There’s a dull pain in my stomach. I sit in the waiting room of an abortion clinic, chewing my fingernails to bloody stubs. My mother is to my right. We're not talking. It’s not because I went to a party under the influence of a bottle of Robitussin, and was then raped by Garrett, the drunken big-gummed vice president of the Cribbage Club at my high school and now I have to have an abortion. It’s because she has heartburn from her hazelnut iced coffee, and I feel anxious and uncomfortably pregnant. Up until this moment the fetus has been a mere tumor, the cause of my dry heaves in the morning and relentless constipation, but now I can’t help thinking of it as some sort of little version of me, trapped inside of my womb, happy and completely oblivious to its miserable future, which I imagine involves burning in an incinerator, or perhaps being eaten by stray dogs out of a trash can.
However, I argue, if this fetus is some sort of “little me,” I am indisputably saving it from years of pain. I imagine it, like me, eleven years-old, rummaging through the pantry for a bottle of sleeping pills after a hard day at school. Danny Bouyea does not like-like me back, and I’m crushed. Worse than being crushed, I am embarrassed. My face is red, and his friends heard my confession. They all tee-hee at me, and I decide that I will show them all! Really, I will. They’ll sure feel guilty when they hear from our teacher that I’m dead the next day. This will be the first time the fetus will try to take its own life, and it will not be the last.
This place looks just like any other doctor’s office. Earlier, I had envisioned a kind of seedy, dingy shithole with rickety chairs occupied by the utter filth of humanity—ratty-haired girls with smudged lipstick, regulars of the clinic I’d guess, sitting here and waiting to get the embryos vacuumed out of their ragged wombs so they can go back out and fuck their boyfriends again, end up here--their whole lives a cycle of in-penis-out-fetus, and though I am certainly pro-choice and consider myself, you know, one of those raging lefty liberals, there is something about this vision that leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth.
It’s not dingy in here at all. On the contrary, it’s bright as all hell. The lights are intense and unforgiving; there are a shit-ton of accent lamps on the tables in between the green pleather chairs (the ones that fart when you move), ghastly fluorescents overhead, and standing lamps by the doors. I look around for a magazine, but for some terrible reason, the only thing within reach is an old issue of American Baby.
“Isobel?”
I start panicking when the nurse leads me away. Oh, Jesus. Jesus Christ, God Almighty. I envision a slew of horrors. I see the huge vacuum hose being shoved up inside of my body. I see the doctor, all yellow-eyed and hungover, accidentally hitting some red button somewhere that says MAXIMUM SPEED!!! and the vacuum going mechanical apeshit, sucking out all my bones and organs, leaving me in a puddle of my own membranes, like rolled-out Playdoh, a fleshy mess of frowning skin.
I am okay.
I start panicking when the nurse leads me away. Oh, Jesus. Jesus Christ, God Almighty. I envision a slew of horrors. I see the huge vacuum hose being shoved up inside of my body. I see the doctor, all yellow-eyed and hungover, accidentally hitting some red button somewhere that says MAXIMUM SPEED!!! and the vacuum going mechanical apeshit, sucking out all my bones and organs, leaving me in a puddle of my own membranes, like rolled-out Playdoh, a fleshy mess of frowning skin.
I am okay.
I am okay.
I am okay.
I am not okay. I’m trembling!-- enveloped in a womb of terror until everything is black and quiet and I feel nothing at all.
When I wake up, my mouth is dry and tastes like corpse. It feels as if my body’s full of a substance that wasn’t there before. Congested. Full. Bloated. Ugh. My vision’s blurred and the only thing I can see is a big ass to my left, bent over and filling out paper forms at a desk near the bed I'm on. The nurse, I guess. Her hair's all askew and her ass is cartoonishly bulbous. Each cheek could be a pregnant belly. Amazing. The fat-ass nurse pays no attention until I try to sit up, but jerk back down because of the pain.
I groan, “Fucking Jesus,” and Fat-Ass is startled. She tells me that I came to earlier than expected. She shakes her fat ass out of the room, maybe to get the doctor. She doesn't tell me anything. It's fine, really; it's not like I just had a living thing sucked out of my nether regions or anything. I roll my eyes and notice that on the nearby table there’s a yellow biohazard bag with what I imagine to be the dead Fetus curled inside. My eyes are fixed on it. I have an overwhelming, uncontrollable desire to see it. I must. Yes, yes. I don’t even think about it, in a second, I’m sliding off the bed and I’m on my feet, tip-toeing over to the table to take a tiny peek inside. The Fetus looks weird as hell. It reminds me of a shrimp covered in cocktail sauce. But it’s kind of cute.
