The Confessions of X by Suzanne M. Wolfe

about me. Feeling as if I were intruding, I hesitated. Augustine rose at once and came toward me, taking me by the hand and drawing me farther in as if he thought I would run away.
    â€œHere,” said Monica, patting the couch on which she sat.
    Unsure, I glanced at Augustine. I wanted to be near him, and the distance across the room from where he stood and where his mother sat seemed so great. He smiled and nodded slightly as if to say: I am here, my love.
    â€œAnd place a footstool by her, Augustine.” Then she gestured across the room. “This is Cybele.”
    From a corner a shape resolved itself amongst the shadows, an ancient crone bent double so her head craned up to see. Her head was almost hairless, her mouth a stitched and crumpled gash, which champed toothlessly at nothing.
    â€œCybele was my nurse,” Augustine said, “the tyrant of the nursery.”
    â€œAnd mine,” laughed Monica. “She is the true domina of this house.” Cybele’s clawlike hand plucked at her dress as if she was cold, and when she spoke it was in a Punic dialect of the tribe of the Garamantes that my father taught me when I was a girl.
    â€œSeven moons,” I answered in that same language.
    Again the nod, a kind of grimace for a smile, which I returned.
    â€œExcuse me, mistress,” a male servant said, coming into the room, his tunic’s crimson braid at neck and hem proclaiming him steward. “Cook asks if you want to check the roast. He says it’s done.”
    Monica stood up. “Thank you, Marcus. I quite forgot.” Then to me, “Forgive me, my dear.”
    She moved like a girl though I knew her to be almost forty. Beside her, with my growing belly, I felt stupefied and gross, a placid heifer gazing blankly over the paddock fence.
    Cybele seemed to have fallen asleep, a pile of clothes heaped on a chair, her breathing almost nothing in the stillness of the room, a mouse’s breath, no more.
    Augustine tucked a rug around her legs and then whispered: “Come.” He took my hand and helped me rise for I found it hard to get up from a sitting position now that I was so weighted down by the baby. “Father asked to see us when you awoke.”
    And so he led me, still clasping my hand as if to keep me near in this strange place where he was at home and I was not. We crossed the atrium at the center of the house, an old-fashioned design the way the Romans used to build their villas when first they came to Africa, to another room, spacious and airy, lamps burning around a bed, a burnished nimbus as if a mist of gold had settled there. A shape lay there so still it seemed an effigy, covers drawn tight across the chest, hands clutching the sheets as if to delay the body’s passing. The face I saw seemed molded out of beeswax, an imago of the living. I saw the covers rise and fall minutely and the orbs beneath the blue-veined lids move side to side as if he watched a phantom game of catch.
    Beside the bed a young man sat, some years older than Augustine but clearly of his blood. He had the same dark hair, the same brown eyes, although a fraction taller and heavier of build. He rose when we entered, embraced Augustine, and bowed to me.
    â€œI am Navigius,” he whispered. Then to his brother: “He fell asleep just now but if you wait awhile he might awaken.” He put a hand briefly on Augustine’s shoulder, bowed once more to me, and left the room.
    There was an odor in the room of putrefaction as if the body had already begun its slow descent into the earth, a viscous slide of parts unjointing, and I recoiled, my hand going to my belly as if to ward off that thing called Death from him whose life had barely begun. I have heard it said that pregnant women must not go near a death chamber for fear the child will catch the taint and I believed such notions until I learned what all must learn if they live as long as I: that life is a kind of dying,