To Lose Something Sacred

The women here don’t speak. They had their vocal cords cut from their throats, at birth, by The Man With No Thumbs.

“Don’t worry,” the nurses say to soothe the weeping mothers. “He knows what it means to lose something sacred.”

The mothers’ cries are the stuff of silent horror flicks—violence without repercussion. The nurses pity them but not enough to stop. They pry baby girls from bloodless knuckles and carry on with the preliminary tests: inspecting toes and fingers, pricking the bottoms of pruned feet. And the screams, oh the joyous screams. “We’ll take a recording,” a kind-hearted nurse reassures them. “You can pick it up on your way out.”

The mothers never do.

“How will he do the surgery if he doesn’t have any thumbs?” the fathers ask. They aren’t educated. They aren’t stupid, either.

“He balances the scalpel between his index and his middle fingers. You can watch if you want.”

The fathers never take them up on it.

The women here don’t work. Not really. They tend to the glass tub in the center of the city—thirteen inches thick, five stories tall—where the remnants of their shared trauma are put on display alongside a photograph of The Man With No Thumbs and his first round of patients. The Voiceless Mothers, they call them. Because what good is freedom if there isn’t a martyr to thank?

Everyone has a role to play. There’s a woman who pumps. She injects the infant membranes with formaldehyde until they are pink and robust. Good enough to eat, that’s the standard. Another tends to the alcohol. She drains the glass tub—once in the morning and once in the evening—through a snake-belly hose, never asking why or how or where the pungent current comes from. Though, she has a hunch.

Midday, you might witness a rush of wide-eyed teens. Inklings of breasts sprout from their chests, their voices long taken. They press their noses to the glass and record their findings in the journals they received on the eve of their second birthdays. They have not been assigned their roles yet. They only come here to watch. Some of the girls throw tantrums. This is neither rare nor common.

A driveway spans from the tub out to the sidewalk. There’s a metal plaque out front, pinned to a wooden post at the edge of a drought-stricken lawn— a warm welcome to the tourists, most of whom travel here solely for the jarring reminder to hold their voices close. “There is no comfort without sacrifice,” the plaque reads in demanding gold font.

There is a church by the tub. Families go there to pray. Sometimes God listens. Like little Chloe Beck, the sheepish girl with the pigtails and jagged teeth. She was one of The Chosen Ones. She woke up screaming after six weeks in a coma, two flat-lines deep. Her voice splintered the oak walls and pried windows from their frames. It’s a miracle, the town rejoiced (those of them that could speak). The others danced—eyes wet, limbs flailing wildly about, a sea of rabid animals, all of them, destined for The Promised Land.

Chloe’s parents sent her to a school up North after that, one of those do-gooder places with free lunches and the take-what-you-need charity bins out front. They followed several weeks later, bought a house on the water with painted white shingles and black trim. On Facebook, they boast about the plush outdoor markets and Mr. Beck’s growing collection of fine Italian wines. He keeps the wines in a custom cellar at 55 degrees. No more bologna and mustard sandwiches. No more stripping of the vocal cords. The Becks want nothing more to do with these silly traditions.

That is good. That is fine.

There are scars at the base of these women’s necks, where The Man With No Thumbs left minimal traces of intrusion. Rubbing this calloused skin is said to help restless women find sleep. To keep them from remembering. These women long to forget the white overcast of the operating room, the tack of wax paper against their backs. Their mothers have the same nightmares. The women know because their mothers tell them. I’m sorry, their mothers write, I should have never let this happen. Shame, the women have learned, is a hereditary condition.

The women here don’t speak. They make do with what they have, like the women they see on the Internet, with their hashtags and closet purges and veganism. Those women don’t sleep either. They crave the same things. They are not all that different.

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Amina Frances grew up in the Greater Cincinnati area, where she kept meticulous journals and read many of her early stories aloud to her extremely patient siblings and dogs. She later graduated from Amherst College and worked as an advertising strategist in Chicago for several years, before moving across the pond. She now lives in Switzerland with her husband, Matthew.