S: the screaming of milotchka stitch

1: the scene.

in a gloomy and unreachable part of the great northern forest,
twinkled upon by the lodestar,
lives the marionette Milotchka Stitch.

See - the smoke weave from the chimney of her cottage. See - the forest
scene painted in black and grey and white, with twisted silhouettes and
smeary brushstrokes of snow on calico and canvas. See - her as she sits
sewing by the fire, strings pulling strings, stitching stitches, sewing
silver brocade onto a pair of silk slippers.

she has lived here all her life, abandoned in the wood as a baby and
taken in by an elderly recluse, a seamstress. she has never seen a need
to leave, and even since the tragic death of Gammer Stitch some years
ago, she's stayed and sewn and sighed.
See - her as she takes a brief rest from her sewing, as she lays the
slippers on her lap and thinks fondly of her protectress. Look! - is
that a tear icing up the crease of her eye ? a resin-like tear from
within the very wood of Milotchka Stitch! a small miracle.

Milotchka Stitch has much to be tearful over. she tries to distract
herself by chopping wood and boiling up stews, but she can't ignore the
predicament she's in. it would never have happened if Gammer Stitch had
still been here.

2: the traveller.

one chill day - the days are always chill - , as a cold, copper sun
pushed long morning shadows out of the branches, a traveller happened
by.

this is him now, in greatcoat and snowboots, a fine film of rime frost
on his fine and fashionable moustache. he is a dashing cavalry officer,
a hero of the Crimean War (if such a thing there is.) try to imagine
him in the midst of cannon-fire, with red frogging down the sides of
his well-pressed trouserings and epaulettes like the paws of a great
bear. his moustache glinted like his sword and his horse snorted
haughtily, as only thoroughbreds can snort.
but See - he cuts a sorrier figure now. he is whipped by sleet and
disorientation, his horse long dead from the bullet he gave it after a
fall and a broken fetlock.
Watch - him stamp his feet. See - him huff his breath like a split
puffball. Listen - as he knocks three times.

Milotchka Stitch is tasting her stew as the three knocks knock. she
stops chickenstock still, the wooden spoon held rigid to her lips.
visitors are more rare than rare in these, the most remote of remote
parts?but Milotchka is still young and guileless. she is surprised, but
not suspicious. she has had company before.

See - her open the cottage door and welcome in the officer. See - her
seat him by the fire. See - her ladle him some stew. with
dumplings.

"you are very kind,"
says the officer, a shiver in his speech.
"I am lost and in need of shelter tonight. would you be so very
kind??"

"but of course,"
Hear - Milotchka Stitch reply,
"you are my first guest for some years now. I would be pleased to have
your company and hear any stories you might tell. I live alone, you
see, and the woodland creatures, well?they're very friendly, but they
speak no Russian."

what a thing is this!,
Thinks - Milotchka Stitch,
a guest! and such a handsome one!

meanwhile, Milotchka's young and artless charms have not been lost upon
the officer. he sees a thin-limbed thing of careful craftsmanship, of
smooth and polished curves and silky grain. she is pretty and slight, a
little penny flute of a thing!, and her dumplings taste damnably
good.

"I could not live so alone,"
says the officer, when his stew is finished and his blood has begun to
circulate once more.
"my family is?was large. we used to skate and play games together. my
wife had a singing voice that could make the swallows stop to listen?it
breaks my heart to be so far from home."

See - that sigh, that theatrical hand across the brow. there's
shuddering shoulders and weeping on the way; there's exposition
coming?

"you sound as though you carry your sorrow freshly, like a
flower,"
says Milotchka Stitch, as twee as you please, unused to human wiles and
such self-pity.

"I do,"
Hear - him answer.
"I lost everything: my wife and both my children?but this is a brutal
story and I will not have you hear it. you have been too kind."

