Poppygoblin
Winner
by Raechel Anne Jolie
Northeast Ohio Writer
“Do you feel like something's not real?
Let the spirit move you again.” - Karen Dalton
Let the spirit move you again.” - Karen Dalton
Loretta Sabine is a death cat. A tiny all-black fluff of a cat with an abnormally short tail and a standoffish disposition of extreme discernment. Loretta Sabine will cuddle only after the witching hour, around four in the morning, after she’s had her most potent time with the house spirits. There is a ghost who lives in the spare bedroom of the small apartment I share with Loretta and her brother Diesel, the humble second-floor of a duplex that I referred to for a year as “my divorce apartment”---we weren’t married, technically, but we were together eight years, and the loss, although amicable, felt nearly insurmountable. There is no triter metaphor for heartbreak, I think amidst bumps in the night, than a haunting.
“You two really fed off of each other in the beginning,” my friend Tal said, after they stayed in my apartment for a month to house- and cat-sit while I visited my new partner in Catalunya. Tal is a witch who grew up in a non-secular Jewish mystic community. They have a connection with other realms I trust deeply. “The ghost is sad, and you were sad. I think she’s been feeling a little lighter since your depression started easing.”
I tell Tal that makes sense, and then ask if they also noticed Loretta’s communication with her.
“Oh definitely,” they confirm.
When Loretta Sabine talks to the spirits, she often yowls in a way that reminds me of a video I watched of professional mourners in Italy. In many cultures, women were hired to supplement the grieving rituals after a family loss. In this particular video, four black-veiled Italian elders wailed, not so dissimilar from the yowl my girl cat makes. I know, for the early months of our time in the apartment, she was talking to the living-but-absent spirits of my ex, and the cat sister she lost in the breakup. I came to learn that she was also talking to the ghost, her new friend, an entity to whom I can tell she’s allied herself. As my grief eased, the nightly wails became less painful, more chirps, more conversational.
“My little death cat,” I call to her when she’s staring spookily into an empty corner.
Loretta Sabine’s regimented 4 A.M. cuddle is usually quite brief, and involves a delicate curl below my chin, her back a C-curve against my chest. I nuzzle into the delicacy of her fur so close, but within five minutes she’s off again.
Diesel, on the other hand, is a life cat. A hedonist, a real glutton for all things snuggle- and food-related. Unlike Loretta, Diesel welcomes pets and scritches anytime. He is a big cat, sturdy and fat, also all black, and he has a particular ‘plop’ that feels nearly dog-like. Plop, right beside you on the couch, leaning into your hip with his head turned up and eyes squinted in a pleasure-anticipating gaze. An Oscar Wilde of cats, I sometimes call him.
Peter, my new partner, has started living with me. He is a cat-person and a ghost-person, and he falls in love quickly with my felines and also notices the house spirit. She isn’t a big fan of him at first, but a few months in, things start to settle.
Incidentally, Peter and I are not trying to get pregnant. We are deeply and passionately in love, but carry a longer-than-normal list of complications between us: for one, he was living on another continent when we started dating, and he’s not so sure he’s ready to give that up. For another, I was fresh out of a relationship at our start, bucking every common adage to take a breather between serious partnerships. And then there is the matter of material resources; between the two of us, we have very few. As a jilted PhD, cobbling together adjunct teaching and other gig work was sufficient when I was with my ex who had a stable job and healthcare; but after leaving, I was under water once again, barely scraping by, just like I grew up. Peter has his
own reasons for precarity, which include an admirable commitment to unpaid social movement work, as well as finding a path to managing mental illness that has precluded full-time employment. The two of us, in our late 30s, with this whole list of obstacles, did not exactly imagine parenthood in our future. And, for many years, I was decidedly ambivalent about becoming a parent — a fact that contributed to the end of my last relationship.
