Vocabularies are bundling along my frontal cortex, as his soft spoken belligerence rubs between my lips like bullets of autumn rain. There’s a sexual ecstasy in this confusion. In the heft of his body pressing upon mine, while I willingly indulge subjugation. Teasing confinement with my tongue. A mattress of mushy soil. I, a sunflower seed, stomped and squeezed into an abundance of nutrients. Choking on molded roots and the remains of a peanut butter crust-stripped sandwich.
Sex is a playground in waiting. A swing-set between 9 and 10am. The anticipation right before an ensuing of adolescence apocalypse. This physical hum is a recession in age. It’s a dose of sluggish death carefully guised as merrymaking. My groaning peak is a physical reminder that I will never be king of the slide, I will never be king of anything because I am a girl. Because my parts do not spit life like chewing gum. Because I am a fragile clear bubble bowl and the most intriguing aspect of my body is the toddler trout growing in my sink water. The shiny scaled vessel children awe at. Not looking towards me, not looking at me, they’re looking through my skin. My worth is that thing inside me that isn’t me at all.
I wake to twin screaming, my ribs slowly scooping out my bloated stomach, serving up blood clots in a cone. Ice cream to appease the wailing minnow between my legs. And a husband creature is holding my hand. His expression contorts with soft contempt. There’s a sick excitement in his eye, as he conceives a plan to rule over this creation. I clutch the wriggling larva to my breast, skin to skin; her clammy form feels like a brand.
The intimacy of this moment perpetuates beyond the length of my life. The solidification of my sudden passing. A titling of my purgatory. I am a phantom called mother now. If I had a name before, I do not know it, though I did always like the name Angie.
I make up stories about Angie. Was Angie a poet? Was she a painter? Watching the world with a slitted tongue, tasting color, and all consuming in her practice. And who was Angie’s mother? Was she a salmon or a mackerel? Or are we born creeks of life? Devices for greater fish to swim downstream.
Did my arrival inadvertently murder my mother? A negligent choice reeking of romanticism. Or was it intentional suicide? A plotted self-demise when she let him in. I swore to myself I’d never let a man cum inside me, but rarely do I keep promises made in earnest.
Now my toddler has turned three. She has a name, and I hate her for it. She screams more than she speaks. Every day, a repeated sequence of when she entered the world. There is sobbing, scrapes, blood, ice cream dribbling down her chin, and an emptiness in my belly that remains untouched.
I wear a paper mache mask in front of my neighbors dog, who can sniff out the truth within my rotting intestines. My contempt. If his owner knows, she does not say. She also has children, but they are boys. They are lucky.
I serve up lackluster suppers to be thrown at daffodil wallpaper, snap peas and cream lathered loins thump to the floor in heaps. The head of the table is bare, my husband’s chair askew. He’s staring at his daughter and there is no personage within his gaze. A void-like lover I tend to nightly. Heaving and howling into the early promises of tomorrow. But tomorrow is today and today holds no promise aside from the circlet stapled to my marrow.
I pick at my unpolished nails, grime packed beneath the jagged edges. My daughter bit the neighbor boy. She learned it from the dog. The dog who knows. She’s nine and old enough to understand dog speech. When she smiles, she does so with pinkish molars. Flecks of alabaster flesh caught between the grooves of her gums. She’s carnivorous, unladylike, and never allowed on the slide.
“Why did you bite William?” I ask, feigning repulsion.
“I thought he’d taste like Jam.” She says, too young to feign regret.