Milotchka Stitch attempts to tempt him. she believes in open hearts and
minds and thinks that she could help. her heart-strings have been
tweaked and in her head there is a wriggly woodworm of curiosity
munching its way into the darkness.

but,
he won't be drawn.
instead, he tells her derring yarns of military life - the smell of
gunpowder, floggings and the sweaty, weighty cares of being a hero. she
is dazzled, but more by tales of so many people in one place than by
subjective notions of courage or blood and glory. a cast of thousands
is something she's never imagined before - she cannot stretch her head
around it, it's so big! - and she reels with feelings of tinyness in a
wide, cruel world beyond the proscenium arch.

perhaps it is this combination of perspective and pity, but there are
now more resins than her tears working within her. somehow, they both
find that they've drained the officer's flask of cherry schnapps
completely, that the fire and its abstract shadow-play are suddenly
enticing and that there's more for two lost and lonely souls to do at
night than talk and chew on dumplings.

Watch - the officer feel sheer-glass woodwork underneath his
fingertips; See - Milotchka sensing heat and blood and an organic
pulsing strange to her veneered skin. there is kissing, hard as black
bark; there are heavy breaths of puffball gas and fruit liquor. there
is stripping, there's denuding, there's delicious deciduous shedding of
clothes.

well, yes. yes?well.
a curtain on this scene.

3: the woodbeast.

later, as the embers blush and virgin blood has dried onto the
eiderdown, Milotchka tries to ask him once again.

"your family?? the children?? could you tell me ?"

the officer intakes a breath. he sighs. See - as he taps a cigarette
from a slim silver case and lights it. he's about to tell the
tale.
the furious snow outside the cottage whites the windows and the
hurricane lamp is low. Milotchka's pinewood skin shines slightest brown
with varnish and her strings beam spider threadlike in the comfy
gloom.

the officer clears his throat and in numb and sombre tones he starts to
tale:

There is a thing known as a woodbeast and it lives in woods. It eats
the unborn young of any living thing. It can smell fresh-laid eggs and
hear the soft, slow pulpiness of babies brewing. It is a thing of
savagery and selfish butchery. It is no myth.

About the spring of 1854, we lived in a little dacha some 30 miles from
__________, on the edges of a wood. We'd heard the stories and
dismissed them all as scaremongery. We'd seen two-toed footprints
pointed out to us, scratch marks in church doors, blood stains on
mattresses, defaced icons and the bony relics of children that
supposedly might have been - but we paid no heed. Some claimed it could
change its outward form to fool its prey, others that it wept for them
afterwards - it all sounded like so much lurid nonesense. Superstition
was a staple of idle folk's gossip and it filled the gap the local
priest had left when he and his mistress and their scandalous sexual
compatibility had left for a life in the Urals.
But we should have heard and seen. Those bones were not chicken bones,
the scratches nothing wolves or bears could make, and maybe the Devil
leaves those two-toed prints, but even he would baulk at the unsubtlety
of bloody, ripped up mattresses and mutilated Madonnas &;
Childs.

See - he breaks off here and looks her in the eye. and See - she stares
right back. Milotchka Stitch is not afraid of scary stories, gory
stories, even true ones, and the officer is first to blink.

There isn't much to tell.
My wife was pregnant when I was called away to war. Her letters
mentioned nothing, but on my return some two years later, all that
remained of my first son was a tiny hand. The left. Bunched up in
unsuspecting death.
We grieved. We set aside a place inside our home for those few
keepsakes as we had. We named him and adjusted ourselves to the loss.
My wife refused to speak about the matter, but I learned from family
and friends what had occurred.

Only unborn young will do for the woodbeast. Once born, a child is
useless to it. It had somehow skewered my son and sucked him out. My
wife suffered terrible bleeding.

Another year and we decide to try again. This time I'm home, on hand to
keep watch and defend. When it reaches the ninth month and nothing has
happened, I admit I begin to feel relieved. But my wife knows
better.

I remember the moon was fat and pink. Icicles hung jagged at our
windows and the wood was so still I could almost hear the stars
glitter.
The stench came first. There was a sudden reek of offal and the beetles
stopped their clicking. This was all the warning we had. My
recollection of events that followed is scarce and tattered at best.
The attack lasted an hour, wrecked our home, and left me with nothing
but soupy lumps of flesh by which to remember my wife. My child had
gone, ripped straight from the womb and devoured before my eyes in
sucks and crunches. A girl, I think.