I groan, “Fucking Jesus,” and Fat-Ass is startled. She tells me that I came to earlier than expected. She shakes her fat ass out of the room, maybe to get the doctor. She doesn't tell me anything. It's fine, really; it's not like I just had a living thing sucked out of my nether regions or anything. I roll my eyes and notice that on the nearby table there’s a yellow biohazard bag with what I imagine to be the dead Fetus curled inside. My eyes are fixed on it. I have an overwhelming, uncontrollable desire to see it. I must. Yes, yes. I don’t even think about it, in a second, I’m sliding off the bed and I’m on my feet, tip-toeing over to the table to take a tiny peek inside. The Fetus looks weird as hell. It reminds me of a shrimp covered in cocktail sauce. But it’s kind of cute.
I do not want this Fetus to be burned or eaten by dogs. It looks so sad and adorable, and I’m filled with a feeling that is foreign to me. It’s overwhelming--like a little storm raging in my head and my stomach gets tighter and tighter and I feel dizzy and it’s hard to breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. I start to cry and I want nothing more in the universe than to have this Fetus. I want to keep it. It’s mine, isn’t it? I think that I would be a much better mother to a Fetus than an actual human being that would grow up bitter and hate me, hate the world, hate herself. She’d have 'the Depression', like me, and probably end up killing herself.
I wrap the Fetus up in its bag and gently place it in my purse, which is slung over the chair beside the bed I’d been sleeping on. I feel nervous that the nurse will question me about the missing Fetus, but Fat-Ass never returns. Instead a man in a white coat opens the door holding a file folder and closes it when he sees me standing up. His face has been taken over by a large jolly mustache. The Mustache says, “Whoa there!” and pats the air down with his hands, telling me to sit down. So I sit on the bed and I pretend to listen, nodding a few times, while he talks to me like I’m a child—softly and slowly, sure to give every multi-syllable word a thorough pronouncing. He’s got one of those assuring voices they use in commercials for anti-depressants.
“Now, ah, we’ll want to see you again in a week,” he says, with a furry smile, “so that we can make sure you’re, ah, doing well…” he smiles again. His eyes get all squinty when he smiles.
“We’ll, ah, want to know if you’re experiencing any, ah, pain.” Smile.
“But it shouldn’t be anything worse than, ah, an uncomfortable menstruation.” Smile.
The Mustache blabs on and on and I start daydreaming about the Fetus. When I leave the room and walk down the hallway, she’s still in my purse, sleeping her soft dead sleep. I open the waiting room door to my smiling mother, who gives me an enthusiastic thumbs-up with both hands.
At home, my mother barrels into the apartment ahead of me and retreats into her room to burn incense and ponder the meaning of life. I decide to store the Fetus in the freezer temporarily until I can come up with a suitable place for her. When I try to accomplish this discreetly, creeping into the kitchen from the doorway, I’m confronted by my little brother, Adam, and this is how he learns what a Fetus is:
“I will kill you, Dragon Eater!”
He stops then and looks inquisitively at the yellow biohazard bag in my hands.
“What’s that?” he says, a little face under a bush of brown curls.
“It is a bag,” I tell him.
“What’s in it?” he asks.
“A fetus.”
“What’s a fetus?”
“A fetus is like a baby, but it’s not.”
“Like a baby?”
“Well, hmm,” I pause a moment, “Let me show you.”
I walk with the little guy back to the Playskool canvas in the middle of his bedroom clutter, and unfold a new piece of paper. With a pencil, I draw a fetus, but it looks more like some sort of merry bulbous worm. Instead of feet it’s got more of a tail that curls up into its body, like this:
“What’s that?” he says, a little face under a bush of brown curls.
“It is a bag,” I tell him.
“What’s in it?” he asks.
“A fetus.”
“What’s a fetus?”
“A fetus is like a baby, but it’s not.”
“Like a baby?”
“Well, hmm,” I pause a moment, “Let me show you.”
