Our grandmothers used to speak to the Old Goddesses—those like dimpled dough, eyeless and petrified. But our grandmothers had had options. And our goddess had had enough of voluptuous fertility. O fruitless one, you’d invoke her. O barren, o skeletal, hear our prayer. Her stone hair was braided into tiny nodules wound tight round her head and her face disappeared into them. O invisible, o moon sliver, o inhospitable. Her breasts lay flat and long against her smooth stomach, nipples pointing to earth, straight lines of hips and thighs and belly and not even a bellybutton to break up the planes.  

Your mother despaired of you. What did I save all your baby clothes in the loft for then, if you were just going to stab me in the heart like this and ask me to throw them in the dump? Her world had centered around fecundity; what did she know? You didn’t talk to her when you realized that you didn’t want a child, this child especially. Even your realization came in a hush. 

Roe and then Dobbs were by then barely flashes in our rearview mirrors. Fifty years had passed. The clinics were shut, the doctors blackballed; the supplies of pills and coils and rods dwindled under heavy taxation, and then the schools crumbled under pressure from above and the teachers turned away in shame and what we were left with was only the Guiding Hand of the church under our skirts.

Of course, you heard the rumours of the goddesses’ Romanian origins, even if you weren’t entirely convinced. The confirmations of efficacy. From China, the case studies passed around seemed almost irrefutable. We’d come a long way from Pliny’s suggestions (stepping over a viper? impractical) and the ancient Egyptian prescriptions involving crocodile shit. Our parents’ stories were littered with coat hangers and bleach that we had no use for.

But first—the hunted hunch of your shoulders as you pored over the backs of local shopper magazines. You heard that we left our details in UV-legible pen on the wall shadows where the tampon machines used to be. Or you’d need to go through someone who knew someone who once met a woman who—

Your consultation arranged, you’re drawn into our loving and caustic fold. For your particular case: Wild ginger. White hellebore. Feverfew. Farn. Butter-headed tansy. Then, with the right words, the cramps would set in. You’d touch the wetness between your thighs and come up daubed in blood. You’d need our hands. Maybe this would be the threshold at which you’d start to believe.

In time would learn the rites yourself and would crouch over a mat woven from prayers friendship bracelets bloody cord fibres. You would grow to know the chants. With each moaned intonation, the goddess would sharpen in your hands. You grew angles where you’d not had them before.

You would register, with the total calm of a moonrise, the sensation of rippling sharp rows, teeth upon teeth, the next time you touched the wetness between Her thighs.