So when I was nearly two weeks late in my menstrual cycle, my first reaction was distress. We could not afford a baby, we could not even say we felt confident in staying together for the long haul. And though I’d recently been feeling some surprising pangs of longing for children of my own, I still wasn’t exactly certain of my ability or desire to be a mom. The second pink line indicating pregnancy appeared almost immediately on the stick below my stream of pee. I waited the prescribed two minutes, just in case it might change back, but I knew. I slid my back dramatically against the wall in the dining room and fell into a seat by the heater vent. “It’s positive,” I said flatly with tears in my eyes. Peter joined me on the floor. What were we going to do?
*
On a walk to the lake we visit almost daily, Peter and I notice a disheveled baby doll in the tree lawn of a house a few streets down. It is covered in streaks of dirt, its little doll dress soiled and awry. “That’s grim,” I say nodding toward it. We first notice this just a few days before I take the pregnancy test, and then promptly forget about it. On our next walk, after it’s confirmed I am carrying an embryo, we notice her again, in the same spot, this time face down in the newly fallen snow. “Oh god,” we both say, more or less. I stop and feel propelled to her; I gently lift her from the snow and set her upright by the tree. I am almost annoyed at how maternal I am starting to feel, how true all the essentialist narratives of mother-instinct have turned out to be for me. I am, already just two days into being aware of my pregnancy, feeling protective, soft, and to my surprise, completely in love with this baby. “Embryo,” I correct myself after googling more about reproductive health than ever before. It's still, at about six weeks now, an embryo. I love this baby (embryo) but I still may not keep this baby (embryo) and it is important for me to remind myself, as I’ve been doing as an abortion advocate for decades, that it is not actually yet a baby.
“It’s the size of a poppy seed,” I tell Peter about my internet research discovery on the couch one night, holding my hand to my belly and weeping. He holds me. “Little poppy.”
The next day, Peter checks the dream journal he keeps. We determine the week I would’ve conceived and with a faint memory of a dream about a child, he reviews his notes. “I was with my dad and my brother, and then I wrote that I was guiding a goblin child through a forest,” he reads and looks up at me with wide eyes. “Little goblin child.”
“Little poppygoblin,” one of us says, I can’t remember who, but it sticks. Poppygoblin, our baby (embryo).
In this first week of adjusting, I go from distress to an uncertain excitement. I schedule an appointment at the local abortion clinic and am told they won’t be able to see me for two more weeks; this is frustrating, but also it buys me time to figure out what to do. Depending on the hour, Peter and I are either in realistic detachment or unbridled gushing about how we’d raise the most loved little goblin. In this first week, Diesel the cat cuddles me more aggressively than he’s ever cuddled me before. His side-of-the-body-plop turns into an insistent top-of-the-body plop, and he rests his whole sturdy self directly on top of my torso, whether I’m sitting or lying on the couch, he finds a way to be completely pressed against me, and against poppygoblin.
Loretta maintains her normal distance.
Peter and I walk again to the lake. The babydoll is still sitting upright against the tree. We are surprised by this, especially because the yard she’s closest to belongs to a big fancy house, a certainly wealthy family who would not appreciate an unsightly babydoll on their treelawn. “Maybe they’re just the kind of terrible rich people who never go outside,” Peter snarks. I am happy to join him, as usual, in raging at the rich, but also I let myself imagine the luxury of a house— with rooms, so many rooms!, for a baby and its baby things — with as much jealousy as I have judgment. The babydoll stares at me and knows this, I think.
My body is changing and I am in awe of it. The science says the round of my belly in the first trimester is likely just bloating, but still I feel stretched, like I am making room for her. My inarguably small breasts are also full and round in a way I’ve never seen them. I find myself grabbing hold of them often, in the privacy of the apartment, insisting Peter feel again; “So much bigger, right?!” I keep asking to ensure it’s not in my head. “Definitely,” he squeezes them gently with an impish smile. At night, spooning me, he holds my belly the way they teach us to in movies. I place my hand over his, both of us creating a radial warmth. These days I connect with my changing body are the days I cannot imagine letting poppygoblin go.
