I am roadkill. I am a body bag with a crying tumor inside. I have no value beyond my womb. Put on life support, my body is cracked like a raw egg. No one cares that the shell is broken so long as the yolk remains intact. I’ve gone necrotic on the mattress; my rot collects in the bedpan. Holy Cesarean, split me down the middle with a chainsaw. Let the masses examine the degradation of my skin. Put me on ice and see how fresh I stay. Tubes down my throat and through my stomach, I am force fed to keep the baby strong. Nothing is more important than my labor. God help me, I need an epidural. No one gives me the needle. Just because I’m a dead woman, they think I can’t feel pain. They stand crowding around me, staring at the hole between my legs. My insides sweat and bleed. My flesh thins as the hole expands. The hole swells and pushes. But this isn’t enough so someone comes with scissors. Snip, snip, snip. Out comes a head, a shoulder. This infant has spider legs. It clings to my thighs; latex gloved hands pry it off, put its thin-lipped mouth to my breasts. What I lactate is watery and smells of bleach. The doctor puts a drop on his tongue. It is sour, he says. He wrenches my amniotic sac with a pair of cold forceps. I bleed. How I miss my period, that spontaneous stigmata when the moon is just right. If I could move, I’d tear the tubing out. I want to swallow but my throat is blocked. I want to turn onto my side without rigid plastic poking me. My colostomy bag bulges with fullness. The baby spits out my milk; colostrum soaks the rented bed sheets. How many women have bled out on this mattress before me? How many are already lined up for their turn? I can’t remember if it’s been five days or ten years; I’ve been laboring since the beginning of time and I’m sick of it.
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Rip this babe from my breast; I’ve always been a proponent of bottle feeding. Let the baby ruin the rubber nipple; an inanimate spout won’t scream in pain. Because tubes keep me alive, because my only meals come from bottles of thick, yellow, synthetic nutrients, my progeny should be fed similarly. Give it those chemical compounds masquerading as sustenance. I’d rather have my nipples lopped off than continuously tweaked. I used to love feeling a man’s mouth on me but breast-feeding is nowhere near similar. Everyone in the room—why are there so many people in the room—want the opportunity to feed the baby. What about me? When am I going to be offered a steak dinner? Where is my butter-poached lobster and potato? Someone wipe me clean. I want off life support, I want out of this room. It’s a pressure cooker within these walls; I am too hot and my guts boil. At least drag me to the morgue, where my skin might be soothed, where the refrigeration will cool me like the piña colada no one gives me. But there is no morgue for me, not yet at least. I am stuffed with stained rags, strung up from the rafters and made to dance on marionette strings. Be a mother, I am commanded. But I will not love that baby. They put that little body in my arms and I let it drop straight through. Throw me out the window so I can crash against the concrete. Body exploded open, I can be pinned to a clothesline to dry until I am leathered. Birds can collect upon me and shit me a new skin layer. I look at the window with the same longing I have for breathing without artificial respiration. The doctor didn’t want the trouble of performing CPR, so attached me to an iron lung.
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Goddamn this maternity ward. It’s nothing but one long bed lined with dying women. We can never die if we’re kept alive. All our disgusting babies squish together in the nursery. Names aren’t kept, our little ones are distributed at will. One baby here, another there; just as many are destined for the charity box as they are the dumpster. Therein lies the rub, if you will. While developing, that baby is like gold. But once it breathes, its value depreciates rapidly. I can’t bury it in a hole or stuff it down the toilet bowl. I must either ween the little shit off me or leave it in the government’s occupied hands. No one cares what happens after. Baby booties should come with personalized body bags. Save one for me. I’m not picky, I’ll take a garbage bag. Toss me out so I can have a fighting chance of rest and relaxation. God, why is it my lot in life to always be worn? First there was the man who came inside me, then the splitting cells wearing me like a coat. I’m not worthy of organ donation beyond the umbilical cord. I’m thoroughly damaged, inside and out, but if my baby doesn’t survive, it can still be harvested like a pig. It can be thrown on ice and rushed to the nearest transplant unit. Unfortunately for me, my ovaries have already been flattened with a rolling pin to get all my eggs out. Egg donation is big money; it’s at the top of the fertilization heap. Do I get any credit for what I gave up? Whether I gave birth willingly or not, no one offers me a pat on the back. Instead, everyone bites the insides of their cheeks to keep straight faces while proclaiming I’m such a good mother. Let’s be honest—good mothers? There’s no such thing.
