Seven Days in Symbiosis’ Cradle
by Zoe London
Stephens College
Zoe London is a junior at Stephens College and will graduate with her BFA in Creative Writing in December. She has previously been published in They Call Us and Harbinger. Recently, she presented her piece “Unbeingdead'' at the 2023 Sigma Tau Delta Convention and received an Honorable Mention for the Stemmler/Dennis LGBT& Award.
They would be happy with a boy; they would be happy with a girl. They came to this conclusion well before the delivery date, and their list of names was perfectly balanced for this reason (Alan, Amy, Bob, Betty, and so on). If someone had pressed them on it, Amos would have admitted that he wanted a girl. His reasoning was that she might be less trouble to raise and better company for his wife. But Eden truly would have been happy with either. The important part was that it was theirs. They needed something to share.
Eden went into labor a day early, but that wasn’t a problem. They were eager for the arrival. Amos had asked if they could induce Eden a month early, in fact. “We keep bickering, Doctor,” he had confided, “so you see, it really can’t wait.”
But the OB shook his head. He had a way of shaking his head with the force of a windmill every time Amos said something too ridiculous. His glasses would slip down his nose, and he’d have to push them back up before responding.
“Eden is an older mother, though. That’s not advisable if you want a healthy child.”
The following month had been far from smooth sailing, but finally Eden’s water broke. Amos caught up with her at the hospital just as she was beginning to crown (the life of an accountant was busy, but he arrived as punctually as he could). She was swearing, which was unusual, and she grunted as fresh sweat matted her red fringe against her forehead.
“One, two, three—push.”
And their divine creation was born. The doctor scooped it out from between Eden’s heaving legs, and its jar of a body was translucent in the light. Behold, unto the world! It smelled rancid like running shoes; Amos felt guilty for that to be his first thought about his offspring. It was smaller than he expected, too, only half full with flour and water. It would get bigger, right? The doctor screwed the top off the jar, and it started to whine and bubble up and over the sides of itself like condensation.
“Congratulations,” the doctor announced, bestowing Eden with her child. “You’ve welcomed a beautiful, healthy sourdough starter into the world.”
It wasn’t the daughter that Amos wanted. It wasn’t what Eden wanted at all.
* * *
On the first day of life, they came home from the hospital, and Eden asked, “Where should it sleep?”
Amos thought he misheard her. But sure as state income tax, when he looked up from the Monday newspaper, she was cradling their sourdough starter in the crook of her elbow. They’d secured the lid back over its head. A bit of thick, eggshell-colored liquid bubbled out from under the lid, dripping down the jar and onto her baby blue blouse. Amos wondered if it would stain.
“The nursery?” he responded, a bit irritated. “That’s what we always planned.”
“But now that we have it, it’s really not suitable for the nursery,” Eden said dismally. “It’s messy, for one thing. I bought a really nice carpet for the nursery. Drapes, too—”
“You bought, right, I’m sure.”
“—and I can’t bear for it to ruin them. I just can’t.” She took a deep breath and said, “I think it should sleep on the kitchen counter.”
Amos nearly dropped his newspaper. “Our child? You’d have our child sleep in the kitchen.”
“It’s only for a few days!” Eden was evidently too loud in her exclamation; the jar whined and gurgled in her hands, and she had to rock it back and forth until it went quiet again. “Seven days,” she continued under her breath, “and then it’s old enough to go out on its own. The kitchen should be fine until then.”
Amos couldn’t argue with that logic. It was only seven days, and he wanted to go back to reading his newspaper. Since he had promised himself that he would try, he fixed Eden with his warmest smile in years. He said, “At least we can clean up the mess together.”
The sourdough starter spit up on Eden. She didn’t smile back.
* * *
On the second day, Eden went back to the urban planning office. Too soon to return to work, maybe, but the doctor assured her that her return to normalcy would be expedited this way. Thus, Amos wandered downstairs that morning to care for his child.
It was nowhere to be found.
Amos checked in cupboards, under tables, in the fridge. He even ventured into the living room, pulling change out of couch cushions—but nothing resembling the sourdough starter. He stood in the middle of the kitchen, frozen, until he remembered the supply closet in the hallway.