There's nothing more to say.

that night Milotchka's sleep is nothing short of fitful: Watch - her
head rocks to and fro, the lips draw back from teeth clenched tight as
blankets. the curious, wriggly woodworm is beginning to gnaw a home for
itself inside her, a little larval inkling of things to come.

Observe - she dreams in black and white, in thought-clouds suspended
from the rafters. she dreams like a magic lantern. there's slide after
slide of silent white forest and static lakes, pools of dark gray blood
and a figure, black between the vertical tangle of the trees?and
there's a drip drip drip, a hazardous crack of thawing ice.
the images flicker, shudder. the dust swirls in the light-beam like a
blizzard.

4: the woodworm.

now See - she wakes and looks about her. it is morning. all is still as
petrified wood. the ash in the hearth can only distantly remember the
fire and the remainder of the stew sits quietly congealing. the officer
is gone.
Watch - her jump up to the window, smooth a circle in the condensation
with her palm. just blank canvas outside, the lick of paint and flakes,
no sign of life.

she sits with wooden heaviness and stares ahead. she freezes with a
feeling of complete inanimacy.

days and nights pass. full moons follow half-moons follow full moons.
the fall of snow continues undisturbed, layer falling delicately upon
layer, slowly marking time, and the wriggly woodworm sits curled inside
her like a question-mark.
she wonders if perhaps she dreamed the officer ? perhaps she is finally
lonely after all this time ? she misses Gammer Stitch, that's certain,
and perhaps she tries to compensate by play-acting herself a charming
and tragic companion, whose tales of hordes, battalions, regiments and
heroes' welcomes can people her peopleless home and animate her
thoughts ? flesh made manifest, words made flesh.

throughout these long and silent days and nights of wondering, she
takes comfort in her faith. her Gammer instructed her well in the
teachings of the Orthodox church: she can never be alone with the
Virgin Mother watching over her, peeping a protective eye in through
the veil of the fourth wall.
Milotchka offers her devotion three times daily. the tiny icon that her
Gammer gave her opens like a little book, a box of rough, dark wood
inlaid with silver filigree framing. inside, the twinkling picture of
the baby Jesus seems suspended like a puppet in his mother's arms.
although he is the size of a newborn child, his features are those of a
full-grown man. Milotchka has the feeling of peering at them through an
aperture, like a strange and mesmerizing magic lantern show: "See! - my
infant son, the miracle! Watch! - him dance and save the world!"

her belief is soothing out here in the nowhere, but it cannot whitewash
her growing unease in its entirety. a maggoty odour has tainted the
clean air. her little worm of doubt and fear is biting inroads into the
heart of her wood?

Interval - and there is time to wonder.
?
but Look! - the curtain is rising.

some few weeks on and new growth is appearing in the forest. nothing
special, only lumpen fungi and a scattering of mosses, berries, nuts; a
small but significant change amongst the stark bark and the
permafrosted earth.
and See - Milotchka Stitch has also grown. See - her round and bloated
like a giant puffball.

she noticed the changes quite some time ago and went into the attic to
consult Gammer's trusty Book of Ills. whereupon, the which being done,
her tiny fear was confirmed as fat and parasitic fact.

she calculates the time on nimble stitching fingers and she
estimates?about nine months. as time wears on, she cannot simply sit
and sew. she must seek help from somehwere.

5: the taiga.

the nearest village to Milotchka Stitch is some days' journey off: in
good weather, maybe four; in pregnancy, maybe eight.
Milotchka's made of hardy stuff and has survived for several years out
here alone since Gammer departed from the earth. but fear, whether
founded or otherwise, can drain the sturdiest of souls of its still
pool. it is clear now that she did not dream her officer and equally
clear that his worm has been made flesh. it does not take a monstrous
leap of faith to see what might ensue.