I walk with the little guy back to the Playskool canvas in the middle of his bedroom clutter, and unfold a new piece of paper. With a pencil, I draw a fetus, but it looks more like some sort of merry bulbous worm. Instead of feet it’s got more of a tail that curls up into its body, like this:
“This is a fetus?” he giggles.
“Yes.” I tell him.
I leave him looking quizzically at the fetus drawing, and I go to the kitchen and peek in the direction of my mother’s room; inside, she’s sprawled out on the bed, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. I open the freezer and place the biohazard bag inside a frosted box of two year-old old chicken fingers.
I think about the Fetus incessantly over the next few weeks. I’ve been drawing little cartoon fetuses all over my notebooks and financial aid applications for college. The Fetus chills in the freezer all this time. I’m terrified of putting her in a jar with liquid because I imagine that in a month, or maybe even a few weeks, she’ll deteriorate into the liquid and I’ll have a horrifying jar of Fetus Soup on my hands. This cripples me with fear, so I decide to tell my mother about this and ask her what I should do.
It’s three o’clock in the afternoon when I hold this conversation. Adam has just bounced off the elementary school bus without his backpack because he’s lost it again. My sister, Tonya, sits in front of her Myspace page, scrolling through pictures of herself and holding an empty Cool Whip container filled with a meat and cheese concoction. My mother sits cross-legged at the window-bench in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke spirals out the window while watching the neighbors argue in the driveway below.
“Darlene’s hooking,” she says apprehensively. “I know it.”
I tell her this is ridiculous.
“I’ve seen her standing on the street in the early mornings,” she replies, blowing a smoke ring.
I roll my eyes and sit at the kitchen table. “She’s like three hundred pounds, c’mon.”
Below, Darlene’s wiggling her bulbous arm, telling her ex-boyfriend to talk to The Hand.
“So what? Men are pigs,” says my mother. I just shrug.
We sit in silence for a few moments until I cough and tell her I’ve, um, kept the aborted Fetus. Her eyes bulge in surprise and she turns to me slowly, dropping the cigarette into her ashtray. She asks me if I’m kidding. I tell her I’m not.
It’s three o’clock in the afternoon when I hold this conversation. Adam has just bounced off the elementary school bus without his backpack because he’s lost it again. My sister, Tonya, sits in front of her Myspace page, scrolling through pictures of herself and holding an empty Cool Whip container filled with a meat and cheese concoction. My mother sits cross-legged at the window-bench in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke spirals out the window while watching the neighbors argue in the driveway below.
“Darlene’s hooking,” she says apprehensively. “I know it.”
I tell her this is ridiculous.
“I’ve seen her standing on the street in the early mornings,” she replies, blowing a smoke ring.
I roll my eyes and sit at the kitchen table. “She’s like three hundred pounds, c’mon.”
Below, Darlene’s wiggling her bulbous arm, telling her ex-boyfriend to talk to The Hand.
“So what? Men are pigs,” says my mother. I just shrug.
We sit in silence for a few moments until I cough and tell her I’ve, um, kept the aborted Fetus. Her eyes bulge in surprise and she turns to me slowly, dropping the cigarette into her ashtray. She asks me if I’m kidding. I tell her I’m not.
“Well, my God! Where the Hell is it?”
I look at the freezer and point.
“Oh Jesus Christ, Isobel, in the freezer? With the food?” she says, crinkling her nose and grabbing her cigarette with her fingers, tapping the ash.
I wasn’t sure what to do with it, I tell her, I wanted to preserve it but I didn’t know how.
She thinks for a moment and eyes me suspiciously. “Why did you keep it?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” I say. She waits for me to go on.
I look at the freezer and point.
“Oh Jesus Christ, Isobel, in the freezer? With the food?” she says, crinkling her nose and grabbing her cigarette with her fingers, tapping the ash.
I wasn’t sure what to do with it, I tell her, I wanted to preserve it but I didn’t know how.
She thinks for a moment and eyes me suspiciously. “Why did you keep it?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” I say. She waits for me to go on.
I tell her that in the moment, I couldn’t not take it! Something made me. I had no control. I felt guilty and I just walked over to it and took it. It was almost unconscious.
She seems to accept this and rolls her eyes. Tonya comes thumping into the kitchen with her empty Cool Whip bowl, triumphant. My mother says to her, all wide-eyed and excited, “Your sister kept the aborted fetus, it’s in the freezer!”
Tonya looks at me in disgust.
“That’s grody, dude.”