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Despite my rotting, I’m used as a milk bag. My afterlife is dairy production. I am attached to a rusted pump and drained. No one shuts off the milk tap even when the milk thickens and curdles. My milk is dumped into gallon jugs and plastic bottles. This hospital bed is my casket cum dairy farm. That fleshy lump existing tremulously between fetus and baby lies in its incubator. It’s congealed from head to toe, wrapped in wires. It can’t suck hard enough to take my milk directly so it’s fed via syringe like a baby bird. What I would give to vomit. So long as my milk flows, the spawn may eat. So long as my pussy is intact, I’m still a woman. The doctors bring scissors and buckets. They trim away any decay spreading across my breasts and pubis; nothing is allowed to get in the way of my milk and cunt. My back adheres to the mattress; no one rotates me regularly because nerve damage isn’t a thing and who’s ever heard of bedsores? The doctors clip my nipples off to enlarge the spout. My milk bursts, then slows. The doctors get forceps into my breasts, press on the meat until the sinus tracks give way to lactation. It’s like draining an abscess except where’s the pus, where’s the blood? The doctors just need to tap the right line to access the putrescence. That thing in the bassinet—I don’t want to think of it as a baby—writhes and coos. It wants its mother. It’s cold, and wants back inside my uterus. Sorry, kiddo. All that laboring tore my uterine walls so now there’s a permanent draft.
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Lucky me! I have visitors. Priests clutch their bible passages and communion wafers. They’re not here to administer Last Rites; now that the baby is out of me, I’m just an everyday whore and achieving salvation is a no-no. The priests want to shame me a little. Between sermons and confessions, they need to get their kicks somehow. I can’t go anywhere or talk back, so I’m ideal entertainment. Yes, let’s all look at the rotten mother. She’s failing at breast-feeding. She can’t give her child a sibling. She hasn’t even given the baby a proper name. What about me? Do you know my name, holy men? Do you know my age? Isn’t it convenient that once the baby’s out, I go back to not mattering? No one gave a shit that I was used as a broodmare for 9 months. The only concern was that I didn’t have a late-term abortion. Like I had a vacuum or a hanger, an outrageous supply of misoprostol. Yes, abortion was the issue, while I was pretty much dead being force-fed prenatal vitamins. The way the baby looks in the incubator, abortion would have been a mercy, but from where the priests stand, the baby looks just baby enough. It could drop dead right there and the priests would call it an act of God. God giveth and God taketh away. God lets a woman drop dead while pregnant, then inspires the doctors to immediately hook her up to life support. Lo! From my dead womb, a child! An underdeveloped, severely handicapped child, but a child nonetheless. It’s a miracle! Yeah, some miracle. The miracle of not getting a say. The miracle of no one asking if I wanted this.
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I want to know how a baby can be alive after spending nine months in a sunken uterus? If a baby is left inside a dead woman and she rots around it, isn’t the baby technically buried alive? And how can it be born without any labor? I never felt contractions, my water never broke. The doctors broke open my pelvis like they snapped spare ribs. If I had been able to say no, would anyone have listened? I already know the answer. No is never an option, not for a woman. And a dead woman? We’re even more silent. A man wouldn’t have this problem. He wouldn’t be kept on life support until every last drop of his cum drained from his balls. He wouldn’t be left rotting without company, waiting for some kind of funeral. He wouldn’t have to wait for anything. As soon as he said he was uncomfortable, they would have propped him up with extra pillows, given him a foot rub, gone to the store for his favorite beer, put him on a morphine drip because how dare a man feel any pain? But I can choke on the feeding tube and there’s no sympathy—after all, haven’t I sucked enough cock in my life to deliver myself from a gag reflex?