He tiptoed to the closet and inched the door open. There, on the ground, sat his child. It wasn’t bubbling; it only did that for Eden, which Amos didn’t mind in the slightest. Rather, there was a dark sliver of fermentation at the top of its body that smelled of raw sewage.
“How did you get in here?” Amos asked, only halfway in his body. He stooped down, ducked his head under brooms and paper towels, and gingerly took the sourdough starter into his arms. He felt too vulnerable cradling the thing, so he shifted to a one-handed grasp. “If you don’t watch where you’re going, you’ll end up locked in there. How bad would that be?”
* * *
The third and fourth days consisted of feeding, and praying for first steps, and more feeding, and no steps made. Eden screwed the child’s head off—swearing it wasn’t harmful once it had been two days, that’s what all the parenting websites had told her—and she used a spoon to remove half of its innards from its glass body. It stretched, tawny and dense like pancake batter. Eden scooped it into a memory box for when their child had flown the nest, at which time they would need something sentimental to remember it by.
“Are you absolutely positive that’s safe?” Amos asked from the other side of the table. He didn’t like how eagerly she was digging into their child’s head, like she was braiding hair with reckless abandon or eating too much ice cream. He shuddered.
“It’s four days old, Amos. We don’t have to baby it.” And because she was increasingly becoming the more confident parent of the two, Amos didn’t argue. He felt horribly on edge around the sourdough starter. Being a parent wasn’t what he imagined at all.
He didn’t hate it, though. At least the townhouse felt more lived in now.
Eden poured warm water and some more flour into their offspring’s head, then gave it a good stir and tightened the top back on. “Healthy and strong,” she said, grinning. “God, I’m already picturing the grandkids.”
“Getting a little ahead of ourselves there,” Amos said. Grandkids implied that they would be grandparents, the two of them—and that was far from a certainty. Then again, the sourdough starter was supposed to help with that. “It can’t even walk,” he added.
“Not yet,” Eden chastised. “Since I’ve been doing all the feeding, why don’t you help with the first steps?”
“Okay,” Amos said, putting down his spoon. He leaned forward on the table, tapping a few times. “Come here, little guy.”
Their jar didn’t move. Its innards didn’t even bubble up for him. At this point, it was no surprise. Eden sighed. Amos felt the weight in the air, as though she’d chucked their glass child at his skull.
“Hopefully by the time it’s fully grown,” Eden said. She picked it up off the table and let it whine into her breast. Amos finished his soup, curving into the warped wood of his chair.
* * *
On the fifth day, Eden prodded her way through button-ups and trousers in the closet, all owned by Amos. She needed clothes that weren’t speckled with fermented, soggy flour. More accurately, she needed to look into one of the sitters that the neighborhood moms suggested. Did she even trust some teenager to look after it, though? Highly unlikely.
She felt rage burn in her chest when she opened up the bedroom closet and looked down.
“Amos,” she shrieked. “Amos!”
“... Yes?”
She dropped to her knees and clutched the sourdough starter to her chest. It was all in-tact, but salty tears started to pool in her eyes. She cried for her child. She cried for herself. “How did it get in here? It’s not warm enough for it in the closet. It’s only five days old! Amos, did you even realize that it was gone?”
“Eden, honey, I can’t really hear you.” The television got louder in the living room.
“If I hadn’t looked, it would’ve been stuck in here for God knows how long!” Eden roughly pulled down her shirt’s neckline so that the sourdough starter could feed, even though she knew it would not. It never had. Her tugging ripped a small hole in her shirt. “Did you put it in the closet, Amos? Did you make it hide in here?”
Eden kneeled in the closet and didn’t move. Amos didn’t answer. No footsteps sounded up the marble staircase. Her child still couldn’t walk.
* * *
On the sixth day, Eden, Amos, and the sourdough starter had dinner together as a family. Amos sipped soup and did paperwork at the table. Eden had fixed a new recipe, but she spent the meal glaring at her husband. Their child didn’t eat its baby food, so Eden got up and put more flour and water in its head. Amos slurped up broth. Slurp, slurp.
After feeding it, Eden microwaved her plate to heat her food up again. She accidentally left her fork on the plate, and for a brief moment she wondered if it might spark and catch fire. If it did, she would leave Amos to slurp his soup and save the sourdough starter. She only had enough hands to save one of them, so of course she would save her child.
