And the Breasts That Never Nursed

by Zoë Rose

I always thought it must be hard for her, to be so beautiful and have such ugly children—pug-nosed and overripe. I watch the bathtime, I see the shake in her hands when she washes their steam-pink skin. She sits often on the porch at night, after they’ve been put to bed. The light from the kitchen haloes her hair.

That woman next door, her husband seems to have tried someone else’s face on and forgotten to return it. He leaves early in the morning, before his babes have risen, and comes back late, after she’s slopped the pigs and washed them in the trough. I am being cruel, but I am not being dishonest. He squandered his gift as well, a lovely wife with soft skin and he pulled something rotten from deep inside of her, bloomed it like mold in her belly to congeal in her arms nine months later.

During the day, the children are at school, he at work, and she lays in the bed, her hair a tumble on the pillow. Through the windows I can see the lint and dust mounded along the baseboards. Even in the putrefaction of her house she lies incorruptible.

Before the garden in the side yard the house was dry and stale. Worms used to scrabble in the soil, wet pink bodies picking up the dirt as they ate the earth and shat the earth and burrowed through it. I used to wish I was a worm, fat and happy, slipping in between the tendrils of the flower roots. After a rain, I used to lie curled on the ground, fingers holding the grass, ear pressed to the dirt. I thought I could hear them. Joyous if they could feel joy, ouroborously satiated. Sometimes, lips pressed to the ground I tried to talk to them. I could fathom a worm but could a worm fathom things beyond wet and dry? That is what I ached for, a lack of understanding. I would have worked nights if it meant I could be in the worm-dank dark. (But that’s not so. In the night the lights are harsher, outlining the crags and unforgivable nature of my face.) Dawn in the mountains slithers in the gulches and snakes around the lichen-spotted trees, to see everything bit by bit invites contemplation, feeds revulsion. In the day everything washes and blurs with everything else. My ugliness is easier to excuse in the puddle of the afternoon sun than in the fluorescence of the shop. 

Here is how the first child was born: well no.
Let’s start before that. 

He’d jammed his fingers into her. I imagine it wasn’t easy. A bit like unsticking a grocery bag from itself. Then he’d pushed his chubby cock into her dark. I’ve seen his cock before, you know, not all of this is an imagining; there’s a grain of truth in all of this like a rock in a shoe, wearing you down bloody bit by bit. Can you pry it out before it’s too late? Can you free yourself from the embedding? Will you? He always puts his shirt on before his briefs and brushes his teeth facing the bedroom window. When he’d soiled her inside she lay deliciously flushed, her body feverish in its attempted combatting of her fate but the infection festered and grew coiled and tight, a milky white and hungry guinea worm. They unspooled it slowly in the hospital room lest it snap and spill out on the tile floor. That’s the one that doesn’t sleep at night. I think it would like it better in the garden, snuffling under the dirt.

No one looks at me now. I am less offensive now that my blood has dried up. No secret fertility to load any glance accidentally tossed my way. Nothing sticky coats the underbelly of any conversation like gum under a desk waiting to catch a wandering finger nail. The cricket rubbing at night can’t sex me in the way a swollen pregnant sway points fingers.  

When I lie at night with my face pressed in the pillow I picture her having just risen. Maybe she is in the bathroom scrubbing at her cuticles until blood flicks into the sink, her skin isn’t like mine, filth limning her contours, it lies underneath. Only to be bloodlet. Only to be borne out of her on the backs of her babies but they aren’t enough to release it all, without the chamber removed the cyst re-forms. She knows this but was too coward to turn on the vacuum nozzle aimed between her legs, grazing her on that Tuesday afternoon where the walls glowed white and caustic. I picture her in the bathroom while I smell the pillow her makeup would have pressed into and taste the salt and oil until I fall asleep or shake. 

The other one. The little one that eats with its animal-dumb mouth hanging open should have been born during a storm. The creek should have run backwards and the cul de sac houses should have skipped like rams while in the hospital a doctor pushed his hand up to the wrist inside her to pry out the afterbirth. She sits at the table now and spoons casserole into the yawning pink throat like a poor meadow pipit shoving worms down the cuckoo’s gullet. Think for a second and you’ll see the bronze wolf with her teat pulled taut in the mouth of those fat leeches. 

Underneath her robe I know I could see the outline of her scapula in sharp relief, offset by her breasts swollen in maternal kwashiorkor. Despite her husband’s best efforts to foul her, her womb lies fallow.

Here’s how it would be: I don’t water my lawn, when I walk across, I know it will puff around my feet. If I were to blow my nose it would be thick and brown. The earth in my face and wadding up in my spit. After a rain the water pools in the dips of dirt where the earthworms bloat and pale. Slipping and slicking myself in the mud through the clover, moss, dandelion, and weed to the harsh line of trimmed and sprinklered grass. She wouldn’t come down the stairs to let me in so I would have to use the key they keep under the false rock. Through the foyer where the pictures are hung and the shoes lay like piled dead against the wall I would watch the falling sun glaring through the westward window, stripping and hot, catching the perennial dust filled air in its floodlight and through this window I would see my window and the room where I sit and watch. Perhaps I would see the echo of myself watching, just as when I sit in my room I see the echo of myself in her house. I would walk up the stairs, holding the railing, the curve of it smooth in my palm. I would kneel and pluck the hair I think is hers where it wraps around the corners and furniture legs.

In the bed where the rot first began I would lick her and she’d open easily. When it’s over and I am good she will let me crawl into the secret place under the curve of her stomach and unfester into something beautiful.

Zoë Rose is a writer attending the University of Cambridge for her Masters in Social Anthropology. Along with being previously published in GUM, she has had work featured in Hobart, A Common Well Journal, Expat Press, and XRAY Literary Magazine. Both her front teeth are fake but you almost wouldn't know it to look at her. You can find her on instagram @zoesaldinger.