Milotchka has no choice, for capable as she is, to birth the baby on
her own is probably beyond her, and aborting it is riddled with bloody
rivulets of guilt: imagine, the dashing officer's third child, albeit
illegitimate, stifled before it even had a chance to breathe ? she
could not live with that.
so See - her packing a knapsack and cleaning her gun. a skillful
seamstress, she can quickly fashion clothes from insulating fur and
bulbous boots for long, wet hours of trudging in the powdery mire.
among other implements, she will take a wire snare, her short-handled
woodaxe, a knife, a compass and of course her needle and thread.

now Watch - she leaves behind her cottage for the first time in her
life. she is a figure open to the elements. she is an animal vulnerably
reeking of the pungency of unborn life. already she feels milk rising
sap-like in her breasts and the chemical metamorphosis stretching her
body. the timber almost groans.

she walks for three interminable days in the coniferous tangle. it is
heavy work in her condition, made worse by a growing and very primal
paranoia. she cannot stick to the woodland path because there isn't
one, and so her bearings are taken from the compass and the
stars.

at night, fly-ropes lever and pulley the moon into position and she
sits huddled in the rimelight, not daring to make a fire or a sound.
and it is now, beneath the sparkling of Ursa Major, that she feels she
has reached her nadir. the loneliness she sampled only once before now
totally engulfs her. she prays and shivers. all the horrible phenomena
and noumena of fear brush at her with cruel gentleness, like big
snowflakes or blunderous moths. she hears wolves. owls screech and the
ground is a panic of rustling as all the tiny mice try hard to
hide.
but the worst of it is in her head, wondering if she might stumble upon
madness like a mantrap or trip up over an unpleasant death.

the fourth day dawns,
and See - the sky is pulsed with strange and beautiful colours.
Milotchka sets off at first light. her exhaustion goes deep. her
desperation hangs rank and tangible about her like stinkhorn.

she tramples for barely an hour and needs to sit. See - over there, a
fallen tree. Watch - as she eases herself down onto it and catches her
breath. she sets her load down and unwraps her little icon from its
cloth.

"great mother of mercy, save Milotchka Stitch!,"
she barely whispers,
"save Milotchka Stitch in these, her darkest times!"

and then - perhaps in answer, but perhaps not - , the wind swirls up in
sudden and spontaneous ferocity, blocking the beautifully coloured sky
from sight. in moments snow is mashing up the air and splattering the
trunks of trees. Milotchka stands and tries to look for cover but can't
see. the brilliant shower is luminous, meteoric, dense like porridge.
it lashes her, weals her. what skin she has exposed is sore and
iodine-burned in the cold. with effort she manages to find her compass
and holds it up close to her eyes to try and see. the needle spins and
jiggers, whizzes round. it's useless in this location, surrounded by
curious sky lights and scrambled magnetics.
she stumbles blindly, hoping maybe to chance upon some shelter, but
there is none. she loses her knife, her wire snare, the compass,
then-

a wrenching. an abdominal twist in the abominable snow. her first
contraction.

the storm dies down a little, just enough for her to breathe and bear
with. she is now helplessly lost. no compass and no means of reading
the sky. not only this, but as the fir-tree branches dance and wobble
like marionettes, she realises that a string of hers is cut.

but all is not so lost as it might seem.
Look! - through the flicker of papery flakes, a shape. just visible is
a building, large and sturdy, and as Milotchka strains to see she knows
her prayers are answered. she sees the burnished gold of an onion dome.
she sees a church.

6: the basilica.

Milotchka shuts the heavy doors behind her with such powerful relief
she almost forgets that she's in the first stages of labour. the air is
very stale and mildewed and there's very little light. See - the
cobwebs painted on the stone walls, the wooden pews gradually greening
rotten. from what she can make out in the darkness, whoever used this
church does so no more.

there's rustling and scurrying, sounds of rodents, but also something
else. Milotchka stops to listen. the noise comes from above. it takes
her a second or two to realise that it is the sound of birds. unused,
the church has been infested by the forest animals, and as her eyes
adjust she picks out thorns and brambles tumbling down the walls and
fungi coming up through flagstones.

a second contraction reminds her why she's here and so she quickly sets
about her preparation. she is practical and resourceful. she finds the
most comfortable spot she can, behind the altar, and pillows it with
tattered tapestries. there are candles, she discovers, but she has no
means to light them. she steals handfuls of nuts and berries from
little piles made by hoarding squirrels. she has expectations of this
being a long haul.