It didn’t catch fire. Eden wondered what she would do when it was the eighth day, and the sourdough starter was gone, and it was just herself and Amos again. Even when both her hands were free, would she use both to save him from a hypothetical fire? No idea.
Eden sat back down at the table with her inflammable plate and fork. To occupy her mind, she imagined her child eating its baby food—with a mouth, with tongue and teeth, like the children of other parents. The image, sweet and hazy at the edges, made her feel like she could finish her dried-out chicken breast.
The family ate in silence until Amos said, “Do you think it can talk by now?”
“Probably not,” Eden said.
“That’s a shame. It seemed like it would be so bright when it was born.”
Eden almost slammed her fork down on the table, but she didn’t want to scare her child. “It’s our fault for not teaching it how to talk. Who will teach it, if not us?”
Amos looked small. When he had held his child in the hospital, she never noticed that he started to shrink. He shrugged. “We didn’t know,” he said.
But then their child bubbled up in its jar. It broke through the lid, and the air escaping its body made such a wheezing sound that both Mother and Father had to listen. It bubbled up over every side, making a yogurty mess on the table’s surface. In spite of their sadness, they laughed.
“There we go,” Amos said. “Its first words. Very profound.”
“We didn’t even give it a name, for God’s sake.”
“Yeast?”
“I don’t think that name suits it,” she said. Amos didn’t have any other suggestions.
* * *
On the seventh day, the sourdough starter left home as they always knew it would. Eden cried, asking if it wanted to feed one last time—for its sake, she said, since money was tight, and they couldn’t know when it would be able to afford groceries (really, it was for her sake, so she could feel like she fed it enough). Amos sulked in the doorway as his wife cradled their child.
“And once you’re making enough to pay income taxes, come to me, okay?” he said.
“No, please go to a better accountant than your father,” Eden said.
“Can you stop?”
The sourdough starter hugged Eden, and when they were finished, she handed it to Amos. For a second, she got scared that he was going to drop the jar on the front porch. She held onto its body—how fragile it was, just glass and how it was raised, nothing else to protect it—and she let Amos shake its hand. Their child had gotten old enough that it didn’t spit up on his clothes. Amos was probably grateful. Eden thought she might’ve regretted missing out on that.
And then, as Mother and Father said their final goodbyes, Eden opened up her child’s head one last time. She used her fingers to dig a bit out of its top layer, one handful for herself, one for Amos. As their child left, Eden held this last chunk of it close to her chest, this something to remember her child by. It wasn’t its purpose, but now this yeast was most precious to her. Amos held it like it was just bacteria—and it was that, too.
The following week in their empty nest, they tried to bake sourdough bread. They used their child, rolled a small bit of it into the dough. They kneaded it. They kneaded it, and they prayed, but when the bread came out of the oven, it had not risen.
Interview with the Author
1. What inspired you to write this piece? What was your thought process throughout?
I wrote this piece for my fiction workshop class in fall of 2022. For this piece, we were working in the magical realism genre, and the initial idea came from brainstorming with my fiancé. We were talking about the period of the COVID-19 pandemic when everyone was quarantining and got really into baking sourdough bread, and using a sourdough starter in place of a “real baby” seemed like a really interesting, not to mention humorous, premise for a magical realism piece.
2. What do you hope readers will take away from your piece? What effects do you want the piece to have on the person, community, or society?
In many ways, this story ended up as a deconstruction of the perfect nuclear family. It’s an exploration of how, in our hopes to save something—whether that’s our marriage or our peace of mind in a global pandemic—we often turn to the act of creation, of trying our best to make something together. Even a loaf of bread that will never rise. I hope readers will take away that, even though the act of creation is messy and imperfect, it is always worthwhile.
3. What is your favorite piece of fiction (short story, novel, flash fiction, etc.) that you’ve ever read? Why?
Maurice by E.M. Forster. I read it last year and have thought of little else since. I’ve got a passion for queer narratives, and that one has such a beautiful mix of complex, difficult emotions and sincere joy. I hope to achieve that same emotional poignancy in my own work.
4. If you plan on continuing to write, what are some goals/plans you may have for your future?
I’ll be graduating with my BFA in Creative Writing in December, and I hope to go to graduate school for English in the future. Along with continuing to write in a variety of genres, I’d love to eventually teach literature and creative writing at the university level, with a focus on queer theory.