The Day Motherhood Arrived Too Soon

My lips fold like swaying waves over my tongue, tasting the dry air before returning to their den. Its pale gray flesh, almost colorless, crackles in my mouth as it grinds against my canines; the taste of iron swirling with spit and plaque.

I stare at the stucco-slattered wall, my canvas with wavering texture. The sea is filled with a deep maroon, as if the blood moon’s light had smeared Earth’s surface. My fingertips are wrapped in gauze, making it harder to continue painting for much longer. My eyes are trained on the animated surface, trailing to the peaks of the waves; their white caps foaming a little at the edges.

This pleased me, my blood simmering like a teakettle. I felt quite proud of myself for once, having borrowed some baking powder from the kitchen before curfew. I delicately apply it to the wall after mixing stucco chips from the anterior wall with water until it resembles a foamy paste.

My fingertips became raw. I feel my mouth fill with the rising waves before me as I lean closer to the wall, my back resembling a gray heron fishing from a dock. My swollen tongue crawls out of my mouth like a salamander; its rose color reminds me of a flamingo’s long neck bowing at the water’s edge.

I dab my gauze-covered fingertips on the muscle, my saliva trailing down the tip before dripping to the floor like a leaky faucet. The fibers swell with blood as if they were suffering from tuberculosis—the poor things. My eyes filled with milky tears as clouds consumed the sky of my mural, and I dabbed the fibers on the unfilled space. My fingertips trailed across the stucco until I reached where the wall kissed the cold, hard floor.

I swallow the blood mixture before crawling, blood splattering with each fickle movement. I examine the thin layer that clings to the gray concrete; there, wild little dust bunnies play in the gray grass. I regard them, chewing on the dried blood droplets that suffocate their progeny, as if they were cannibalistic, such perplexing creatures. I saw as these creatures’ eyes became engulfed with anger, a sight that struck me back as I crawled to the anterior wall.

“I didn’t mean, mean, mean to,” I cry. My milky tears leap from my skin to the floor like Russian grays in flight. “I’m sorry, sorry—I didn’t,” I plead to them as the creatures drag across the floor. I cower, clutching my arms over my head as if the room were shaking, my eyes shivering shut. These creatures’ rage becomes engulfed with hate as they grow to the size of cumulonimbus clouds, towering over me.

My eyes crawl across the stucco walls as these clouds fill with soot. A sooty soot that paints the walls of the remaining space that was once a soft eggshell in the right light. Their beet-red eyes cling to the wall as flashes of amber ruminate within its curly-hair shape, resembling paint strokes from a broad, wolf-hair brush. The blood moon waves batter against the walls as my corpse crashes into the corner. Drenched in crimson sorrow, I wipe away at my face, leaving behind streaks of bruised flesh.

The creatures’ chests swell like a fireplace bellows, letting out a cloud of soot that clings to my face. “Searching—searching, searching, searching…,” it says, trailing off as if unable to form coherent, intelligible words. Its mere lack of vocabulary was due to its incorporeal figure, as though you could slip right through, seamlessly feeling the charge of electrons, or perhaps, its milky soul.

“Spinning—spinning, spinning, spinning…,” it continues, spilling its words onto the floor like a poor soul waning over a disgraced porcelain. The floor did not shudder or shake; instead, it grew into a whirlpool as if emerging off the coast of a rocky chain of islands spiraling down, deep down, into the belly of the Earth. The edges grab for my feeble members, pulling me in like an African crocodile, ripping and tearing at my flesh, struggling as the sweaty air of the room escapes my lungs.

Below the waves were creatures of proportions utterly bizarre to me. A webbed-toed creature swims around me; its nose resembles a narwhal with its lance at a fine point. Its scales, as green as wavering seaweed, are reflective with the light shining through the ocean’s surface. Its figure dances in a flurry like a pirouetting firework, as if communicating with me. My arms hardly break through the weight of the water, making it fruitless to swim, even to flail. I sink into the heavy water, thick as blobulous jelly, engulfing my limbs. Fish the size of young minnows with thorny scales bustle to my digits, nibbling at my raw flesh; the gauze tethers away to reveal the pricks in the ridges of my fingerprints. Their fins whirl like a puff of ink swirling in the water that paints the canvas of my flesh. I cower, scratching at their rigid eyes; their bubbles of gooey blood that spew in swollen globules of pudding. They stretch and collide like a bolus of wax in a lava lamp; these buoyant bubbles coalesce and rise around me, full of gaseous masses.

As I sink deeper into the heavy void, the light above me resembles a pinprick in the night sky: a lonely star, its fading light long since ceased. The melancholic vastness embraces me, like a lifelong friend—a faint clutching for air as water escapes from my lungs like a hiccup or the workings of gills—perhaps a sullen reminder of my humanity. The miasma before me courses through the deep, deep, dark, invisible life, melding me into its panoply. They hold my form within their womb like a fetus clutching its umbilical cord, the sloshing fluid coating my flesh.

Holding my members close, arms wrap around my corpse, I could hear the faint murmuring of the loving mother before the subtle rise in voice; their melody pierces the semi-translucent barrier between us. Their words acted like a soothsayer’s hymns, reassuring my poor soul that I was safe, safe in the womb of our primordial mother.

“How long had I waded in the deep, deep, dark?” I think momentarily, deep in such darkness. The thought of time elapsing clings to my gray matter like flesh caught in the prickles of a barb, but without the hunter in the sky, the concept of time alludes me. Not even a bolt of lightning could pierce through the waking seas.

As I kick and fret, the vast emptiness becomes claustrophobic, tightening its grip on my flesh and returning me to a fetal form. In an instant, the subtle cooing of that primordial mother returns, humming their soothsaying song once more. Despite my confinement, I struggle as if tied down to a bedframe; the straps become bitterly cold with resistance, my clothes tearing away from my flesh as if I were struck with leather lashings.

Their humming rises, a sickly worry as their tone elevates, a deep concern filled with melancholy. I hiccup, feeling the crushing of my lungs as I gulp the heavy water, my hands wrapping around my neck to feel my tattered flesh. As if being strangled, my eyes strain; the blood vessels swelled like a portly boy. I look upward; my eyes train on the faint glimmer of the archer in the sky, its fletching quivering in the water’s ripples as it reaches its target, filling the deep, deep, dark with light. My pupils grow, an intense blinding of light that fills me with allure. Its intensity blares until my corneas blister, squeezing them shut. I scream, but the waves do not break the water’s tension, gripping my vocal cords like the vengeful wrath of a womanizer. Instead, a burgeoning call pierces my tender ears.

“It’s a girl!”