“I don’t care what you think,” I scowl at her, “I’m keeping it.”
This is hilarious to my mother. She’s in hysterics, giggling wildly. My cheeks redden and I regret telling her. I’m silent until my mother settles down and continues puffing her cigarette deeply. Tonya leaves and gives us the look that means she’s busy increasing the brightness and contrast on her Myspace pictures, and she’d better not be disturbed. She slams the door behind her. My mother and I look at each other in silence.
“That’s grody, dude.”
“I don’t care what you think,” I scowl at her, “I’m keeping it.”
This is hilarious to my mother. She’s in hysterics, giggling wildly. My cheeks redden and I regret telling her. I’m silent until my mother settles down and continues puffing her cigarette deeply. Tonya leaves and gives us the look that means she’s busy increasing the brightness and contrast on her Myspace pictures, and she’d better not be disturbed. She slams the door behind her. My mother and I look at each other in silence.
Her head perks up.
“Shellac!”
*
I have serious doubts about the shellac, but after a few days I buy it anyway. Soon my mother and I are sitting at the kitchen table with cigarettes in our mouths, concentrating on painting the little Fetus with shellac, using Adam’s rainbow paintbrushes. I’m careful to bring the Fetus into my bedroom and onto my dresser, but after a week’s observance, I notice that the shellac seems to be making things worse. She’s starting to raisin and I fear that she might waste away. She’s just going to have to be submerged in liquid, like in science-fiction movies, and it’s not until a late afternoon in the living room that I have the answer. I’m sitting on top of a few empty TV dinner boxes and reading a book about fetal care when Tonya turns around from the computer and clears her throat at me.
“I was thinking about that thing on your dresser,” she says.
“The Fetus?” I look up.
“Yeah,” she rolls her eyes, “It’s technically a dead person, right?”
“Well, I wouldn’t really call it a person, really, more of an embryo—an almost-person,” I explain.
“Yeah okay. Well, what if you put it in that stuff that morticians pump into dead people?”
“Hmm,” I close my book, “You mean formaldehyde?”
“Yeah, I guess,” she shrugs and turns around back to her web page of self-portraits.
How stupid of me. I hadn’t thought of formaldehyde. It’s perfect!
Tonya and I sit side-by-side at the computer browsing Ebay for formaldehyde. After duking it out with chemqueen69 and winning at a bid of sixty dollars for a gallon of formaldehyde, I keep the Fetus in the freezer for the two weeks until it arrives in the mail, along with an acceptance letter to a liberal arts college. I’m glowing.
I find a jar of pickles on the refrigerator door. It’s so moldy that the pickles have congealed to a lumpy green jelly. I wash it out, and this is now the Fetus’s home. She floats around in the jar happily and I think that, for a moment, I detect a smile on her little underdeveloped lips.
*
College is near. My room has become the world’s smallest warehouse, with boxes piled so high I can’t even reach them anymore. I want to bring everything to New York, leave nothing behind. Besides, Tonya’s already laid her claim to my bedroom and casually informed me that everything must go, and what is left behind will find its way to the curb. I’m careful to roll up my fetus watercolors very gently, tuck the stuffed fetus I’ve sewn into a bag of its own, and leave just enough room in the car for my senior year art project, a five-foot fetus made of crinkled papers, paint, and duct tape, nailed to a seven-foot cross I made in Shop class.
My mother is unhappy about driving me to college. I know this because, with her coffee in the morning, she takes two Xanax and the ashtray is already full of squished cigarette butts. She also asks me several times if there are any other modes of transportation I can take to get to central New York. I remind her each time, no. There are not.
In the car she smokes, listens to Christian talk radio, and cackles.
“These people!” she exclaims, her cigarette bobbing up and down, “They’re crazy!”
The drive is nine hours too long for just the two of us. When we arrive at Ithaca College, my mother drops me off with my boxes and gives me the peace sign as she drives away, back home to Maine.
*
My roommate hates me. Her name is Tiffany and she likes Dave Matthews Band and I don’t. I reside on the left side of the room. Every millimeter of the wall is covered in fetusy artwork. The five-foot fetus nailed to the seven-foot cross hangs over my bed like a shrine. The Fetus jar sits on my nightstand, next to my reading glasses. On her side of the wall there is a poster of the holy Dave Matthews and a picture of her white-bread mom and dad at her high school graduation. I offer to help decorate her side of the room and she scoffs at me and declines. The next day I’m locked out of the room so I have to ask Residential Life to let me in, and when they break the lock open, Tiffany is Skyping with her boyfriend a couple feet from the door. She says she’s sorry, she didn’t hear me knocking.