she thinks, too, of the baby. Watch - her carefully rip her fur hat to
provide a warm cradle of sorts and scoop up brackish water from the
font into a chalice so that she can wash the child. her woodaxe is set
out beside her, ready to cut the umbilical cord. once satisfied she has
everything she needs, she settles down for the ordeal. she lies behind
the altar with a hassock under her head. and breathes.

as she is breathing slow and evenly, anticipating her next contraction,
she has time to look about her. she can see a little further in the
dark now, can make out the flitting shapes of the birds up in the
rafters. despite the paucity of light, the gold mosaics on the ceiling
glow back at her dimly, and the indistinct figures of saints or
apostles or martyrs or maybe the Virgin Mother herself look down from
the cupola, taking a professional interest. it's a chattery sort of
church, she thinks, full of faint but constant little sounds of life,
much like the woods. she feels strangely safe and calm, as calm as she
could feel in such circumstances, and it pleases her to think that this
place of worship has found such a peaceful use in its abandonment, as
home and shelter to God's creatures, and that this wild but hallowed
ground is where her child will come into to the world.

but while she breathes and tries to take her mind off things by
focussing on the details of her surroundings, it occurs to her that she
has seen no crucifixes, and come to that, no icons, no representations
of human figures at all, apart from the high ceiling. and as she scans
the walls where pictures might have been or mosaics could have offered
devotional decoration, she sees cracks, or lines, or?scratches ?, in
the masonry?

instinctively, her breathing stops. she holds her breath and wonders
why she's done so. Shhh! - the faint, continual chattering of the birds
and other animals has ceased. the air is tense, it's dead, a smothered
scream of hush?
now See - Milotchka Stitch struggling quickly to her feet, her belly
pulsing and her wooden heart muscles squeezed with pain and panic. the
adrenaline gives her the strength to scramble into a less conspicuous
corner, axe in one hand, her other, string-cut arm flopped limp at her
side.

the silence waits.

Milotchka breathes again. her steady, even pattern of breaths has been
replaced by an instinctive irregularity. sweat glazes her forehead and
her neck. the wooden handle of her axe is slippery and uncertain in her
hand.

she wipes her brow. the birds and animals continue to pretend that
they're not here and Milotchka feels inclined to trust their judgement.
minutes pass. the infant in her belly gives a kick.

and then-
a choking stench assaults Milotchka's nostrils, tangy and carnivorous.
she hardly has the time to register the smell when something grips her
ankles tight and jolts her feet from under her. she lands on her hands
like a cat, intent on keeping the baby from harm, and then feels
searing heat and pain from a deep claw rapidly scratching out ribbony
gouges from the flesh of her back. she buckles, seizes her axe and
takes a wild, directionless swing.

a thomp! as axe meets assailant and another thomp! as she takes a
second swing. she feels a sprinkling of warm liquid on her hands and
face. it could be her attacker's blood, but it could equally be her
own.

two more deep axe-chops and the grip on her ankles relaxes. Milotchka
wriggles herself to her feet, feels the blood dribble out of her back
and soaking her legs. she takes her fifth swing - ching! - and hits the
flagstones. two or three more tries confirms that whatever-it-is has
definitely retreated for now.

again, instinct pulls her strings. light and fire. she grabs a votive
candle and then holds the wick to the ground. she hammers the stone
floor in a series of hacks from her axe until the sparks catch fire to
the wick. the resulting brilliance after all the gloom is almost
painful. light floods her immediate surroundings. there's blood
a-plenty on the stone under her feet, but nothing else.

she remembers that she's left her gun where she initially laid behind
the altar. she waits and listens out for sounds of movement. hearing
none, she makes a rush for her tapestried birthing-place, slipping on
the sticky stone floor and unintentionally snuffing the candle in the
process.

a spectrum of afterglowing colours from the extinguished flame
disorientates her in the darkness. she slaps out her good arm wildly in
a number of directions, hoping to lay hands upon the gun. instead, she
feels the tiniest pin-prick penetrate her abdomen, a needling stitch
which squorls in circles like a kitten kneeding for its mother's teat,
and she recoils until she's stumbling backwards on herself into the
main aisle.