When I am about five weeks along in the pregnancy, something shifts. My breasts seem to deflate and every evening I feel extremely painful cramps. I google these symptoms and learn that they can be signs of either a miscarriage or normal first-trimester side effects. Helpful. “Something’s wrong,” I tell Peter. “I don’t think she’s okay.” We have gendered Poppy, I don’t know why. (“Even if she has a penis, I think she’s a girl,” I have told Peter my hunch.) The cramps are not bad enough to warrant a hospital trip, and I’m not bleeding, so there is no certainty to any of it, but I feel more and more sure that I am losing this baby, that I am losing the choice of her.
I am crampy on Christmas and haven’t told anyone in my family about the pregnancy. I do not drink alcohol that evening, which is admittedly rare for me on a holiday. I am glad to make the sacrifice of changing my behaviors for poppygoblin; it feels easy. But I am worried, clenching my stomach in the bathroom and deep-breathing through another sharp pain, that there is no poppygoblin anymore to protect.
I have cramps two other days that week. The last day I remember feeling pain, Loretta Sabine comes for her nightly cuddle, but this time it is long — hours next to me — and this time, she curls not beneath my neck, but directly into my lower belly. I am in and out of sleep throughout this, but at one point, the sky still dark, I say loud enough for Peter to hear: “Poppy’s gone; Loretta is telling me that she’s gone.” Peter reaches over to place his hand on me, but Loretta is in the way of it, so he pets her and presses his face into my neck and nods.
The next morning, on our walk to the lake, we notice the babydoll has disappeared.
A week later, my first ultrasound confirms that poppygoblin stopped growing. “About a week ago,” the nurse tells me gently. She explains that I had a “missed miscarriage,” and in my case, the embryo probably won’t pass naturally; I will need a surgical procedure that is the same as an abortion, but will be covered by insurance since there will be no way to prove I’m not a deserving wanna-be mother, rather than an undeserving dumb slut. I put on a brave face for her, tell her I’d like the picture they offer to print, and when I get back into the car with Peter, I weep. We hold the image in our hands and cry and cry. I did not think I was going to be a person who cried over an ultrasound image, but I was, there in the car, looking at this little blob and thinking, Somehow I love you.
We drove to the lake where we walk so many days of the week and we stood on the bridge and we looked at the wild geese, and we told poppygoblin, “Maybe you can come back.” We cried and we held each other and we said, “Thank you for changing our lives.” We light a candle for her that night; eventually, after the procedure, we will do a symbolic burial of a seed, and we will hold her picture over the dirt and fallen snow, and we will thank her again, and we will ask her to please keep communicating with us. “Loretta Sabine will help.”
***
I keep trying to figure out why it feels so important to me to root the story of my pregnancy in the supernatural. It is strange, maybe, to think that the most powerful part of my short natal journey was how my cats responded to it, the omen of a babydoll, or the namesake of a dream….But it is also strange to grow a thing inside of you. It is strange that fingers were forming in my uterus like the way leaves sprout from my basil plant. Of course it all feels close to magic.
But more than that, the spiritual realm breaks apart time; I think that’s why so many of us are drawn to it. If poppygoblin showed herself through the emblematic, she can keep existing. Somehow, she can keep existing, no matter how long she’s been gone.
***
Several days a week, we walk to the spot in the woods near the lake where poppygoblin is buried. I feel her there, in a patch of land that in the spring will bloom with green leaves and yellow buds, where we place and replace a tea candle in remembrance. I feel her when, two months after my procedure, a new restaurant in the neighborhood puts up its sign, reading Poppy. I feel her when I look at the ultrasound, tucked in the drawer on the nightstand, and in the times she visits me in dreams. But it is at home—when Loretta Sabine is in the hallway, yowling or chirping depending on the day, staring at nothing that is clearly something—where I feel her most of all. My little death cat telling me, she’s here, she’s still here.
