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The Safest Place by Huina Zheng
The night before they came to drag me in for a forced induction, my mother and I curled beneath the bed. My husband took our four-year-old daughter, Nini, to his parents’ house. My mother came to stay with me. She moved like a shadow: slid the bolt, hooked the chain, drew the curtains, blew out the kerosene lamp. “Quick,” she whispered, tugging me under.
Dust lay thick. My palm sank into it like flour. A torn sock and a split sole pressed my belly; mold stung my throat. Seven months pregnant, I was as heavy as a water jar. My mother braced an elbow in my lower back, pressed a knee to my hip, and shoved. “Tuck your feet in,” her breath warmed the nape of my neck. “Don’t touch the slats.”
I inched deeper. Before the Family Planning Office found us. While there was still time. With my mother’s help I flattened myself under the bed. She knew how. Once, before the Red Guards came, she hid her little brother in the attic.
If you carried a second child, word reached the Family Planning Office and stayed there until you went in. Willingly or dragged in. Shoulder to shoulder on the concrete, we lay face-down. My mother ringed us with a crate, a cardboard box, a woven sack of winter clothes, then dropped a worn quilt over the pile. The corner brushed my face, bitter with old camphor. She’d always been cautious. When I said I’d run to the mountain behind the house, she cut me off. “The safest place is the most dangerous one.” That was where the officers would search.
When I was in her belly, her mother-in-law — my grandmother — told her, “If it’s a girl, throw it in the river.” Two days before I was born, my grandmother died.
“You’re hard to kill,” my mother used to say. She bore seven children; only three lived. I was the last. At one, I burned with fever for a week. The decoction came up as fast as it went down. Even the doctor shook his head. But I survived. She rubbed my back. “You’ll get through this too.” I believed her.
Dogs barked. Footsteps. Shouts. I shook. The child inside kicked, hard.
A weight closed on my chest. I gulped for air. I remembered my first pregnancy, passing a room with a woman trying to save her baby. “Look, it’s not dead yet…” she whispered. Through the crack I saw a whole infant on a cabinet, silent. “Go, you can’t look!” a nurse snapped, herding us away. The woman said she’d seen “not-whole” ones: when the injection failed, they stirred the fetus apart.
A sharp stitch jabbed my belly. Sweat slid down my brow.
“Don’t be afraid,” my mother said, gripping my hand. Hers trembled too. “Do you remember when you had Nini,” she asked, “how you fought on that bed for hours?”
I nodded. Blood soaked the sheets. Rubber gloves were smeared dark.
“And when the doctor said the head was stuck and issued the danger notice?”
“Yes.”
“How did you get through?”
“Telling myself I must save the baby,” I said.
“A mother,” her voice was steady in the dark, “swallows whatever she must for her child.”
A car horn grew nearer. I squeezed her hand and felt the callus in her webbing. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew she was smiling. The baby moved again, lighter this time, like a small fish across a palm.
“This time too,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, though dread kept rising, something larger than I could bear.
“Remember, Mama is here.”
I nodded, set my hand on my belly, and told my child, “I’m here.”
Huina Zheng holds an M.A. with Distinction in English Studies and works as a college essay coach. Her creative work has been published in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and other literary journals. She has received multiple honors, including nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. She lives in Guangzhou, China, with her family.