We will probably not be friends, I gather. She blow-dries her hair in the early mornings when I’m sleeping, so I make sure that the Fetus is, at all times, facing Tiffany. She tells me it’s disgusting and I’m perverse.
I tell her that I’m bored with the concept of her.
When Tiffany is not around, I paint watercolors of her being killed in ways that amuse me. Tiffany is attacked by a ravenous bear on the campus quad. Tiffany is rolled into a blunt and smoked by Snoop Dogg and his homies. Tiffany is crushed under a steamroller driven by the Fetus. I enjoy painting very much. It gives me inspiration. I like it particularly because I’ve started to fall into the Depression, and I have made only one friend in college. Her name is Courtney Keach and she’s an art major who has a single dorm room covered in ashes and empty beer cans. I don’t often visit her room because it smells like death. This is because she paints portraits of women using her own blood and feces.
“I find this very strange,” I tell her as she smears blood over a painted-woman’s exposed nipple.
“Yeah, well, you’re not the poster girl for normalcy yourself there, Fetus,” she says with a Camel between her yellowing teeth, “Besides, that’s all life is—shit and blood!”
I like Courtney because she tells me that she just can’t be bothered with the rest of the dullards on campus, and I’ve been feeling more and more disconnected, myself. I’ve taken up chain-smoking Marlboros between classes. Courtney and I will sit on the roof of the art building and shit-talk about the campus bros and biddies. We moon the football players. On the weekends, we drink red wine from the discount liquor store because we’re classy. After a bottle, we’ll sometimes prank-call our relatives back home. We call Tonya.
“Hullo?” Click, click, click, in the background. I can tell she’s at the computer looking at pictures of herself.
“Cunt-bucket!” screams Courtney into the phone. She laughs. Then we hang up and call back. Sometimes we get my mother.
Ring, ring, ring.
“Yes?”
“Jiggly tits!”
“Ah yes, the wonders of the bosom,” says my mother in a stoned whisper, “Caller, please tell me, have you ever considered the amalgamation of the sexes? A super-sex, if you will, with bosoms and a penis, and all that—a race of hermaphrodites. I do think that it will be only then when we will achieve true liberation from sexual oppression…”
We hang up before she finishes and laugh until our stomachs ache.
*
Lately I feel sad all the time. It's halfway through the first semester and I've acquired a job at the campus Information Desk, but I am a bad employee because sometimes people will ask me simple questions on the phone that I should be able to answer, but instead I’ll start crying and ask them questions of my own.
“Have you ever considered that our lives have a negative value? Do you think that we, as human beings, are weak creatures, operating under will, which inevitably entails misery?”
No one ever has any answers for me.
I’ve also developed a taste for strange foods and I’ve stopped eating at the dining halls completely. Sandwiches and diet sodas and mashed potatoes are bullshit, I decide; instead I find myself sampling my watercolor palette and eating Tiffany’s mail by ripping the letters first into pieces and having them with milk, like cereal. I know this isn’t particularly normal, but I’m compelled to do this. When I eat dining hall food I feel like a dullard. Tiffany finally catches me eating a postcard from her grandmother. The Greetings of Greetings from Florida! sticks out of my mouth. She rats on me to the director of Residential Life, who refers me to the counseling center.
“Pick any seat you’d like,” the counselor tells me.
Her name is Susie and her office is very zen. On the small table next to the cushy armchairs there is one of those little trickle fountains and a box of tissues. I want to eat one but I think better of it. She gives me a paper assessment and the questions are hilarious.
6. Have you ever thought about ending your life?: Fuck yes!
7. Have you ever attempted suicide?: What do YOU think?
She asks me to talk about my childhood, so I do. I tell her about the sad-sack stuff, you know, blah blah blah--my parents getting divorced, the near-abortion of Adam, being an obese child, getting picked on, being sad all the time, and all that. I tell her about Garrett, The Big-Gummed Rapist, and the abortion. Yadda, yadda. She's consistently zen until I talk about the Fetus in a jar. Then she stirs uncomfortably, and I start to feel anxious. Oh God, oh God, oh God. The sweats and the shakes and the shudders. I tell her I don’t know what’s wrong with me. My head's in my hands and I try not to cry, but I do. She tells me that I have the Depression and I have to find healthier ways to cope with my stress. In addition, she says, I can join a support group for my Depression that is free, courtesy of the college.