“You two really fed off of each other in the beginning,” my friend Tal said, after they stayed in my apartment for a month to house- and cat-sit while I visited my new partner in Catalunya. Tal is a witch who grew up in a non-secular Jewish mystic community. They have a connection with other realms I trust deeply. “The ghost is sad, and you were sad. I think she’s been feeling a little lighter since your depression started easing.”
I tell Tal that makes sense, and then ask if they also noticed Loretta’s communication with her.
“Oh definitely,” they confirm.
When Loretta Sabine talks to the spirits, she often yowls in a way that reminds me of a video I watched of professional mourners in Italy. In many cultures, women were hired to supplement the grieving rituals after a family loss. In this particular video, four black-veiled Italian elders wailed, not so dissimilar from the yowl my girl cat makes. I know, for the early months of our time in the apartment, she was talking to the living-but-absent spirits of my ex, and the cat sister she lost in the breakup. I came to learn that she was also talking to the ghost, her new friend, an entity to whom I can tell she’s allied herself. As my grief eased, the nightly wails became less painful, more chirps, more conversational.
“My little death cat,” I call to her when she’s staring spookily into an empty corner.
Loretta Sabine’s regimented 4 A.M. cuddle is usually quite brief, and involves a delicate curl below my chin, her back a C-curve against my chest. I nuzzle into the delicacy of her fur so close, but within five minutes she’s off again.
Diesel, on the other hand, is a life cat. A hedonist, a real glutton for all things snuggle- and food-related. Unlike Loretta, Diesel welcomes pets and scritches anytime. He is a big cat, sturdy and fat, also all black, and he has a particular ‘plop’ that feels nearly dog-like. Plop, right beside you on the couch, leaning into your hip with his head turned up and eyes squinted in a pleasure-anticipating gaze. An Oscar Wilde of cats, I sometimes call him.
Peter, my new partner, has started living with me. He is a cat-person and a ghost-person, and he falls in love quickly with my felines and also notices the house spirit. She isn’t a big fan of him at first, but a few months in, things start to settle.
Incidentally, Peter and I are not trying to get pregnant. We are deeply and passionately in love, but carry a longer-than-normal list of complications between us: for one, he was living on another continent when we started dating, and he’s not so sure he’s ready to give that up. For another, I was fresh out of a relationship at our start, bucking every common adage to take a breather between serious partnerships. And then there is the matter of material resources; between the two of us, we have very few. As a jilted PhD, cobbling together adjunct teaching and other gig work was sufficient when I was with my ex who had a stable job and healthcare; but after leaving, I was under water once again, barely scraping by, just like I grew up. Peter has his
own reasons for precarity, which include an admirable commitment to unpaid social movement work, as well as finding a path to managing mental illness that has precluded full-time employment. The two of us, in our late 30s, with this whole list of obstacles, did not exactly imagine parenthood in our future. And, for many years, I was decidedly ambivalent about becoming a parent — a fact that contributed to the end of my last relationship.
So when I was nearly two weeks late in my menstrual cycle, my first reaction was distress. We could not afford a baby, we could not even say we felt confident in staying together for the long haul. And though I’d recently been feeling some surprising pangs of longing for children of my own, I still wasn’t exactly certain of my ability or desire to be a mom. The second pink line indicating pregnancy appeared almost immediately on the stick below my stream of pee. I waited the prescribed two minutes, just in case it might change back, but I knew. I slid my back dramatically against the wall in the dining room and fell into a seat by the heater vent. “It’s positive,” I said flatly with tears in my eyes. Peter joined me on the floor. What were we going to do?
