It looms outside your bedroom door. The mid-September air is chilled with the birth of morning, sticking to you and your skin, kissing your forehead, so you force out a heavy breath — a long one, which pulls at the fibrous interiors of your lungs and opens you from within. Your hair is damp and clinging to your chin, with your terrycloth bathrobe slung over your chest as you cross the hallway in a dance, gliding your hand across the sleek wooden railing. It watches you, its keyhole mouth agape, as if posing a silent question. Its brass knob gleams — untouched, immaculate. You know that it longs to stand before you, to coax you closer, but you descend the stairs regardless, ending the perfectly contrived waltz.
It doesn’t follow you once your day has begun. It sits at the landing, pondering, wondering about your absence. It doesn’t truly exist without you there. You’ve given it this life, birthed it, designated it as a creature of your own womb. You love it in a perverse, portentous way. And why shouldn’t you? It is yours.
The kitchen is slathered in honeyed sunlight, which beams through the cracks of the window’s blinds and bounces off the beige cabinets. Across the street, a yellow school bus chugs around the cul-de-sac toward a group of elementary school students. Your daughter Georgia watches, sitting at the counter with half of a toaster strudel in hand, chewing with her mouth open. Like most eight-year-olds,’ her skin is ruddy, as it always is no matter how you try to wash it. You’ve done up her hair in a curled caramel ponytail, but it now sits at the bottom of her neck, the purple scrunchie threatening to fall. Stray cowlicks dip over her ears, fanning out like a halo or a tornado through a crop field. Her small feet kick against the legs of the stool, and you’re almost brought to tears, like a devotee in the presence of an angel.
“Good morning, sweetheart,” you coo. “Did you sleep well?”
***
“Georgia is a talented young lady.” Mrs. Acton’s voice is tinny over the line, and you imagine her hands clasped over a desk as if in prayer. Around her, the classroom would otherwise be empty, the grimy plastic seats tucked neatly under tables. The kids shout from the hallway, dragging their parents along with grubby hands and missing-teeth grins. All you can focus on, however, is the tick-tick of your kitchen clock and your short-clipped nails against the granite counter. You try to imagine yourself in the space with her — your purse hanging on the empty chair beside you, your legs crossed, your shivering fingers smoothing the wrinkles of your long-pleated skirt. But thinking about it too intensely fills your brain with an all-consuming static.
“She’s already learned all of her times tables, and she’s not afraid to raise her hand in class,” Mrs. Acton sniffs.
You build her up from her tepid tone, giving her the face of a woman who cooks soggy casserole for Thanksgiving dinner, her horn-rimmed glasses sinking into her wrinkles, and wrinkles sagging into her frown. And she possesses a husband of equally jaundiced quality, and they have a double bed, with photos from vacations in silver frames on the mantle, while your bed is narrow and lonely, draped with your childhood quilt.
“That being said, the other teachers and I are worried about… How should I say this?” She pauses. Coughs. “Her social development. Georgia is different. Distant. She doesn’t make connections like the other kids do. Sometimes it feels as if she’s not even present in the classroom. I don’t know. I just wanted to bring this to your attention.” Her voice wanes into a garble – phlegmy, foggy, and unknown.
You knock your back against the refrigerator door, clicking your head against the metal as you slide to the floor. She doesn’t see you. She doesn’t see Georgia. You respond with a terse “All right.” There will always be people in the world like Mrs. Acton, people who treat you and Georgia as foreign bodies. It is the primary tenet of being.
You click the “End Call” button, leaving Mrs. Acton to her normalcy, in that world so distant from your own. You lift your head. Above you is a piece of construction paper, held to the wall by three pieces of Scotch tape. Two girls have been drawn in peach Crayola, smiling prettily, placid. Behind them is a small brown rectangle, unassuming. Across the top, in black Sharpie, reads, “Me and Mommy.”
You study the taller girl of the portrait, with her two strands of straight blonde hair and her outstretched stick arm. Her deliberate expression. She has no features to exude motherhood, nothing to reveal her. She’s merely an expanded version of the young girl, something bigger yet equally one-dimensional. They are both the same as the door they stand before: flat, timid, and confined.
Your fingers graze the reflective material of the tape, which is old and yellowing. You think about what you’re becoming.