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A woman is a corpse is a woman. In death, a woman can still gestate, be fucked. I can have my broken body wrapped in wet plaster-coated rags, then baked until hard, and a man will still force himself inside me. I’m not allowed to be empty and I have no rights. I have a hole and so I must be kept filled. This is decided by everyone who isn’t me. This is decided by doctors and sanctimonious pilgrims and senators and the president. It’s decided by someone who deceptively slipped a ring on my finger. It’s decided by someone who spurted inside my mother to create me. I can declare a DNR or DNI, have it notarized, given to my lawyer, and somehow, most conveniently, all the copies will be shredded. Attached to pumps and electrodes, given intravenous protein and vitamin supplements, I’m kept on the cusp of death until the butcher makes time to take care of my body. There’s no quick lethal injection. There’s no kneeling at the guillotine. Instead, it’s a slow skinning. It’s torture for all the times I turned down an offer of dinner or a drink or a nightcap. It’s punishment for not responding to catcalls or pick-up lines. It’s my comeuppance for being a prude. It’s retribution for not smiling when someone said, You’d look so much prettier if you smiled.
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If I choose myself above all else, then it will always be considered selfishness instead of self-preservation. How can I save myself when I’m bound by restriction and not given room to turn. A woman can have dinner ready at 6 o’clock every night and deliver vaginally without painkillers and always be ready for sex and never leave bloodstains on the bed and always smell sweetly of perfume and never wear sweatpants and always have on tiny underwear and take out her own garbage and plunge her own sink and scrub the toilet and make the perfect martini and raise well-behaved children and never boast about her intelligence and always have a kind word and have a fat-free body and even after all that, she’ll still end up burning at the stake. The moral of the story? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. A broken nail might be all it takes for the illusion of womanly perfection to be shattered. God forbid a woman have a headache when her partner is in the mood. How dare she eat a second slice of chocolate cake when she was on the carrot and celery sticks diet all week?
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This all comes down to martyrdom. A woman can be perfectly perfect and still be killed for it and someone will say, Oh how perfectly perfect she was, It’s so terrible that she died. Someone else will say, Yes, it’s very sad that someone thought she wasn’t perfect enough. Someone else will say, If only someone had tried to save her. Then someone else will respond, then someone else, and someone else after that, and soon, the story will be, There once was a perfectly perfect woman we should all aspire to be like, and oh yeah, she died. But no, she didn’t just die. She was assassinated. She was exterminated. She didn’t go to bed one night and not wake up in the morning. She didn’t fade away from old age. She didn’t catch a cold that became pneumonia that became tuberculosis that finally killed her. No, she was burned at the stake or hanged from a tree or given the brazen bull or suffered some other equally hideous method of death, so let’s all be just like her and not give a second thought to the assholes who signed her death warrant.
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I don’t want to be a martyr. Don’t look at me as the figurehead for the pregnant woman’s cause. I’m not an example for others. I’m not perfectly perfect and I don’t want to be. I want to scream. Doctors, save me! Save ME! You’re breaking your oath by ignoring me. You’re doing harm by concentrating on the pregnancy and not the whole person. Pretend I’ve had a hysterectomy. There’s nothing so important inside me that I can’t just die. But it’s too late now. That thing was lifted out of me and tucked into the incubator to propagate. I’m lying here with a gaping hole between my legs and those condescending fucks are toasting to themselves with crystal glasses of red wine. We are amazing, they say. We’ve defied nature, they say. Toast, toast, toast. Forget that I’m right here, bleeding out on the bed. Forget that it’s my milk you’re feeding that thing. You delivered a baby that probably won’t survive. Congratulations. Now all my torture is worth it. The baby won’t remember me. The doctors won’t remember me. The news won’t remember me. I’m just a dead woman. There have been billions of dead women before me. There will be billions of dead woman after me. Somehow, I scratch at the bedsheet. I scratch and scrape with my overgrown fingernails until the cheap threads thin and tear. With tiny rips, I write my name. There I am. Finally. I’m immortalized now, I’m remembered!
Alana I. Capria is the author of the novella Mother Walked into the Lake and the story collection Wrapped in Red. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and resides in northern New Jersey with her rabbit.
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Heavy Feather Review 