EDITOR’S CHOICE AWARD
BY HAVEN STEEL
Sometimes I imagine myself as a fish, half-swallowed by my mother.
Let me start over.
I saw a video of fishermen plucking scales out of something hulking and dead. They pulled from flesh like fingernails, like something you aren’t supposed to see uncovered.
My mother ate my placenta. Mine and my sister’s and my brother’s, but mine was first. I think she blended it into a smoothie. She bragged about it, the way she does most things: it’s healthy, it’s natural, it’s your body’s way of giving back what it took from you. I think if she could have swallowed me whole, she would have. It was the only time our bodies worked together, creating something that was mine and hers, and she couldn’t let it go. She couldn’t let it be mine.
It’s 2020, and she tells me she’ll save her tip money from the seafood restaurant to buy an underground bunker before the sun explodes. She tells me I can bring my husband and children. She tells me I should start having babies as soon as possible, before it’s too late. Don’t I know we only have a few good years left?
I’m not sure when the years were good. The towers fell while I was the size of a poppy seed, but I don’t feel anything about that; don’t bring it up except to jolt you awake. The best years might have been when my brother was a baby. He was so quiet and trusting, barely splashed in the bath. I loved him so fiercely that it gave me nightmares. Over and over, I dreamed I was pregnant with him, that my body had warped to fit him inside. Maybe I would’ve swallowed him, but just to keep him safe. The years were never good, not really, only the people, and only in flashes.
Have you ever dropped kibble into a koi pond? If you have, you know how they swarm. You know what their mouths look like, gasping little O’s, the way they push and slap over each other to fight for a single scrap, a single moment. You know they’re never full. My grandma had a koi pond in the backyard, just a couple of them in there. It got greener and greener, and then it was gone.
Sorry. I’m sorry.
She likes to bake. She keeps thick old-fashioned recipe books in the kitchen, always has. She lets us lick batter from the spatula. She likes Fleetwood Mac. She used to be beautiful; sometimes still is.
Most animals are just fish that walked out of water. I’ve always liked this idea. Think of those science-illustration type drawings, a photorealistic bluefin with naked human legs. Of course, they didn’t look like that, but when you’ve never seen something in real life, it can look however you want it to look. Sometimes I think this is how my mother looks at me, like something she’s never seen before, more of a concept than tangible reality. Babies crying in the bunker, diaper rash and rationed lotion.
Who gets our scraps? Half-used ketchup packets and crusted tins of tuna bloat her fridge; the door shudders out shaky exhales. Life support, panic attack: in for three, out for four. Breathe, remember, wake up, hold on! You can’t sneak a midnight snack without getting hit by something in the mid-to-late stages of rot. Takeout containers sail down like Donkey-Kong barrels, stir-fry explosions. When my brother’s stomach growls, he waits by the cat’s dinner bowl; our savior grips the handle and braces herself for the avalanche. I dream that amniotic fluid and baby teeth pour out in a recyclable sea, that she unhinges her jaw and lets in the flood.
I have gone fishing one time. Too young to remember, the story on record is this: I hooked something half as big as myself and almost drowned trying to make my parents proud. In the photo my mother took, I hold my slaughter beside me, both of us gasping for air.
What’s the difference, I wonder, between my unborn children and caviar? Should I scrape them out and save them for later? She’s still so hungry; we aren’t getting any younger. She wants to see her eyes in my daughter’s skull before the world eats us alive. She wants another placenta for the fridge, another body, another chance. She wants to die surrounded by people who love her, all of us wailing. I dream that the first piece of the sun falls like stir-fry, a live grenade: as koi, we swarm.
Stop that, get off me! Good Lord, girl. Get out of the water. Pick yourself up, pull yourself together. Say you’re sorry; aren’t you sorry? Don’t you have anything to say for yourself? Fix your face, trim your nails, pluck your scales. Close your legs; you’re bleeding. Don’t slam the door, don’t be ridiculous: you came out of me. You came out, and you’ll go back in. You went back in. You are still inside, still here. Breathe. Keep breathing. That’s it. There you go. Go give your brother a bath; he’s filthy. Don’t look at me like that. You don’t know what you want; one day you’ll understand. You don’t know what I’ve sacrificed; you don’t know who you are. Let me tell you.