axe still in her grasp, she swings out erratically. a contraction
seizes her and wrestles her to the floor. if she could will the infant
out, she would!

there's no sound but there's the faintest rush of air, and Milotchka
knows the thing is coming at her. more sightless swings of axe and
then-

it's on her, clawing gashes in her legs and arms, biting vicious little
chunks of flesh from out of her neck and shoulders, splintering her
skin in what seems to her like a thousand different places. for a split
and almost languorous second she thinks of submitting. there's that
inanimacy within her again, tired and hopeless, lifeless and felled -
and, in that, there is almost, almost, a flash realization of her
origins, the very unspiritual and undivine nature of her original
creator, the one who sculpted her and then discarded her into the wood
for good. there is an undeniable sense of being watched in all her
torment, of a passive audience like the apostles on the ceiling, seeing
everything and letting it happen. there is all this in her head at one
transient and agonizing moment. all this and more, because these
lightning thoughts electrically charge her, spark her into life she's
never known, no strings attached, with scorch marks burnt into her
faith and a determination that she, Milotchka Stitch, will not roll
over and play dead.

atttactive notions, yes, but nothing very practical when confronted
with a natural born killer and eater of young. so her flesh splinters,
and the seconds pass, and inspiration comes quite slowly to our
suffering heroine, lacking more and more determination as the tiny
little bits of second tick away and blood goes flowing and the
woodbeast - as we must surely by this time recognize the thing to be -
keeps ripping and slashing and doing whatever terrible and tasteless
things that woodbeasts do.

Milotchka's wounds may be bleeding merrily, and time may well be
wearing on, but somewhere in her timber rings and years of deep forest
uncertainty there lies a spirit, perhaps pagan or primeval, recorded in
her very substance?something, who knows what ?, which gives her
strength enough to knee the beast in the belly and curl the handle of
her axe up under its chin with a hard wooden crack! she finds herself
released and pummels what bits of the beast she can find with as many
axe-chops as her one good arm will allow, following it as it seems to
squirm and wriggle and try to dodge her random retaliation until
eventually it retreats into the pitch black cubby-holes of the church
to lick its wounds.

a contraction rips Milotchka's abdomen to strips. she retches and then
steels herself. the birth is close. if she can forcibly push her baby
into the scene, she'll be okay. the woodbeast will not want an actual
child; only unborn young will do; and so, if she can manage to give
birth, then all is safe.

she pushes, squeezes muscles unbeknown to her beforehand, tries to work
the worm out of her like a splinter.

nothing happens.
she looks wildly for a safer place to push the infant out, or else an
escape route, and finds the door to the bell tower. she can just about
see a spiral staircase up into the onion dome. wise or not, she takes
it-
tiptoe, tipetoe, tipetoe , tip-
until she's on her back and birthing in the belfry. fruit-bats chatter
like it's market-day, but Milotchka Stitch is bleeding like she's cut
her own wood throat. she could die before she bears this child.

contractions are coming fast and often now, the blood that's still
inside her pumping, pumping, pumping, throbbing -

See! - her clench.

up here, there's little room and less means of escape. the baby
stubbornly refuses to be born and the woodbeast won't be fooled.

and then-
Listen! -
the pawing up the stairs, the sound of scraping claw and padding paw.
it knows there is no hurry. where can anybody go from in the belfry
?
time is paramount. Milotchka pushes, strains, she gives up all the
effort that she thinks she has to expel her baby from the unprotection
of her tummy, but nothing's happening.
the pawpads tell her that the beast is getting closer, there's no gun
and no woodaxe. she scans the belfry for anything to keep the beast at
bay, but naturally, there is nothing.

at last the woodbeast makes it up into the bright and breezy belfry
space, a cold and windy cell of fruitbat shit. Milotchka, in the very
brief breathing-space of time that she has left, thinks grimly that the
woodbeast is a disappointment, with its diminutive stature and spindly
limbs. she'd expected something bigger, meaner, hairier; not some
psychopathic midget with unusually large hands. but although it is only
the size of a small child, it has the features and menace of a
full-grown adult, and the flailing assault she has just suffered leaves
her in no doubt as to its deadliness.
it would be a laughable, cartoonish thing if it weren't for the
knowledge that it can split wombs and ingest foetuses at one stroke of
its long, proboscis finger.

there's a whipping sound and out comes that intrusional and murderous
finger, pink and sharp and accurate.

