Skip to content

Spend $70 more and receive free shipping! Free shipping available!

A Keening for Churile

04 Feb, 2025
A Keening for Churile

Content Warning(s)

The doctor taps the blackest part of my inner thigh and I think of my mother as I spread my legs farther. I wonder if she’d made it this far, a stranger’s face three inches from the most intimate parts of her, checking and prodding. Prepping her.

“I should’ve had the abortion when I had the chance.” The refrain of my childhood.

And here I am, losing my own baby, my second. I’m alone in this venture. Much like the first time. Churile (you’ll meet her later) has found her interest in me once again.

He taps me again and this time I lift my ass.


They say your belly sits low when you’re pregnant with a boy while a girlchild sits high. They also say a girlchild steals your beauty, so when that second line appears on the fifth stick, I bite back the secret hope that it isn’t a girl since I have such little beauty to give. Churile, bless her, listens and three days later, ribbons of crimson melt into clear as I stand in the shower cupping my pussy and praying for one thing to go right. It doesn’t, but I go to work anyway until the pain is too much and I’ve gone through my third pad in an hour.

“I don’t feel well,” I tell my supervisor later. She’s gorgeous, thinner than me with three kids of her own, so she thinks I’m bullshitting to leave early. Single, childless women don’t get sick. “I think I’m miscarrying,” I whisper. Her whiskey brown eyes widen and her hand is in mine as we rush to the onsite nurse.

From there, I’m taken to the hospital via Lincoln Continental. I feel oddly important as an ER nurse meets the cab at the entrance. I’m seen immediately. A wand prods my womb and they tell me the obvious: I’m losing my baby.

I’m twenty-six and indifferent.


My mother told me she was pregnant with a boy not long after my brother was born. She said she would’ve been happy to stop there with two sons. Instead, Churile stepped in and ripped him from her at six months in.

Sometimes I feel like he was still born, wedging his way between the love my mother wants to give me and the dislike that manages to filter through.


Perhaps I should introduce her, my Churile.

Churile (pronounced Choo-ryle) is the spirit of a pregnant woman who died during childbirth, or committed suicide during pregnancy. She is depicted by long, unbound, disheveled hair streaming over her face. Dressed in white, she carries her fetus in her arms. In the dead of the night, she wails sorrowfully as her unborn child cries for milk from her teat. She is my patron saint and my only true company.


The second time Churile comes for me, I’d wished it was a girl.

I’m thirty and single yet yearning for something beyond myself. Anthony left the month before, taking all of my Disney videotapes with him and leaving me with a permanent reminder of us. As the second line appears on the first and only stick, I mourn the tapes because what else are you supposed to show a girlchild to calm her down? I’d conveniently forgotten the pain of watching faces unlike mine go on adventures, get the boy, live the life I could only fantasize about.

But then she left, too.

My obstetrician now back to gynecologist takes care of the remnants of my hope, my proof that someone will stick around just for me. But it seems Churile is my only company, a spirit lost and lonely, consumed by a grief so strong, she sucks you in, too.

“I understand how painful this must be, Teri, but for this to go smoothly, I need you to spread a little wider and come a little closer.”

It is the last time I hear these words from a man’s mouth.


I don’t tell my mother that like her, someone I made left me, was snatched from me. The information sits just behind my teeth, imprisoning a tongue fat with the knowledge that my mother will never love me, not like she loves the son she never had. She’ll only find a way to be disappointed. Call me the slut she never was, despite three pregnancies outside the righteous protection of marriage.

I have no man. I have no money. And my voice fades with each passing day as a darkness grows within me, filling the void they both left. They all left.

I wonder if we share that same darkness. I wonder if this is how Churile, and my mother, felt.


My mother is beautiful, light-skinned with dagger sharp cheekbones, nails done, hair perfect, clothes tailored. Apparently, she was even prettier growing up in La Brea, Trinidad, even lighter with fire red hair and opals for eyes.

Some would say she got ugly when she came to the States. Darker.

Others would say that darkness oiled my skin to remind my mother of the childhood she never had, of the son she lost, of the perfect life she could’ve had if only I’d done what she’d told me.

She called me ugly. Not in so many words, but when I asked her if I was pretty, the silent stare answered me.

“You crawled after the car when we tried to move!” she’d joke.

“I should’ve left you,” she’d sneer. “I should’ve had the abortion when I had the chance.”

All the same, my mother is still beautiful, even with the vile words shooting from her mouth to smear me wide.


There’s a violent scar on the bridge of my mother’s nose, right between her eyes. More than a slice, more than a simple cut.

It’s a gash, a gouge of flesh ripped unceremoniously from my mother’s face. Yet sparing her eyes of any damage. I wonder if this is when their color had changed.

She hates the scar, calls it ugly, so of course, I am fascinated by it. Fascinated she has some connection to Churile that I’ve always had, that unkempt to her perfect, the ugly to her perfect.

As a child, I let my pointer finger dip into the crevice and for once, I saw myself in my mother.


She still doesn’t know my truth. Not that Churile has come for me twice, not that I still call myself ugly, not that my heart breaks for the love she refuses me every time we talk.

But I’ve gotten used to it, this heart ache. It’s my only company, its cold embrace cooling the heat of my tears. As the years tick by, my loneliness grows and the darkness continues to eat at me, bit by bit. Yet and still, I refuse to suck anyone else in with me, not even the children I’d lost. Unlike Churile, I choose to play vengeance against myself.

I sit alone with these truths and stitch them into a shield to save myself since no one is there to do it for me. I can only hope there is someone there for you.

Content warning: Pregnancy loss

Welcome Discount

Get 15% Off