Milk Blood Heat. Dantiel W. Moniz

I’m waiting at the front door, ready for the fight. “Did you tell her I was fine before you dropped her off?”

      He closes his eyes, moves past me into the living room. “When will you be able to let this go? When can we get back to normal?”

      “Let this go?” I spark like a star in the night, feeling suddenly full to the brim. “I’m glad this is so easy for you.”

      “Jesus, Rayna! I don’t know what to do. It’s been eight months.” He grips the bridge of his nose. “I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying what everyone’s told you already. It’s common! It happens all the time. It wasn’t even . . .” He stops. Looks like he wishes he hadn’t come back. “We didn’t even know what it was.”

      But I knew—soft petals shimmering gold, my baby girl. And I wanted my common pain.

      “Maybe you never wanted me to have it. Too afraid to tarnish that pure family blood,” I jeer, and Heath’s face twists. I can feel the thin line I’m towing, about to cross over, but this anger is delicious, satisfying as a last meal, and I can’t stop eating of myself. “Maybe you’re actually happy. After all, you already have your perfect daughter.”

      “That’s enough!” Heath roars. He steps forward and grabs me at the wrists, and if he were a different sort of man, I can see how this might go. But Heath just looks at me like he can’t tell who I am, like he wouldn’t want to know me. His breath comes hard until the anger softens, and when he lets out a little whimper, a window opens, and through it, for the first time, I can sense his sadness, his jagged need. Stunned, I watch him swallow it. “How dare you,” he whispers, and I’m ashamed.

      I lean my forehead against Heath’s and he doesn’t move away. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.” I wish I could pin this loss on Nila, on anything, but there’s no explanation, no one to blame. I know it’s not her fault or Heath’s, maybe not even my own. I kiss Heath until he kisses me back, until we’re undressing and he’s pressed close against my skin. We’ve needed this; missed it. There are so many ways to be filled. “Please please please,” I beg over and over, like it’s the only word I know.

      I say it the way I did when the baby fell out, warmed by body heat and shower steam, the color of raw life. Red globules, liver-streaked, clots the size of champagne grapes. And then a slippery, silvery sac, small as a coin. My baby in pieces, fig-dark and glistening. Before I hunched empty under the showerhead, letting the water grow cold; before I slid the sac into a Ziploc; before Heath drove me to the hospital, I picked up my baby and cradled it, tried to see if I could make out a face or a miniature knee in the alien landscape of my insides. I rocked my baby in my hands, told it everything was going to be fine. I knew already what a mother should do.

      Nila said, The only place as strange as space is the sea, so the next morning, I drive to the city aquarium and buy a ticket. The halls shimmer, filled with a dense, amphibious silence. Here it’s safe to wander, to be driftless. I pretend to goggle at the flitting of fluorescent fish, to be consumed with nothing more than the wavering of sea kelp stretching up toward artificial light. At the tide pools I trail my finger along an urchin’s purple spines and watch it shudder, blindly grasping until I still my finger in the middle of it, let it hold me.

      Suddenly, the aquarium is teeming with children, a first-grade field trip. The kids rush in, trailed by frazzled teachers, their eyes wide and hands reaching, grasping as the urchin. At once I want to hold them, press their small chests against mine and feel that vital thump. The children awe at the boneless creatures resting at the bottom of the shallow tank, and their joy is simple, tactile, too much. Feeling unworthy of them, I fade away to seek out darker, more solitary spaces.

      In a dim room where the water seems heaviest, I rest my head against the glass. For a moment, I can almost remember what it is to be unborn—this darkness, this weight, a comfort. Then, something stirs in the water, stealing my attention. In a corner of the tank, hidden by living rock, rests an octopus—iridescent orange with blue rings spiraling up the trunk of its body. Slowly, golden eye unblinking, it feeds a tentacle into the black of its mouth. Its other arms wave, two or three of them shortened, partially eaten already. I can feel its stolid regard, and like the body parts, I know this is meant for me. A synchronicity; something about ashes and rebirth, Ouroboros eating his own tail.

      “Hey!” a man next to me says, a middle-aged father in glasses towing a child in each hand. He had snuck up while I’d been transfixed; maybe my engrossment brought him. He gathers the attention of a nearby worker. “Something’s wrong with this squid!” Nosey, ignorant man; he can’t even tell the difference.

      I press closer to the tank and my reflection superimposes over the animal, my eyes a dark glinting on its body. The man is panicking, perceiving madness or danger—some invisible, toxic signal radiating across the current. But I know this act is natural, a truth beneath it, muscled and gleaming; I had heard the creature speak. Sometimes you must consume the damaged body, digest it cell by cell, to taste the new beginning.

      I lean in, lips almost to glass, before the onlookers come to gawk, before the workers can interrupt this godly process, and look into its eye.

      “Good,” I tell the octopus. “Like that. One bite at a time.”

       Tongues

      Ms. Addler keeps a word-of-the-day calendar on her desk, so in fourth period, while Zeyah tunes out her teacher’s prattle on American history, she learns new words: censure, vicissitude, caliginous, exegesis. Slick words, shape-shifting, Zey devours them, voracious.

      Learn something every day, Ms. Addler’s always saying. Her teacher is young, Call-Me-Katie outside the classroom, red lipstick and stitched flowers on her garter-topped stockings that show when she crosses her legs. Once, Zey saw her French-kiss a man after school, then hop into his nice car, her grin spread large as if she, too, were a high school senior, seventeen.

      Today’s word is luciferous, and Zey pronounces it wrong. No, Ms. Addler says, loo-SIF-fur-us. But Zey can’t ignore the prefix. She knows Lucifer: fallen angel, Prince of Darkness. Little horned man on the candy cigarette box. How could this word mean light? Ms. Addler says, There are all kinds of things “they” don’t want you to know. She says it real mysterious, like some slim, blonde-haired prophet—but this idea, that word, quickens in Zey, growing big in the eternal Southern heat.

      At home she takes her dictionary into the bathroom—locks the door, a blasphemy—to see what it knows about the devil. She seeks a different opinion than what Pastor or her family’s Sunday Bible have to offer: 1) a proud, rebellious archangel, identified as Satan, who fell from Heaven. 2) the planet Venus when appearing as the morning star. 3) (lowercase) a friction match.

      At New Life First Baptist that Sunday—Zey and her brother bookended by their parents in the pew—Duck slips his fingers into hers and tickles her palm, their signal for boredom, for something funny or ridiculous an adult has said. Duck is twelve, still accepting of his nickname and blessedly silly. Zey remembers him small, head smooth as a pebble, her mother placing him in her arms. How sweet he’d felt, yawning mouth, breath scented with their mother’s milk. He was hers in a way nothing else was. Duck sings along with the hymns, he always does, intentionally off-key, but this time Zey isn’t bored; she doesn’t sing. Instead, she watches: the collection plate going round once, twice; Pastor roaring at the pulpit, royal purple trailing from his arms; people asking for blessings, to be touched by the Spirit, falling out when Pastor presses his thumb hard between their eyes.

      She listens to Pastor’s words: Brothers and Sisters, all those who accept me as the Savior shall live forever in the Kingdom of Heaven! Repent! He whips the air as if spurring something invisible. Benediction or absolution—his necessary position in the power of such things. The congregation writhes. In the pew in front of them, Sister Ruth in her flower-box hat slumps backward, speaking in tongues, this strange language flowing from the deep place where the soul lives, waiting for God to free it. The long, stray hairs under her chin tremble; her grown daughter fans her face.