Milotchka is about to say her prayers when something nicks her index
finger. blood beads out; contraction follows and she tries again to
expel. the woodbeast's wormy finger wriggles up to her stomach, starts
to needle, and then-

some kind of miracle ?

-her waters break with such a rush and unexpected force the fruitbats
scatter out like frightened deer. the splash and disturbance catches
the beast unawares and Milotchka grabs the only weapon she has, the
very thing that nicked her index finger - her stitching needle -
sinking it as deep as she can into the rucked, pink hide of her
attacker. once twice thrice and several hundred times she stabs the
needle in, tipping the beast off balance on the slippery floor. it
skitters and flails, unable to remain upright, and finally slips
backwards onto the brown, rusted iron of the basilica's only
bell.

an enormous clang vibrates the timbers of the entire belfry and as the
bell swings backwards, the woodbeast cannot help but follow, tumbling
through the gap in the floor, on its way to the bottom of the
tower.

but it's still not beaten. as it tumbles, it grabs hold of Miltochka's
stringless wrist. she finds herself pulled across the slippery belfry
floor by the weight of the falling woodbeast. she yells and tries to
get a hold on something, but the force of the pull is too much and the
timbers too tightly jointed, so she slides into the gap after the
beast, head first?

this could be the end for Miltochka - a giddy fall and a mangled death,
a pile of junk wood and sticky resin, broken joints and impossible
knots of twine. but as she falls - another miracle ? - her strings
tangle. several loops catch on a cluster of nails and her limbs are
nearly pulled from their sockets as her fall is jolted to an immediate
halt. she is left suspended, upside-down and completely hamstrung as
the bell, now below her, moans throughout the tower. debris falls
upwards, as it seems to her, and a second or so passes before she
realises that the beast is no longer gripping her wrist.

high above her, she hears a very deep boom and a wooden-sounding crack
or snap, perhaps the break of bones. dust clears and in the dimness
there appears a figure, lithe and still and twisted, like herself. the
woodbeast's lizardy, mosaic skin seems stuck onto the floor above her,
two-dimensional, as if it was only ever a picture or a bad dream.

she dangles there for a moment, strung up like a hare, the world
inverted.

then she feels pain deep inside her - the baby is most definitely
coming now, at last! but she can't stay like this - the thought of
giving birth in this position is not a pleasant one; Milotchka imagines
having to grip hold of slippery umbilical cord to prevent her child
from following the fate of the woodbeast. she has to get back up into
the belfry-space.

she swings herself between her strings, curls her torso like an acrobat
or trapeze-artist, and the effort pains her beyond belief. after
minutes of struggling which seem like hours, she manages to grab the
lip of the belfry ledge with one hand, her fingers digging as deep as
she can into the floorboards and the blood beginning to flow back out
of her head as she rights herself. she's curled like a foetus herself
now, knees up level to her chin and her belly big and cumbersome
between.

when she finally hauls herself onto the boards of the belfry floor,
there's no stopping the baby from making its entrance.

7: the screaming.

there is screaming and lots of it as Milotchka Stitch gives birth.
there are fluids and an unspeakable effort and a life finally
appearing.

there is screaming - See ?
she screams the place down; screams and screams like woodlice caught in
burning wood. she screams and screams and screams until she's
sick.

the baby's here.
amid blood and bat shit, the baby sees its first light. Milotchka
Stitch is more than spent, more than physically traumatized. her skin
is rucked and puckered and bleeding profusely; her end is very probably
near,
but she cries and laughs in equal measure.

the baby is born! the ordeal is over!!

but See! - with the curtain just about to fall, as the tiny child
screams in a bath of Milotchka Stitch's blood, his toothless mouth a
loud, pink gramophone horn of furious sound and his teeny tiny fingers
grappling, like his lungs, with the alien air,
See - that his feet have got between them only two toes each.