A baby bit Janey’s heart and then her heart turned black. Her heart had been a live, beating thing; it had led her first to Harry and then to the white waiting room with little wooden blocks painted in primary colors. On the car ride home, Harry and Janey clasped hands, a cotton ball taped to the crook of her elbow. Janey was as soft and buttery as the nursery walls they would soon paint pink.
It had been their honeymoon. Harry unlocked the hotel door with a boney click then carried Janey over the threshold of the room, the bedspreads flowery and smelling of bleach. There were two twin beds, two twin lamps, a painting of the ocean that lay just beyond the window. The painting hung crooked; the colors dulled by dust. Harry pushed the beds together and straightened the painting before straightening himself, hands on his hips as he looked at Janey.
Janey stripped and stood naked. The air conditioner clunked on and then off, the room clammy with quiet, her skin wet with want and sweat and the weight of Harry’s eyes then hands then body. After, they laid on lounge chairs by the pool as children shrieked and the heat beat down, ice clinking against her glass as it melted. She felt bent and rippled and new, as clear and bright as the chlorine-refracted sun, an easy net gliding through water. Everything—the breeze, the light, the steady pitch of the cicadas—slipped right through her, whatever she was made of excised in the humid, curtain-darkened hotel room, an offering to something bigger than Harry.
Harry spoke to her stomach, the center of her a small and fluttering swell. Janey ate liver and cuts of meat red with blood, her own blood doubling then given away. When she walked downstairs to fold laundry her bones slid out of place, her skin stretched then split into veins the color of her nights, purple and thinned by tumbling dreams. The house was filled with sweet, pale things, the rooms downy with cotton and muslin, blankets printed with small and colorless animals, a gauze of lace canopied and floating above a rocking bassinet. Janey bent over toilet bowls and sink basins, everything not yet excised vomited down drains and left in films across her teeth and tongue and throat.
Janey’s hair thickened, one tooth fell out and then two, enamel corroded by acid until her mouth hummed, a bundle of nerves. Harry crooned nursery rhymes and combed her curls with an ivory handled brush. The birth of their daughter was not an event; it happened just as they knew it would, as a baby is always going to be born. The ending is as predictable as the promise of a new beginning, culminating in life or death or both. It was a bright blue day after a long and bluer night, the scream as clear as the sun. The baby was red and swollen from the pressure, her toes and fingers curled tight as talons, her legs chicken-thin, her stomach round.
When the umbilical cord was cut the baby’s mouth funneled Janey’s nipple into a new one, mother’s milk turning her pink and plump. The baby’s fleshly limbs moved without reason and without stop, the same as they had inside Janey’s stomach. As the baby lay in her rocking bassinet Janey from across the room still felt each stretch and twitch against her widened ribs and in the empty hollow of her body, a phantom. Silk blonde hair curled over the baby’s soft skull as her bones stitched themselves together. Janey’s hair darkened and straightened and fell out by the handful, the long strands tangled translucent around her wrists and toes and neck, tight and cutting, her emptied blood called from hiding to pool and burn first red then white.
Janey slept and woke, swaddled in sweat and the patterned cries of the baby. Harry wrapped clean diapers around the baby’s chapped bottom and tucked her arms and legs tight in warm, dry cotton. He pressed her to his chest and breathed in her skin, his eyes clouding over in a dream as he lay her down to sleep. Harry padded softly through rooms and twirled the mobile until it danced on its strings and the baby’s mouth pulled up into a smile. Janey paced the house cradling and shushing and cooing and kissing, her skin a costume, loose and ill-fitting. She spooned down meals between feedings and showered in a bath rimmed with leaking milk, held in steam and the stench of spoilt butter.
When the baby turned one Harry filled little glass bottles with cow’s milk thicker and sweeter than blood. He warmed them in water and the palms of his hand and the baby sat in her chair and squealed and clapped and looked through the window at the white summer sun. Janey’s milk dried and her breasts turned to paper, more hollows that hung from her bones. She began to bleed monthly and while Harry was away on business she left the baby babbling in the arms of her mother. Counting backward from ten the surgeon filled her stomach with gas, the skin swelling to something familiar. Janey returned home with two scars on her hipbones, crescent moons not yet silver, one waxing one waning. The doctor informed her the eggs would, with nowhere to go, disintegrate into nothing.
On a hot day Janey set the baby in a plastic pool on the lawn in the backyard. She sat in a yellow lounge chair and watched the trees, listened to the baby’s peels of laughter as she splashed, the sound shimmering in the air with the heat and the moths. But her heart was already black. It hadn’t happened that day on their honeymoon; it wasn’t the sex she had long since decided. It was her blood and her teeth, her hair and her milk—women don’t give parts of themselves for things that aren’t curses.
Katie Harms received her BA in Film from the University of Michigan and her MFA in Creative Writing from Ohio State University. She was shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s 2024 Open Season Award and she was a recent Novel Slices finalist. Her short story “The Quickening” is forthcoming in Action, Spectacle’s summer 2024 issue.
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