*
On a walk to the lake we visit almost daily, Peter and I notice a disheveled baby doll in the tree lawn of a house a few streets down. It is covered in streaks of dirt, its little doll dress soiled and awry. “That’s grim,” I say nodding toward it. We first notice this just a few days before I take the pregnancy test, and then promptly forget about it. On our next walk, after it’s confirmed I am carrying an embryo, we notice her again, in the same spot, this time face down in the newly fallen snow. “Oh god,” we both say, more or less. I stop and feel propelled to her; I gently lift her from the snow and set her upright by the tree. I am almost annoyed at how maternal I am starting to feel, how true all the essentialist narratives of mother-instinct have turned out to be for me. I am, already just two days into being aware of my pregnancy, feeling protective, soft, and to my surprise, completely in love with this baby. “Embryo,” I correct myself after googling more about reproductive health than ever before. It's still, at about six weeks now, an embryo. I love this baby (embryo) but I still may not keep this baby (embryo) and it is important for me to remind myself, as I’ve been doing as an abortion advocate for decades, that it is not actually yet a baby.
“It’s the size of a poppy seed,” I tell Peter about my internet research discovery on the couch one night, holding my hand to my belly and weeping. He holds me. “Little poppy.”
The next day, Peter checks the dream journal he keeps. We determine the week I would’ve conceived and with a faint memory of a dream about a child, he reviews his notes. “I was with my dad and my brother, and then I wrote that I was guiding a goblin child through a forest,” he reads and looks up at me with wide eyes. “Little goblin child.”
“Little poppygoblin,” one of us says, I can’t remember who, but it sticks. Poppygoblin, our baby (embryo).
In this first week of adjusting, I go from distress to an uncertain excitement. I schedule an appointment at the local abortion clinic and am told they won’t be able to see me for two more weeks; this is frustrating, but also it buys me time to figure out what to do. Depending on the hour, Peter and I are either in realistic detachment or unbridled gushing about how we’d raise the most loved little goblin. In this first week, Diesel the cat cuddles me more aggressively than he’s ever cuddled me before. His side-of-the-body-plop turns into an insistent top-of-the-body plop, and he rests his whole sturdy self directly on top of my torso, whether I’m sitting or lying on the couch, he finds a way to be completely pressed against me, and against poppygoblin.
Loretta maintains her normal distance.
Peter and I walk again to the lake. The babydoll is still sitting upright against the tree. We are surprised by this, especially because the yard she’s closest to belongs to a big fancy house, a certainly wealthy family who would not appreciate an unsightly babydoll on their treelawn. “Maybe they’re just the kind of terrible rich people who never go outside,” Peter snarks. I am happy to join him, as usual, in raging at the rich, but also I let myself imagine the luxury of a house— with rooms, so many rooms!, for a baby and its baby things — with as much jealousy as I have judgment. The babydoll stares at me and knows this, I think.
My body is changing and I am in awe of it. The science says the round of my belly in the first trimester is likely just bloating, but still I feel stretched, like I am making room for her. My inarguably small breasts are also full and round in a way I’ve never seen them. I find myself grabbing hold of them often, in the privacy of the apartment, insisting Peter feel again; “So much bigger, right?!” I keep asking to ensure it’s not in my head. “Definitely,” he squeezes them gently with an impish smile. At night, spooning me, he holds my belly the way they teach us to in movies. I place my hand over his, both of us creating a radial warmth. These days I connect with my changing body are the days I cannot imagine letting poppygoblin go.
When I am about five weeks along in the pregnancy, something shifts. My breasts seem to deflate and every evening I feel extremely painful cramps. I google these symptoms and learn that they can be signs of either a miscarriage or normal first-trimester side effects. Helpful. “Something’s wrong,” I tell Peter. “I don’t think she’s okay.” We have gendered Poppy, I don’t know why. (“Even if she has a penis, I think she’s a girl,” I have told Peter my hunch.) The cramps are not bad enough to warrant a hospital trip, and I’m not bleeding, so there is no certainty to any of it, but I feel more and more sure that I am losing this baby, that I am losing the choice of her.
