Milk Blood Heat. Dantiel W. Moniz

as well as a feeling. It fills the tub—comforting, disappointing, absolute. Could she be like Kiera? Open her mouth and let water and blood pour in?

      She opens her eyes instead of her mouth and there is her mother standing above her, watching, face indistinct above the ripples. She shoots up, swallowing water in surprise, choking on it. Ava’s mother leans down and grabs her roughly by the shoulders. Her hands are firm even through the slips of water flowing down Ava’s arms. She squeezes her and makes her daughter look her in the eyes.

      “That’s forever. Do you hear me?” she says, and Ava, for the first time since she’s been thirteen, sees a flash of recognition in her mother’s face, some bit of knowing. (What If she’s seen me all along?) This new idea disrupts Ava, rattles something loose inside her, and the tears come hot and fast with the pressure of the empty emptying out. She sits and shakes with her mother’s fingers pressing into her arms, and it feels so good to hurt.

      “It’s okay,” her mother says. “Let it out.”

      Her mother grabs a towel and lifts Ava to her feet, dries her, and after showing Ava how to use a pad, leads her to the living room. With Ava sitting between her legs, she detangles her daughter’s hair and oils her scalp, massaging it with her sure fingers. She braids the hair into a crown and all the while she lets Ava cry, saying nothing. Ava wonders at this new emotion, of feeling cracked open—like a small, big thing is happening inside of her, making room.

      “I’m so sad, Mom,” she says, and though this word doesn’t mean what she wants it to, when her mother places both her hands over Ava’s eyes, catching wet and salt from her tears, Ava feels like her mother knows exactly what she means.

      When people ask what happened to her friend—whenever she mentions Kiera, recounting some silly thing they used to do, tame things people won’t hurt to hear—she’ll think back to gym class, that first time they met. When they ask her, How did your friend die? she’ll tell them, She drowned.

      In time, Kiera’s broken body on the hotel concrete is not what she returns to when she thinks of her friend, and she’ll think of Kiera often, especially in such moments where she is now and forever first and only—first high, first car accident, first sex. (That particular bit of guilt will settle and smooth into something like peace.) On her wedding night, she’ll dance chest-to-chest with her husband—a man whom she’s not sure but thinks she loves. A man who sees her, and doesn’t try to tell her what she needs. Swaying close, their bodies generating comfortable warmth, Ava will remember a day near thirteen’s end.

      On what would have been her friend’s fourteenth birthday, she snuck into Kiera’s backyard and down to the retention pond to watch the sun set, water and sky burning pink; to stand on the same bank where she and Kiera had scared the tadpoles, where they had laughed and preened. The place where they—two monsterish girls—had owned the entire world. After the sun slipped under the lip of the horizon, Ava left the way she came, tripping up into the backyard, the sky darkening, all quiet until she heard something small and strangled cutting through the dusk. Kiera’s mom was slumped in a patio chair in the corner of the yard, face in her hands, bathrobe twisted around her, exposing one milky, blue-veined thigh.

      This is the image Ava returns to on her wedding night and many others: walking toward Kiera’s mother; standing in front of the woman and placing a hand on her shoulder; how her mother’s whole body seemed concave, as if consuming itself. She’ll think of the way she opened the woman’s robe and pressed her body into hers, their skin suctioning together where it touched, forming a seal. How she stayed there, silent, as time collapsed around them, wondering if Kiera’s mother could feel her daughter’s blood pumping hard in her veins—a howling, creating heat.

       Feast

      There is only moonlight, a spill of it across Heath’s shoulders, illuminating how he lies on his side, turned from me, and also the pair of miniscule hands floating above the curtain rod, the fingers small as the tines of a doll’s silver fork. When I call my husband’s name, my voice splinters from my throat and Heath wakes immediately, turns on the bedside lamp, leans in so close I can smell the sleep on his breath. He checks my pupils, then lays the cool back of his hand against my forehead.

      “Do you have any pain?” he asks, and I want to swallow my mouth—to fold in my lips and chew until they burst—to keep myself from laughing. I place my hands on my stomach and nod. Heath reaches underneath my sleep shirt to test the tenderness of my skin.

      “What hurts?” His fingers keep pressing, like I’m clay.

      “Everything,” I say.

      He looks at me then, and in the look I can see him envisioning how I will be at some point in the future, ten years from now or twenty. I am a vague imprint of the girl he’d thought I was when we married, my mouth a black cave, ugly and squared.

      “Rayna, you’re fine,” Heath says. “Everything’s okay. It was a nightmare.” He turns the light back out, and I don’t correct him, don’t mention the tiny hands that are still climbing up and down the drapes. We are both pretending. It’s the only way we sleep.

      This thing with the body parts makes sense to me, this fixation with scale; I blame all those baby tracker apps for that, measuring the growth of my child as compared to produce—kumquats and Brussels sprouts, pomegranate seeds, green lentils—except instead of roots, it was growing a brain and tongue, eyebrows, a thumb to suck. Briefly, I’d been in love with it.

      Heath and I had been married for three years, and he had this whole other child, this ex-wife, a past life that had nothing to do with me. I had my friends’ questions (When y’all having kids of your own?) and my mother’s proclamations (That baby’s gonna have good hair!). I had two hands held out, waiting to receive my due. I’d wanted a honeymoon baby, a curly-haired kid with golden skin and Heath’s hazel eyes. While I waited, I would practice with his child. Out together at dinner, I’d wind a strand of Nila’s hair behind her ear, tell her not to eat so fast, introduce her as our daughter.

      Nine months ago, when I missed my period, when I confirmed with the pee stick and the doctor, when I told Heath over a bottle of expensive champagne and a card that read Daddy, I was glowing from the inside out. This baby validated me in the same way as my master’s degree, my good credit; Heath’s getting down on one knee. I bought the baby books, browsed the best cribs, shunned the million things expectant mothers should shun. Rule-by-rule, I was everything I was supposed to be—twice as good for half as much.

      The baby was the size of a Washington cherry, with miniature sex organs even a skilled technician couldn’t see, when I lost it. There’d been no symptoms, it was too small for fluttering, and when I went to the appointment, the milestone when embryo became fetus, the doctor told me she was sorry, her face solemn and practiced. There was no heartbeat. It was, and then it wasn’t.

      “This is common in early pregnancy,” she’d told me. “It happens all the time. Once the fetus is out, and you begin ovulating, you can try again.” The fetus, she’d said, and the word I’d been so excited about minutes earlier soured.

      I opted out of the D&C and the pill, waiting for things to proceed “naturally.” There was still hope inside of me. Doctors were wrong all the time. I prodded my slim belly, shook it, willing my baby to move. “Wake up, baby,” I commanded, but the next day, the bleeding started and didn’t stop. The doctor said, It’s beginning, and there was nothing to do. Heath kissed my forehead, tried to fold me into his arms, but I couldn’t let him hold me. I locked myself in the bathroom with the baby books, flipping through them carefully, and nowhere was it written how to reverse time or spark a heartbeat. How to make a womb worthy. I tore the pages out in handfuls and flushed them down the toilet, watched as they swirled back up in soggy clumps and came to rest at my feet. Later, in the shower, my baby would come out that way.

      I saw the first baby part in a bouquet of marigolds Heath brought home that night, the small slit of sex resting among the petals—a girl. I was afraid to blink, in case it disappeared. She was