Her name was Eliza Maren, and she was being delivered like a broken tool.
Behind the wagon, her family followed on horseback and foot, too ashamed to ride close, too desperate to turn around. Her mother kept her eyes on the horizon as if staring hard enough could erase what they’d done. Her father’s jaw worked like he was chewing on words that wouldn’t go down.
Eliza didn’t cry anymore. She’d cried the first day. Then the second. Somewhere between the third and the fourth, the tears had dried up like the creekbeds.
It had started with a doctor’s sentence, spoken the way men spoke verdicts back then.
“She’ll never carry a child,” he’d said in the small, whitewashed clinic in their county town, not even lowering his voice. “Some women just… aren’t built for it.”
Eliza remembered the way the room had tilted, the way her mother’s fingers had gone slack around the edge of her shawl. She remembered her father’s face changing, as if he’d been holding a picture of her his whole life and suddenly someone had torn it in half.
From that day, the label came fast, like flies to a wound. Infertile. Barren. Cursed. Even the women who once braided her hair at church began to speak to her with pity that felt like a slap.
Eliza tried to tell herself it shouldn’t matter. She tried to remind herself she was more than her body. But the world she lived in measured a woman’s worth with a single scale: could she give a man heirs?
