She Walks

‘They crossed the bridge and continued on down the road and vanished
one by one into the waiting darkness…’ (McCarthy, 2010, p. 208).

We walk. It feels like it’s all we do. Sometimes I wonder why we still do but wondering seems
more pointless than the walking. I walk because they walk and, if I tried to run, they would
stop me. They walk, their rucksacks sagging heavily on their backs. The rucksacks are a
patchwork of faded colours and materials, some leather, some nylon; all dirty and worn.
Inside them are cans of food, bottles of brown water, blankets crawling with lice, hard objects
that can be used as weapons, have been used as weapons, on me, on others. They are
heavy with blood. They walk with a purpose I don’t understand but now I have my purpose
too.

I carry my small suitcase. It is old and battered, as I am, but inside is the cleanest object I
have. A small grey rabbit soft toy I dare not touch because my filth will stain it and I want my
child to have one clean thing, one thing untouched by this world. It is for you, my love. You,
curled inside me like a question mark. I hope to see you soon, but hope is a black and sticky
thing now. How I wish I could keep you there, inside me, where I know I can protect you and
feed you as best as the morsels these men, and this world, will allow me.

I try not to remember before. It’s poison. It eats away like the lice in the blankets. I want you
to know how often I dreamt of you, how hard I tried to have you, before. I remember the
solemn, apologetic faces of the doctors, all the tests. ‘There’s nothing wrong.’ ‘Everything
looks fine.’ ‘It will happen when it happens.’ Why did it only have to happen now? Before we
could have packed this suitcase for a holiday, taken you somewhere hot where I would have
bathed you in suncream so thick you’d look like a snowman. Anything to protect you. I still
want to protect you, but will I be able to?

These men protect me, only because I serve a purpose. They don’t speak to me and once it
was clear I carried you inside me, I thought they would kill me, use me for another purpose,
take the flesh from my body until I could give no more. They have not and I wonder if it is
you that they protect. I can’t bear to think what purpose they have in mind for you. If you live
and grow, what will you be? A boy is likely. Will you be the boy I dreamed of or will you inherit
their nature, the new nature of the world, and become a thing of violence and desperation?

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There is smoke in the air, acrid and dry. It clags in my throat and makes me want to cough.
They don’t like it when I make noise. One mutters something about how black everything is. I
see a blush of bronze dusting the horizon, and the faint ghosting of pink on the half-ravaged
trees. Maybe, when you come, you will see it too.

Word count: 524

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 Critical Commentary

For this creative rewriting, I chose the minor character of the pregnant woman carrying a
suitcase in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2010). This character’s presence, although brief,
was powerful and significant. I felt compelled to give her a voice and, using the technique of
extrapolation, explore her experience as a pregnant woman in the post-apocalyptic world
that McCarthy presents.

One inspiration for this rewriting was Sharon Olds’ ‘Rite of Passage’ (1984), a poem that
explores a mother’s fear for what her son might become when he grows up. This theme
resonated with me, and I tried to use it to explore the pregnant woman’s fear for her unborn
baby in such a harsh and unforgiving environment. Through this character, I wanted to
reflect on the universal anxiety that parents must have for their children’s future and what
they might become. In McCarthy’s post-apocalypse, these fears are magnified considerably.
I attempted to show, though not through explicit explanation, that the woman has been
abused by these men because she ‘serves a purpose’.

Another text that influenced me was Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990) in which
he uses the physical listing of what soldiers are carrying in the Vietnam War as a jumping off
point to explore the emotional and internal things that are carried in times of extreme stress.
It struck me that the image of the woman carrying the suitcase alongside the men carrying
rucksacks could be an interesting parallel. While it was difficult to make such things explicit
without having to tell the reader in such a short word count, I hoped to explore the weight of
fear and grief in the face of an almost unthinkably uncertain future.

In my reimagining of this section of McCarthy’s story, I tried to subvert the bleak and
unrelenting blackness described in the novel by incorporating a note of colour, suggesting
that the world looks so black because the sparks of colour that do exist are not noticed by
the male perspective. Through the eyes of the pregnant woman, there is a noticing of beauty
on the horizon and the pink blossom just visible in the trees. These small moments of colour
may serve as a reminder that, in this darkest of worlds, there is still evidence of life and
hope. It could also be interpreted that this is something the pregnant woman is imagining
because she must cling on to hope. In a sense, this works as a mode of defamiliarisation as
the expectation from the bleak world that McCarthy presents is relentless in its insistence on
a lack of colour. Adding colour to the expectedly grey world makes this rendering new and
intriguing.

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I introduced a small soft toy as an item that has somehow managed to remain unblemished.
I wanted the toy to represent a sense of innocence and purity. This tied into the woman’s
reflections of how much she wanted a child before the apocalypse happened. I hoped that
this cruel irony would serve as an interesting thread to show that she still carries those
memories, just as she carries the toy. I wanted this to be an analogue to the ‘light’ that the
man and the boy are carrying in the main story. Where the men who accompany her carry
weapons and lice-riddled items, the woman carries something close to that ‘light’ and overall,
a sense of hope.

Word count: 563

Combined word count: 1,087

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 Reference List

McCarthy, C. (2010) The Road. London: Picador.

O’Brien, T. (1990) The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Olds, S. (1984) Rite of Passage. In: The Dead and the Living. New York: Knopf.