Baleen in vivo

The kids come home from school forty minutes later than they had last year, and I assume it’s as they’ve matured to junior high, given I’m no longer awake early enough to hear them leave in the morning. What once sounded a stampede quieted to the door opening, and closing, three times over in exchanging speeds. It’s funny feeling older only because they are. My face hasn’t changed much. Least not for a while, now. I’m sure I look the same to the kids, I’ll look the same only ‘till my hair grays, or I gain a limp, or a goiter. I should’ve had kids. I don’t mean that. Only, I wanted that until I couldn’t, and when you’re too old to have kids, you’re too old to grip the grief with your teeth, and should just shut up and die about it already. Ha-ha! I hadn’t ever a sip of hindrance when holding babies, even the littlest ones. When I held the littlest ones, I worried my ribs’d crack and swallow the sweet thing like a Venus fly trap. It’d float in there, not so comfortable as in vivo, the golden age, no, she’d sit in there dodging chunks of half-chewed Lupini beans at four AM and rattling my baleen plate like prison bars ‘till I’d just fucking throw her up. I worried.  A friend had a son, paid the hospital bills and rolled him up like a cigarette, took him home and slid him right under the Christmas tree. When he was old enough to sit at the table without arm rests, she’d tell him he was her miracle, Jesus’ spittle, ‘stead of the memory she held getting stoned for the first in months, watching him see every color on those twinkling lights, all at once, how cool that was. Ha-ha! I got pregnant once. By accident, and then one day it wasn’t there. Like it hadn’t ever happened. A couple evenings off kilter, maybe, and then a long period. The only folks who’d known were the neighbors, the lesbians, because the sturdier one was pregnant for the second time and I was an incipient local yet-still. I’d knocked at the door holding floral seedling packets, the ones you get at the hardware store checkout line. Chrysanthemums and baby’s breath, the sketches on the cover were just as glitzy and shoddy as candy wrappers. First thing I saw was that belly, snug and hanging low on her elastic waistband. It was the oldest boy. I’d said, Hi, Hello, I have these extra seeds I’ve run out of space for and thought you’d might like them on your windowsill so I can see them too and also I’m late and lonely and already losing hair due to separate stressors and Can I Come In Now? She said Yes, so we sat on the same sofa and she listened to me verbally hallucinate third trimester symptoms and puffy nipples for two hours or so, and see, I’d thought at that point we’d booted toward a friendship, a companionship maybe, where our gardens would compliment one another’s and  our children’d grow up together and play cards and beat each other up and share a hospital bed, maybe, we’d start a little family on that block. She lent me Miracle of Birth: Vis Guide to Pregnancy and gave me their home phone number. Then nothing happened and my tummy didn’t get big and the lesbian had the boy and the wife wouldn’t make eye contact with me when I’d buy her kids’ lemonade and nobody called and now the boy’s kicking puppies and crushing beers and spitting on old people with his buddies down at U of I. If my baby’d come to fruition he’d probably be gearing up to do the same about now. They never planted those flowers. Mine toasted years back. I miss my brother, how little he was in one moment, how storyless, how nesciently he looked at us and how quiet we all got. I think we all thought something was wrong, then, without the babbling and sputtering, we thought something was real wrong and we fell quieter in grief. And then he turned four and got his head stuck in the bars of a ferris wheel and everything and all he could scream was Feel it, Feel it. So then he learned to speak like a feral child and my mother sought counseling for self attributed neglect and the fourth child they’d been planning on was henceforth usurped by the tying of tubes. And that was that. Ha-ha! I fell asleep early tonight. I’d formed a pit in my stomach that only smoothed when I promised it I’d kill myself in the morning. It spat in my face and put me to sleep, then, and I reawoke before it could stir — Headlights simmer against the wall and I hear the youngest girl creaking fences on tip-toes. Surely she’s far too young for this, surely the lesbians’ll wake up and objurgate her straight, rip out her earrings and tuck her to bed. Surely they’ll wake up. I’m up still, hours later when she returns. She throws up in my bushes. I know because I mistakenly left the hose unspooled and I hear her fumble over it and hiss Familyless fat liar cunt, or maybe it’s what I want to hear. I try and stay awake through the early morning to hear the lesbians find her seedy in fishnets when gathering her for school but the pit’s returning and if I have to pledge suicide again I’ll really come undone. Maybe, I’ll get a dog instead. One that stays little and quiet, nuzzles to my breast and drools when it sleeps. Maybe I’ll do that instead.

Art ;

La Jeune fille à la chèvre, Pablo Picasso

1906, oil on canvas, 139.4 x 102.2 cm

https://collection.barnesfoundation.org/objects/5452/Girl-with-a-Goat-(La-Jeune-fille-a-la-chevre)/