Oh, fun.
*
This is what I do: I stop going to classes and I move to a single room not far from Courtney’s in the Towers residence hall, because Tiffany says she’s had enough of my psycho-bitch bullshit. My room is high up, on the eighth floor. In the mornings I roll joints and imagine tearing out the screen and falling until I hug the pavement with my body. There's nothing more motivating than the image of a brainy soup splatter and a pile of broken bones. There must be at least four floors to guarantee death. I hope I’d land on my head and die instantly, but I have terrible luck, and I fear that I’d just end up brain-dead or paralyzed. I imagine the rest of my life wearing a frilly bib to catch my drooping spittle, wheeled around a facility by the bitter working class who dread going to work and changing my shitty diaper. I do not want this.
The support group is a circle of six sour faces, all waiting for their turn to complain. I despise all of them except for a writing major who oddly resembles Charles Bukowski, terrible face and all. His real name is Frank and he’s there because he has a mean father who did mean things to him when he was a child. He rolls his ugly eyes when the whiny blonde talks about her break-ups. I find this attractive. After the first session, we end up fucking in his dorm room. Aside from the rape in high school, this is my first sexual encounter. I try to like it, but I don’t. He fucks the way he looks like he’d fuck: hard, fast, and without mercy or consideration. Later, I scan his bookshelf to discover that he’s not into Bukowski or Ginsberg or any poet at all, really. He reads Dan Brown and Stephen King. I feel cheated. I sulk out of his room, sore and considerably more Depressed.
After a few months of the routine class-therapy-work-studying, I stop drinking paint water but it's still hard to get out of bed. I have fetal nightmares, where the jar on my nightstand breaks and the Fetus is RIPSHIT, wiggling her way up to my bed and eating my brains while I'm nestled in a stoned oblivion. Sometimes I call my house to hear my little brother’s voice and then I hang up. At night I sit on the grassy quad with Courtney, and we talk about the nature of death.
“It can’t be any worse than this shit-hole!” she spits.
I ask her, “What if it is worse?”
She considers this.
“Nah.”
During winter recess, I take a 14-hour long Greyhound ride, back to my family. My bedroom has, as promised, become Tonya’s room and all of my remaining artwork has vanished. We roll joints on her high school history book and play Uno. Since I left, my brother’s been inspired by my fetus drawing and has taken to drawing fetuses of his own. He draws them on the wall of the Storage Room and paints them green. When I ask him why the fetuses are green, he says it’s because they’re moldy--duh! He’s hung my original in a frame over his bed.
I sleep on the couch because Tonya’s taken the mattresses from her old room and consolidated with my mattresses. Now she has a giant bed, and I have none. But it’s okay. I only feel annoyed when, in the middle of the night, I slip my hand under the pillow and my fingers smear some sort of pasty surprise. When I turn the light on, I see that it's an old dinner plate caked with rotting spaghetti. The Fetus in a jar sleeps on the floor next to the couch where I reside until my mother sees it and sneers.
“Good God, you still have that awful thing?”
I frown at her, hugging the jar close. I keep it hidden for the rest of the break, and when I return to school, the Fetus has her eyes open. They’re milky-looking and underdeveloped. They’re kind of spooky, really. I show Courtney and she’s impressed.
“Holy Hell!” she says.
“I know.”
“What the crap! It didn’t have its eyes open before?”
“No, it didn’t,” I reply.
We look at the Fetus for the rest of the night while drinking forties, musing about the formation of its eyes. We draw no conclusions that coexist with reality as we understand it, so I go to sleep feeling uneasy for the next few nights. It only gets worse when the Fetus starts talking to me.
“You look better without all that eyeliner,” she tells me in the morning, and I drop the black pencil on my dresser, feeling self-conscious. I’m suspicious about this. I invite Courtney to my room because I want to determine if she can hear the Fetus as well, but she doesn’t. It’s just me.
I contemplate telling Susie about this new development, but I think better of it because so far the Fetus hasn’t really said anything terribly disturbing. On the contrary, really, she's been sort of complimenting me and reassuring me. I enjoy our conversations. When I call my mother and she’s stoned off her ass, I want to throw my cell phone against the wall and break it into a thousand teeny tiny pieces, then jump out of my window or hang myself by my own intestines, but the Fetus blinks her milky eyes and sighs softly.
