When I rise from the dead, I find my husband has hammered a sickle over my neck to keep me from coming back to life. Sentimental, I think as I wiggle free, considering the alternatives. He could’ve cut off my head and tossed it in the sea, padlocked my toe, poured stones in my throat, quartered me, staked me, cremated me, lined my plot with lead and then I wouldn’t have been able to return, hungry for his flesh.

But of course not – what use does an undead woman have for revenge and blood? I’d like to see my mother, not my father who sold me to my husband when his crops came up dry two seasons in a row. Nor do I want to see my children who ripped their way out of me one by one despite my best efforts to remain a barren wife. I haven’t been home to see Ma since my wedding day. I think often of my girlhood spent singing in sweet meadows, playing games with my girlfriends, coming home hungry to Ma’s clean fragrant home and curling up to rest down by her swollen feet. I long for a time when I was never lonely or needed by anyone except Ma, and it’s her strong voice that calls me back to life: Come back to me, Mathilde. Wiggle your fingers. Swallow the dirt.

I wiggle, chew, swallow the dirt until I break through the surface, heave myself out onto the long, dewy grass. It’s dark and startlingly cool, but by the moonlight I see that my husband has laid me to rest in the mass pit behind the crumbling stone church. When I’d decided I’d had enough, before I locked the children into our bedroom, filled my pockets with rocks, and walked down to lie in the cold, rushing river, I’d begged my husband that if anything should happen, that if I die before him, that he must bring my body back to my mother’s village to be washed, tended, and buried. I lumber to my feet, shake loam from my dress, and take my first steps toward home. I should’ve known that my wishes for an eternal resting place were far too much to ask. 

For two days, I stumble alongside the river that leads back to the village of my youth. I walk by fallow and farmed fields, drift in the sweet whiffs of wet grass and decaying bark. In the years since I’ve been upstream, I haven’t felt so free and alive. Always my body ached from the endless work and the toddlers, clinging to my skirts, my hair, even my eyelids when I was too tired to fend off their needy hands. There was no place I could become myself, no rest even at night when I blew out the candles and yearned to dream of galloping brown horses and bare feet and laughing, but I was shaken awake by the weight of my husband running his work-calloused hand up my thigh. 

I crouch by the river to get a good look at the state of my body. My once full cheeks have hollowed, plotted with little holes from where hungry creatures have burrowed in. My eyes bulge out like a startled goat, and my lips are too thin to cover my dull teeth when I grin.

A wide-mouth bass garbles to the surface and breaks my reflection. It speaks, “Monster, what are you doing by the river? This is no place for you.”

I stroke its clammy lips with my finger. “Bass, I’m no monster. I’m a girl, and I’m going home to my Ma.” The bass nibbles on the bits of flesh hanging from my fingers. It feels as good as pulling off a hangnail.

“What mother wishes to see their daughter like this?” it garbles.

What mother doesn’t wish to see their daughter? An image – my own frightened Inga, red-crying into her hands as I rounded them up, howling and crashing around the filthy kitchen, ranting mad. It had been the last straw – Inga breaking the glass swan ornament I’d stowed high on the mantel, the only thing I had left from my mother’s home. Something had broken inside of me when I heard it, glittered to shards all over the floor. Or maybe it was the second straw, after that morning when Husband decided we’d start trying for another, and I felt the same shattering inside myself, like the snapping of a twig or a wrist. 

But I wouldn’t bring any hurt home to my Ma. Come to me Mathilde. I shake the bass from my fingers and continue my way home.

It’s night when I arrive in my village, but I find my parent’s home with ease. It’s only her now, since the blue sickness relieved her of my father and little sisters, and my two brothers married downstream. I feel Ma’s loneliness in that mighty, drafty house. I touch the door handle and imagine my life unfurling in the place where I’d thought I had none – Ma in the chair before the fire stroking my hair, me by her knee knitting twine. Us together for the rest of our lives, with no men or children tugging on our clothes and our flesh.   

When I step inside the house, the floorboards creak. Ma turns from hunching over the stove. “Mathilde,” she whispers, her eyes wide and glassy. My quiet heart kicks, like a rabbit, to life. Ma crosses herself quickly, closes her eyes and mumbles something thankful, and I’m buoyant with the snap of a hundred embers crackling in the hearth. I’m welcome, I’m wanted. She’s missed me so much. 

I lurch to embrace her, cross the threshold that has been separating us so many years but – 

A creak on the stairs.

A slap of bare feet.

A surge of dirty heads and flushed faces. 

The tide coming in. 

Children, children, children and they’re crying, 

“Mamma! You’re home!” 

The children submerge me, clinging to my legs, digging their searching fingers into my flesh, as soft and giving as an overripe plum. I push them away but they keep coming and Ma disappears from my reach. I call to her and beg her to help me as they tug me down to the floor. My brittle knees crunch beneath their weight. 

A foamy current of faces: Otto and Inga, Emil and Yrsa, cheer my return with wide, wet mouths – grab my ears, my nose, and my lips to see if it’s true, if I’m not dead anymore, and I cover my eyes and think, how could Husband bring them here but not me? And how can I never get back to who I was when I was a girl, alive and my own, and why must they always need me so much?

In the morning, when Ma has packed us all up and shoved us out the door with enough rations for the long journey back to my husband’s home, I curse her for bringing me into this life sentence not once, but twice. I yell and howl that I won’t go, that she must keep me, that I’m hers and she’s mine and I don’t deserve it. I want more.

She closes the door a crack so only one accusing gray eye sees through. “You think you’re the only woman that’s angry? Greedy girl, go back to your husband. Let me finally rest in my own quiet home.” She bolts the door with a resounding snap.

On the steps, with all these children, these many unwanted wriggling bloodwarm children, I close my eyes and return to the last day when I found myself some peace, when I leaned back into the rushing frigid current and hoped my body could be carried, waterlogged but worthy, back to my home for a proper burial. A place I could be cared for.   

A child tugs at my dress, bits of soil and worms fall from my body onto their sandy, poorly cut hair. Inga raises her gangly arms for me to pick her up, Emil drops his pack at my feet. My stomach revolts. “No,” I say, “You’re too big for that now.” Then I steer the children down toward the river.