My first date was in the ocean. We waded hip-deep as the rocks sliced our skin, free-bled to the fish. Salt rolled through our veins, vodka through our livers. He asked if I wanted children. I asked: dead or alive?
If you watch her, you’ll see; she moves like something strung on a wire. We are similar that way—mouths that won’t quite shut, bodies that won’t quite still. Twitching carcasses reeling towards the butcher. Pointless, inevitable, breathtaking; the last choke of a dying animal. I can never get far enough away, not with her fingers hooked behind my teeth. You remember the feeling, I’m sure, you remember the drag. Forgive me the reminder. Forgive me. Forgive me. Good Lord, forgive me.
Do you think the fish pray, before it ends? Do you think they recognize the sun when it’s uncovered? Do you think they die afraid?
My sister is engaged to a boy she met at church; they want to raise their children in the mountains. I lick strawberry lip gloss off a stranger’s mouth as we swim under strobe lights, feel her body pulse like a wave under my palm. Starve for her, for anyone. She breathes hot in my ear and asks me to follow her home. I am sinking to the bottom of my mother’s stomach; I am late for curfew. The seas are steaming—not much longer now. Bang on the door, throw it wide open, let the scraps fall free. I know our years are numbered; I know we live in flashes. I know what I want, and it is not to drown with my daughter.
Am I hurting you? Can you feel me under your skin? Does it tug? Does it burn? Open your mouth. Open it, hold it, don’t lash your tongue, don’t bite down. That’s it, breathe. Keep breathing. Listen: you can’t tell me who I am. I am more than what you swallowed. Hold me between your teeth. Now chew.
Are you done yet?
The placenta leeches nutrients from the mother’s body and feeds them to the baby, taking waste products and toxins in return. A feedback loop, the first point of connection, the first thing we ever shared. Despite what the mommy blogs say, you aren’t actually supposed to eat it. Doctors will tell you that benefits are unproven; disease is not. My mother trusts doctors the way she trusts fathers, so none of us were born in hospitals. Me in the bed, my sister in the pool, my brother slipping loose in the hallway like the accident he was. Land, water, frying pan, hot oil. Eventually, the heat comes for us all. Believers say it brings you closer to your child, closer to yourself: ward off post-partum, ease the bleeding, feel the love rise with your oxytocin levels. Gulp the smoothie down quick to avoid the flavor. I’m not sure about the results; I have only seen the toxicology report. I imagine it tasted like strawberry.
I know, I know. You want something thinner than blood, kinder than rot. I do, too. I see it behind my eyes, I dream of impossibilities. This is my private shame: I want to be your daughter. I swear to you, I do. Please, I’ll be good, I’ll be better.
Forget about the legs for a second. Do you think we could go back? Like, if you try real hard to breathe. Imagine a miracle. Imagine the bottom of the ocean, the parts we’ve never seen. How it could look like anything at all: a tongue or a spatula or the inside of a womb. Imagine shivering underneath the surface as it all goes dark, looking up through thick waves of sound. Imagine a bunker.
Sometimes I think it’s the other way around, that I have swallowed my mother. That she lives inside of me, hungry, pushing and slapping for that one last moment in the sun.
—
Sorry. Hey, hey, I’m sorry. Don’t cry; I didn’t mean to make you cry. Can we start over? You give me yours, and I’ll give you mine. I’m sorry if it hurts you, I’m sorry if it’s toxic. I’m sorry, I’m always sorry. I wish my legs were good for something other than running. I don’t have a husband, and I don’t have babies, but I will take myself below the world with you and wait for it to end, all of us in a loop of our own, in a pond going green. The things you’ve done to me don’t matter anymore. Forgive me, and I’ll forgive you. We can just be fish.