Days Like Today by Rachel Ingalls

he began to chant ‘Whore-whore-whore’ again.
    She fell into step beside her lover. At the end of the street he set the boy down. ‘Listen to me, sonny,’ he said in a quiet little voice. ‘I’m your father and this is your mother and that’s a dirty word you’ve been taught: whore. If I catch you saying that word again, I’ll wash your mouth out with soap. Do you hear me?’
    The boy looked down. His fear electrified the silence between the three of them, which continued for a long time; no one knew how to break it. At last she said, ‘If we can ever afford to waste soap that way.’
    He gave a snort of laughter. She turned her head against his shoulder, her face brushing his neck. ‘How I love you,’ she whispered. He kissed her, the first time in four years. The boy, guessing from which direction harm or help might come, nudged forward and pulled on her skirt, his hands pressed to her thighs through the fabric. Like the sudden flickering of a light in darkness, warmth sprang from the center of her body, flying up to her heart and outward – igniting every part of her with a feeling of life that had nothing to do with the past and made all of it powerless against her: as if no one except her lover and her child had ever touched her.
    ‘Fertility,’ her friend commented, hearing her tell the story twenty years later.
    ‘Love,’ she declared.
    ‘Don’t split hairs.’
    ‘Fertility doesn’t know the difference between one love and the next.’
    ‘Maybe,’ said the friend, who was a doctor. ‘And maybe not. Fertility leads to motherhood. Motherhood can take people in different ways.’
    ‘Exactly. Love is different. And anyway, he wouldn’t have believed my side of it if he hadn’t loved me.’
    ‘Let’s just say that there’s a time for everything.’
    ‘Love doesn’t have set times.’
    ‘I meant,’ the doctor explained, ‘that there’s a time to be a mother and a time to be a grandmother. And they aren’t always the same.’
    ‘Oh, her,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean her. I understand that.’She took up her work again, washing dishes in a bowl and then rinsing them under the spigot.
    She refilled the bowl with water and started on the next batch. After a while she said, ‘I’ve heard so many stories about those times. A lot of people went through much worse than anything that happened to me. I know that. You can’t imagine the things I’ve heard. So, in one way I just think: I can forget about this or that – those things weren’t important. But what I can’t understand – in fact, I still can’t accept it – is why my own parents would have wanted to treat me that way. Strangers, maybe: but your family should stand by you.’
    ‘You were the last thing left in their world over which they had some control. As long as you behaved according to the rules they’d laid down, they felt secure. When you stopped being the girl they’d trained you to be, they couldn’t recognize you as theirs.’
    ‘Um,’ she murmured.
    The doctor went on, ‘I have a colleague who says everything that happens in the world is entirely impersonal and it’s brought about by large astronomical upheavals. You know, there are times when the sun shoots up fiery gases like geysers – some of them are so high that they alter the weather here on earth: crops grow better, the woods produce more lumber and – a whole generation in advance – the ratio of male to female births changes dramatically so that soldiers, who are going to be killed in a war that hasn’t yet begun, will be replaced by another generation of men. Do you see what I mean? Everything that’s essential happens on a huge scale and over vast periods of time. It takes centuriesbefore you can see that a general direction has been established or that something new is being worked out. But that’s what really drives us: biology. Everything else is superficial.’
    She stood the last of the dishes in the rack, slung the wash rag over the