I am crampy on Christmas and haven’t told anyone in my family about the pregnancy. I do not drink alcohol that evening, which is admittedly rare for me on a holiday. I am glad to make the sacrifice of changing my behaviors for poppygoblin; it feels easy. But I am worried, clenching my stomach in the bathroom and deep-breathing through another sharp pain, that there is no poppygoblin anymore to protect.
I have cramps two other days that week. The last day I remember feeling pain, Loretta Sabine comes for her nightly cuddle, but this time it is long — hours next to me — and this time, she curls not beneath my neck, but directly into my lower belly. I am in and out of sleep throughout this, but at one point, the sky still dark, I say loud enough for Peter to hear: “Poppy’s gone; Loretta is telling me that she’s gone.” Peter reaches over to place his hand on me, but Loretta is in the way of it, so he pets her and presses his face into my neck and nods.
The next morning, on our walk to the lake, we notice the babydoll has disappeared.
A week later, my first ultrasound confirms that poppygoblin stopped growing. “About a week ago,” the nurse tells me gently. She explains that I had a “missed miscarriage,” and in my case, the embryo probably won’t pass naturally; I will need a surgical procedure that is the same as an abortion, but will be covered by insurance since there will be no way to prove I’m not a deserving wanna-be mother, rather than an undeserving dumb slut. I put on a brave face for her, tell her I’d like the picture they offer to print, and when I get back into the car with Peter, I weep. We hold the image in our hands and cry and cry. I did not think I was going to be a person who cried over an ultrasound image, but I was, there in the car, looking at this little blob and thinking, Somehow I love you.
We drove to the lake where we walk so many days of the week and we stood on the bridge and we looked at the wild geese, and we told poppygoblin, “Maybe you can come back.” We cried and we held each other and we said, “Thank you for changing our lives.” We light a candle for her that night; eventually, after the procedure, we will do a symbolic burial of a seed, and we will hold her picture over the dirt and fallen snow, and we will thank her again, and we will ask her to please keep communicating with us. “Loretta Sabine will help.”
***
I keep trying to figure out why it feels so important to me to root the story of my pregnancy in the supernatural. It is strange, maybe, to think that the most powerful part of my short natal journey was how my cats responded to it, the omen of a babydoll, or the namesake of a dream….But it is also strange to grow a thing inside of you. It is strange that fingers were forming in my uterus like the way leaves sprout from my basil plant. Of course it all feels close to magic.
But more than that, the spiritual realm breaks apart time; I think that’s why so many of us are drawn to it. If poppygoblin showed herself through the emblematic, she can keep existing. Somehow, she can keep existing, no matter how long she’s been gone.
***
Several days a week, we walk to the spot in the woods near the lake where poppygoblin is buried. I feel her there, in a patch of land that in the spring will bloom with green leaves and yellow buds, where we place and replace a tea candle in remembrance. I feel her when, two months after my procedure, a new restaurant in the neighborhood puts up its sign, reading Poppy. I feel her when I look at the ultrasound, tucked in the drawer on the nightstand, and in the times she visits me in dreams. But it is at home—when Loretta Sabine is in the hallway, yowling or chirping depending on the day, staring at nothing that is clearly something—where I feel her most of all. My little death cat telling me, she’s here, she’s still here.
Raechel Anne Jolie (she/they) is a writer and educator based in Cleveland, Ohio on Erie and Mississauga land. She holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota. Her writing has appeared in The Baffler, Bitch, Teen Vogue, In These Times, among other publications. Jolie is also the editor and co-creator of The Prison Arcana tarot zine, made in collaboration with incarcerated artists. Her memoir Rust Belt Femme received recognition in NPR's Favorite Books of 2020, was a finalist in the Heartland Bookseller's Award, and was the winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction.
Twitter: @reblgrrlraechel | Instagram: @rebelgrrlraechel |