We drank watered down coffee -- cups of rust-tinted liquid that released a strange smelling steam.

We didn't speak directly to each other - instead we concentrated on other things. The news we could barely see through the crackle-jump of our old TV, dog-eared books we'd dropped in the bathwater. Radio songs we didn't quite know the words to.

A trio of shaky beige beans sat in a paper-clip corral in the middle of the table. We gave them boy names, creating some barely acceptable idea of the modern family, laughing when they managed to tip themselves outside of their silver cage.

"Another escapee!" She would smile, placing the little one, Maxwell, back into the makeshift safety zone.

It was easier this way. But even the beans could miscarry, in their own way.

It was something I didn't tell her.

Sometimes, in the deep dark of the middle of the night, the wind would pick up and howl into the cracks that made up our little house. We couldn't afford anything fancy; money for extra wood and glue went into more important things - milk and the day old bread from Murphy's on the corner. The heels would mould first, middles were usually good until a few days later.

We didn't have a freezer.

All we had were those tiny split seeds that reacted to warmth and light and laughter.

Like she had, once, before the rains came and drowned everything.

Dry winter was the only time she wrote poetry.

March came, the month that didn't really belong to any season. Our beans had stopped dancing, dormant in their playpen.

I told her they were in stasis, preparing to evolve.

I had also told her our babies were in heaven.

She wondered how many children a god needed when all she'd ever wanted, was one.

In the spring she pierced her nose and pressed round cut ruby glass into the hole because it gave her something pretty to look at. When people asked her, she told them it was religious and asked if they knew who Yama was.

Most of them would just shake their heads and step back slowly.

"He has my children."

I knew all she wanted was a night without rain. To lie dry in the desert, with open eyes that could finally see the outlines of stars.

"I'm tired of them being blurry," she would say, lying on her back, a hand resting on her sunken belly.

We kept the halogen lamp on all the time, even though it was dangerous and we didn't have insurance. She thought the babies - her beans, just needed another hour of heat.

I'd assumed we'd long baked them, but I didn't tell her.

That night, we ate plain macaroni and fried ham.

It was her birthday.

April 1st came as a kind of joke, she missed her period, ten days late but she wasn't counting, not anywhere but under her breath.

It took her two weeks to tell me, and even then she did it without a smile, as if it were an afterthought, already dead.

I beamed and brought her day-old roses from the cart on the corner.

Wilted, but still smelling like birth, they sat in a chipped vase on the kitchen table, leaning towards the sun.

It was raining.

By May it was obvious they were dead. Their shells had begun to shrivel, darkening up like old leather.

She held the beans in her hands and shook them for hours, her eyes all wet and swollen.

"They're gone," she finally said.

Later, I went to sleep, curled up in a ratty old comforter that smelled like ancient mothballs. She never joined me.

In the morning I found her, Maxwell's belly opened up, exposing a grey worm husk and crumbling silken thread.

The knife on the floor and the blood pooling, congealing. Her insides didn't look much different.

Outside it was raining.

Bio:

She is not refined, nor unrefined. She keeps a parrot. --Mark Twain