.
She went to the window to watch his car pull away, but it was the wrong window. Through it, she saw another woman in her own kitchen, washing the same dish over and over.
• • • •
Magdalene went to bed alone. She didn’t hear her husband come in. There was only the wind in her ears and in the morning she couldn’t get up.
• • • •
On the first day Ben yelled, called her lazy, a child. On the second he called an ambulance who couldn’t come. There was only one for the town and all the beds were full.
“Is this hysteria? It’s all of them, shouldn’t we call in a specialist?” Ben asked.
Magdalene opened her mouth to laugh at her husband’s newfound concern after all this, but the only sound that came out was a high, scratchy howl, like the wind.
Ben stopped making calls, sat on the edge of the bed, and cried. Held her hand and made promises to figure it out, get her help. It had been years since he held her hand.
Her whole body pulsed with pain. The first-time fucking pain. Stretching to accommodate the something making its way in. The tears that leaked from her eyes were thick and cloudy. They soaked the pillow, flooded her ears, and the wind grew louder.
She couldn’t hear Ben at all. Just the rattling windows, the wind speeding past, shaking the little cabin the company had given them.
On the third day, Magdalene rose.
They all rose in nightgowns from where they had fallen. They left beds, walked down halls and out front doors. They stepped so lightly, their feet barely touching the ground. They were leaping down the asphalt roads, toe touch to toe touch. Into the fields, tips of grass tickling the soles of their feet.
Arms outstretched, Magdalene ascended, body propelled by the pulsing pain that was pulling her higher, reminding her of the bliss of being young and the clumsy pleasure of the first time. She reached her arms to the lowering sky, saw sprawling, spiraling grey towers where once there were only clouds. The pain lifted from her and there was the blessed emptiness of having done, the euphoria of nothing.
In that space she could see the whole unseen world past her marriage, the company, before the boy died in The War. An endlessness of possibility. She bloomed into it, forehead shattering and from it sprouting a being of opal, folding and unfolding on itself endlessly. Rising ever higher. And below, down the thick rope of flesh that connected them, before it snapped, she saw herself. Saw all the wives, torn bags of skin and meat in the tall grass. The best parts of them taken, the rest left to rot.