***
Saturday, September 17th. A big day for the Barrett County U9 Rec Soccer League. The Blue Whales are playing the Red Fire Ants, and they are committed to their tradition of playing until the high-school referee calls mercy, mainly out of pity. You sit in your lawn chair, feet resting on the faded white spray paint of the sideline, and watch as Georgia leaps into the mass of jerseys and mud. The field is old and graying, with turf littering the ground in hefty chunks. The sun is settled above the open space. It is like the rapture, and the sound of buzzing, shouting, and kicking is like the plague.
Most of the members of the Blue Whales have long accepted their team’s unbreakable losing streak. Not Georgia, though. Every Saturday morning, she bounces in the open trunk of your parked Camry, kicking her feet as you tie the laces of her dirt-caked hot pink cleats. Her tiny face scrunches in concentration as she spends ten minutes conducting her own solo drill routine like a sergeant. With her pinky finger in the air, she promises that they will win.
She lunges forward, driving her foot into the fray, knocking down an older boy on the other team with the crunch of an ankle. It’s a practiced massacre, and she beams for it, smiling with her chipped front tooth. And you are proud, so proud of this beautiful thing you’ve produced: your darling.
At half-time, you stray from the field and approach the playground atop the hill, where mothers bearing Baby Björns and crusty water bottles chase after their toddlers. When your feet hit the warm rubber, and the smell of infant wafts to your nose, you remember it. You watch rosy-cheeked children chase each other through the blue plastic tunnel slides, shrieking, grimy, and lovely. It is then that all of your motherly experiences become void, and you become the fawn-like stranger: wombless and unearthly.
“Are you okay?” A woman with a fading farmer’s tan asks you, clutching her infant to her chest. She’s stout and has a myriad of freckles and a thick braid of hair. The baby clings to the strap of her camisole, sucking its thumb as she hoists it closer. On her shoulder is a tote bag that could carry the ocean, from which she pulls out a bottle of water that she hands to you as a greeting, or maybe a peace offering.
“Yeah, sorry,” you say, fumbling the bottle with both hands. “I guess the heat is affecting me more than I thought.”
“Happens to the best of us.” She looks behind your back, cradling the baby’s skull as she tilts. “Where’s yours?”
“Excuse me?” “Where’s your kid?”
“She’s down there.” You gesture toward the field, expecting to see Georgia stretching by the benches, but your lungs stutter when you can’t find her in the crowd. You assume she’s there — she has no reason to leave you. Your eyes rave, hunting, foraging with violent desperation, until they finally land on her. She’s alone at the outcrops of the field, picking at the sole patch of green grass that’s remaining. She looks to you over the distance, smiles, and returns to her operations. You exhale.
The mother observes you with judging eyes. Against her, in the reflecting sunlight, the baby seems to redden, its skin becoming rubbery and molten, watered down, victimized by gravity. The creature oozes and drapes to the ground, letting out a sickening mewl. The mother murmurs, cradles the amorphous mass, and gives it a kiss on its horrendous forehead. The fetus peers at you with its soft, gelatinous eyes, and lets out a feral howl.
You blink, and the illusion lifts.
***
It waits for you when you return home, always perched at the landing, extending its arms to you. It is a creature that desires love, desires attention, and craves the saccharine coddle of the mother. It reaches out its knobbled brass fingers, clutching your skirt, seizing you. You do not acknowledge it. You do not give it what it wants. Does this make you a bad mother? Does this make you a tormentor? You slip into your room without a word of admission, without surrender.
Georgia sleeps early, tucking herself into her twin bed, and her faint snores echo through the hallway. You’ve never seen her sleep. The Cerberus at the gate guards her and holds your offspring hostage by the clutch of pale pink petals. It is opaque and unyielding, obtuse in nature, despising you, its beloved. It waits, fortifying the barricade, in undaunting opposition: a thing that so desperately does not want to be an enemy. You have made it an enemy, so that is the only thing it knows, with no time to learn otherwise.
Her sounds of sleep fade. You could press your ear to its wooden face to hear her more clearly, but to do so would be a concession to its ability to limit you. So, instead, you wait there, hands clasped knuckle-to-knuckle, lip in teeth, gnashing yourself. The purpled joints of your fingers darken as you clench them harder. You imagine her: her hair roiling across her flowered pillowcase, her translucent, fluttering eyelids, her curled body pressed between the sheets. She has never felt a soft mother’s kiss in the rapture of half-sleep. When the sun sets, she is motherless, and you are daughterless, and it is all the fault of your foe.
“Fiend,” you whisper, spitting at it. It doesn’t answer you, but neither does it yield.
