Ariana Harwicz

Instead of a vagina, he thought his wife had a stone in the depths of a cave.

When I fall in love, like this very minute, as I shake myself, I scatter earth onto a coffin. It doesn’t matter whose. And when I masturbate I desecrate crypts, and when I rock my baby I say amen, and when I smile I unplug an iron lung. Hence the kiss. Because after all, since forever and since even before being born, and for the whole time my husband’s been shouting with jealous rage, I’ve been dead.

Open the door, please, we’ll do it after, I promise. He’s bribing me, but screw him. I’m begging you, it’s not funny. And then, having climbed onto the toilet, I deliver a lengthy existential monologue, adding some philosophical and psychoanalytic touches for good measure. When I’m done, he says: It’s all in your head. That’s all he ever says. In the end I feel sorry for him and leave the bathroom. He gives me an insipid kiss that does nothing for me. I need a buffalo and all I get is a porcupine. He shoves me away from the bathroom door. I hear him defecate, the sound of his shit dropping into the water. I wait for him in bed, try to read something, but all I can think about is satiating my body: it’s chasing after me, sweating. I toss the book aside. The baby is all twisted up in his sleep, coughing like a worker in a Cuban tobacco factory. I straighten him out and decide to go to sleep. My husband is still in the bathroom, playing on his phone. I end up taking off my bra, the underwire hurts, and changing out of my knickers. I scrub my face clean and slather on some lotion. Afterwards, nothing. At dawn, I’m woken by a shrill, trumpet-like scream. A strange whistling sound. The fire in the living room has gone out. I blow on it but that just sends ash flying everywhere, including up my nose. I spit. I sneeze. I have an allergic reaction. Nasal blood. I try to light the fire. The uproar continues outside. Men and animals are fighting it out. A chicken truck has crashed into a car carrying an average family, two point four children in a pile-up. Or it’s a kangaroo giving birth to a troop of joeys and they’ve got stuck on the way out. I leave the house barefoot. I get soaked, slip on the stones, look for the source of the tumult of voices and growls. I walk down the road, through the woods and to the stretch of wasteland scattered with used condoms where the tourists go to procreate. It’s coming from the sky. Hundreds of birds are criss-crossing each other, confused. No one’s leading them. North and south are mixed up. The baby is crying his quota of morning torment. He’s had his nightmare about a hungry wolf climbing in through the window. There’s no smoke detector in his room. I put him to bed with my husband. I wrap their arms around each other and they lie there, sound asleep, breathing the air from each other’s mouths. My vampiric offspring is going to end up a smoker. I go back outside. For the first time, I feel drawn to the sky. The birds are raising the feathers on their wings, they’re riled up like bulls. Then one of them heads south and the rest follow, screeching off into the distance. Back in the house I find the baby under our bed, screaming at the top of his lungs like another bird. I don’t know what we’re doing with our tiny deformity, with our flesh. What we’re doing with our conjoined entrails. We’re letting him grow up among shrubs and bones. We’re letting him get scraped and knocked about. How could you leave him there when you can see I’m sleeping, he said. Are you out of your mind? Then he drifted off again. I lay down between my husband and my son and watched them inhale and exhale as they abandoned themselves to the heavy breathing of sleep. I looked at one face and then at the other, and then at myself in the middle. I eventually got bored of their features and was alarmed to find that, after staring at them for so long, I no longer recognised them.