Swallow

After Octavia Butler’s "Bloodchild" and David Cronenberg’s "The Brood"

I’m taking a writing class from READING SUCKS with mlo and this is something that came out of it.

Also, I watched The Brood by Cronenberg and it was so fucking crazy.

The stories that were told to us as children, the movies we watched and the songs we sang, they all warned us about the horrific process…and the pain. It always came down to the pain. There was the initial pain of the rage itself, how it would stifle your parasympathetic nervous system, then vision, then voice, pulling apart the muscles beneath your ribs until nothing was left but slack fibers, bent over in a dome shape like wild grass in the wind. And then there was the spirit, how it would swim into your body, through your mouth, which it could pry open with nothing but its hollow eyes. It would empty itself into your blood, into anything open and pulsing—your lungs, your heart, your stomach, your womb, if you had one.

It’d begin to fester, to make you sick. Hives would grow on your limbs, the skin on your chest and stomach would turn purple and blue, as if you’d been beaten and bruised. Everything would start to swell. By year two, a sack would emerge, below your lower abdomen, full of blood and pus and some kind of little creature, one that does not coo or purr, but screams. A rage baby. It’d have no bellybutton because there would be no umbilical cord. It would not need nutrients in the form of food or blood, only rage. Rich, syrupy rage, the kind that brews in the loins, the kind that traverses to the bottom of the feet, charring the soles. And you’d live like that, that’s what they told us. If you felt that feeling, you’d live like that, for years, until the rage baby broke its sac open and scurried into the woods, the neighborhood, the nooks and crannies of orderly life, suitable for human cooperation and consistency, where it’d mess with the way things go, setting houses on fire and flipping cars on freeways over and making meat slicers malfunction in butcher shops.

So life was knit by the government into a blanket of perfect feelings - joy, pleasure, serenity, satisfaction…sadness…even sadness was okay, because of its still, heavy nature, too heavy to go anywhere, nailed to the floor. Sex and love and friendship and meditation and good food and sunshine, ‘The Mosaic of Humanity’, as the government called it. It felt good. It all felt so good.

When I found my mother hanging from her bedroom ceiling by an itchy, thick rope, my mental rolodex of every known sensation ran out, as if the pages blew into the wind, and I was left there with a momentary emptiness, one that quickly began to fill itself up with something like a dog’s growl. My jaws unhinged. I screamed. For the first time in my life, I screamed. “Fuck you! Fuck you. Fuck you…” and I fell to the ground, and began to claw at the cornflower blue carpet, the one I always hated because the color looked like it belonged in a children’s hospital, but I didn’t know what hating something felt like before that, so I yelled “Fuck you!” to the carpet also, and began to scratch my own bare thighs, as I was wearing a skirt, and oh, was I loud. And oh, how I was waiting for something as hellish as that scene in front of me to fill me up inside, to make my internal landscape match that of the external, to embellish me with warts and burns and bruises and a loud, echoing, miserable pregnancy.

And it did. The spirit was burly. Thicker than I would’ve anticipated. I didn’t know that something that weighs the same as air could choke you as it slithers down the throat. It took a while for it to fit itself between my ribs, my spine, below the fat of my breasts. The acute and specific pain of something bigger than me, making itself at home inside my own body made me grin. It felt like freedom, to harbor something more poignant, more real than anything I’d ever felt, like an endless drunken evening, bones prodding my skin from the inside, breaking skin, releasing the potent, swelling pockets of blood that I’d been harboring since I was born.

The pregnancy was powerful. I lived in a cabin at the bottom of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, so as not to be found by the government. They’d put me in the Rage Ward, kill my baby by slicing its throat upon its birth.

In those years, I’d wake up and sob, not the sob of a lonely woman, but of a woman who’d been held captive from her wholeness since forever. My rage became my lifeforce. I was unfastened and flying through the air like a trapped bird let free.

When Jonah was born, I saw in his eyes the only truth I’d ever seen. Pure ecstasy filled me as I prepared for the world as I knew it to transform, for chaos to fill in its pillowy, blank recesses. He grew fast, double the speed of a human child. By the time he was 10, he was using mental techniques to make married women fall for each other and leave their husbands. By the time he was 17, he’d drain wealthy men’s bank accounts, keeping some of the cash for us. Now, he’s 37, and practically mastered at presenting as a human. Rage, though, that is his purpose. With it comes discovery of what should be impossible, of what the government has so tactfully seduced its people into avoiding.

I still think of those pregnant years, how I’d sit on the porch and rock back and forth, holding my sweet jonah in my hands, watching the moon waxing and waning, wondering what else I’d never felt before, how orgasmic it would be to have it build inside of me.