***
The field is cavalier and gray. Through fatigued, muted soundwaves, a whistle shrieks and pierces your eardrum, and you flinch, holding your neck as it strikes the backs of your retinas. In the dense fog of your pupils, masses of red and blue fabric swirl, pouncing upon one another. You hold the armrests of the lawn chair, sweating from your hairline, unsure of when you became so feverish. Before you, the children shudder to a stop, their cleats digging into the skeletal turf. The referee has enacted mercy.
With weary hands, you fold up your chair and take your leave. The dying turf itches your bare ankles as you slink around the rest of the team. Even with the blow of yet another despairing loss, the members of the Blue Whales take their cranberry juice boxes with dignity, replaying the highlights with mouths full of granola or apple slices. As they move towards their minivans, the children reach out their hands for their mothers,’ or those of the man-things that seem to attach to mothers once their bodies have bloomed and swelled to the germination of their young. To you, these man-things are crickets: dark and noisy, invisible except for the sounds of their chirps.
What does it mean to possess a man-thing? Does the man-thing possess you? There may have been a time when you knew this answer, when you and a man-thing worked together as one body, sharing life’s responsibilities; you can’t remember, however, when you may have been more than one body. If there ever was a man-thing of yours, it either abandoned you or burrowed its way into the core of yourself, dissolving into the atrium of your heart. You have always been hollow, a woman-thing by definition. A barren temple. A relinquishing.
On the playground atop the hill, you find a wasteland teeming with parasites, with bald fleshy skull-caps, and entrails of fat that hang from their limbs. It is the job of the mothers to cajole them, to dissuade them from the puddles of mud, to keep them on their feet. One mother, the tips of her cheekbones red from the sun, taps your arm, and you nearly skitter away.
“Are you all right?” She holds a creature in her arms and it shudders backward, burying itself into her chest. It despises you, despises the sight of you, the scent of you. It whimpers at your gaze and yelps at the very eminence of your existence. Its beady, bean-shaped eyes squint as if to dispel you. The mother consoles the thing and tells it to quiet. She never disagrees with her creature, however, never introduces it to you or elects for cordiality. She knows why it is so fearful.
“Are you looking for something? Where’s your kid?” She asks, but your tongue is thick, and your mouth is sealed shut. You gesture to the field, where turf expands like the weathered waters of a sepia sea. She leans over, neck over your shoulders, and you wince at her proximity. “I don’t see anything.”
No. She will never see anything. Neither will you.
***
You have never known mercy, and therefore you have never known to show it. But now, as the dregs of you ooze through your front door, you conclude that you are an unfair judge. It stares at you from over the banister, watching as you wallow below, expecting your lamentation. You snarl and bare your teeth; your hair is slung over your shoulder as you hobble up the stairs. It waits patiently for your ascent. When you make it into the hallway, the waltz begins again, but this time the unspoken music is warbled and discordant. A hollow chord strikes as you raise your hand to the doorknob.
“You have never been kind to me,” you say to it, your hand hovering. “But I have not been any kinder.”
Your fingers close over the brass, and the frigid golden metal barbs your surrendered flesh. You could have muttered an apology or could have waited for one in return, but you are too focused on your own arrhythmic heartbeat. Your grip tightens as you turn your wrist. It opens. It had always been eager to bare itself to you, to let you burrow inside, to finally accept the love of the mother.
The room inside is covered with a translucent sheen of dust, which freckles the open air like an old memory. Half of the walls are painted yellow, with a printed ducky motif in white, but the pattern abruptly stops by the window, where it wanes into sterility. The brush strokes on the fringes are long and erratic, and the paint job is weak and scratchy. The window across from you is fogged over, and a single cobweb drapes over the glass.
You step forward towards the crib in the back corner. The white railings are up, holding hostage a ghost, a nothing. The sheets are pink and perfectly unwrinkled. Against the single pillow lies a stuffed bunny, eyes glassy and dead.
You drape yourself across the crib, hanging your head over the railing. Your knees give out, knocking against the wood. The crib threatens to fall under the full weight of your body. With a groan, you melt into the carpet, your legs curled up under your torso. With your stomach cradled in your arms, you wrench out a stabbing wail, letting out such a curdling scream that the whole house shakes with your despair. Tears erupt, burgeoning on the floor, leaving empty pinprick holes. You howl, gripping yourself, tearing at your skin.
It watches you. It is unsure what to do. You were not its caring matriarch, but you were still a mother to something.
“Georgia,” you sob, but there is no answer.