“Don’t worry,” she says, in a voice like my own, “There is nothing you can do to change her behavior. You can only focus on your own. Make yourself happy, Isobel. Watch a movie. Go for a walk. Remember that I love you very much.”
“You’re right,” I nod, and then I watch Look Who’s Talking.
This is another thing that’s interesting about our exchanges: the Fetus tells me that she loves me quite regularly. Sometimes this makes me feel uncomfortable. Should I say that I love her back? Do I love her? We’ve spent quite a bit of time together. It could only be natural to develop a bond stronger than owner-object. Have I grown an affection for the Fetus that I’ve been unaware of until confronted with its own feelings for me?
“I love you too, Fetus,” I say finally, and the Fetus blinks her eyes and smiles.
*
The school year’s almost over. I’ve been having these little moments where I feel like I’m frozen in time. It happens in class often. I’ll be drawing fetuses in my notebook and suddenly I’ll be in the midst of a panic. When I look up, no one is talking and I’m flooded with racing thoughts. I’ve wasted so much time here. I’ve screwed everything up. I’m a fuck-up. A loser. An asshole. No one will ever love me. I’m ugly. I’m pathetic. I’m stupid. Socially-inept. Morally-corrupt. What have I been doing all this time? This whole year’s gone by, and what’ve I accomplished? Nothing. Zero. I’m worthless. Utterly, completely, entirely worthless. I’m a bad person. A bad, bad person, and I deserve to die.
I’ll try to take deep breaths to keep from crying hysterically in public, and then time resumes as if nothing has happened, and I’m left feeling as if a storm has just ripped through the room and I’m the only one who’s been caught inside. I’m on edge all the time. I’m apprehensive and I’ve begun to truly start hating my peers. They’re dullards—all of ‘em! I can’t relate to them and they sure as hell can’t relate to me. I wouldn’t even want them to; I have nothing to say to them. I even stop talking to Courtney. I stop seeing Susie because I’m suspicious of her motives, certain that her bias, whatever it may be, pollutes her counseling and further undermines my well-being. The only being who can make me feel anything at all lately is the Fetus, who has started sprouting hair and is growing significantly larger. Her body's all mushed inside and her head’s poking out. Sometimes she turns her head so she can watch me if I’m not in her view. This would scare me, normally, but I’m preoccupied with my mind-storms and the little artistic projects I’ve been working on, like writing haiku on other people’s doors in my own blood, which I’ve been collecting in a small jar by cutting my wrists open and letting it drip slowly. It’s a tedious process and consumes most of my time.
I’ve stopped sleeping. Instead, I stay up and have slumber parties with the Fetus. She watches me paint my chewed-up fingernails. I throw popcorn at her when she makes a corny joke. We talk about things I’m too embarrassed to talk about with other people, and the little Fetus is always kind and honest. I ask her what it’s like to die, and she tells me that it’s sad and scary, but it’s okay, because it’s the last time I’ll ever be sad or scared again.
*
I look like a corpse now. I walk around campus like the living dead. My eyes are black and crawling back into my head. My hands are grey and tired. My limbs seem withered. I start wondering if I really am dead, so I cut myself deeper and in more places just to make sure. I use the extra blood I’m producing to write longer poems on the walls.
“Your poetry is wonderful,” the Fetus tells me, “but I do wish you wouldn’t hurt yourself like that.”
“I’m creating art,” I grumble. I can’t be bothered.
“You should really go back to your counselor,” she says sadly, “I think you might be in danger.”
“I’m not in danger, Fetus,” I say with a paintbrush in between my teeth.
“How can you be certain?” she peeks her head out of the jar.
“Because. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I face her.
“It would appear to me, Isobel,” she lifts herself out of the jar and sits on the night stand, “that you may not know what you are talking about anymore.”
I consider this.
My hands are covered in blood and I feel suddenly overwhelmed with confusion. The Fetus and I look more and more alike than I’ve ever noticed. I stop what I’m doing and look into her sad little eyes with my own sad little eyes.
“Do you think I’ve gone crazy?” I ask.
The Fetus says nothing. I start to cry.
“I’m sorry,” she offers, and touches my hair with her tiny hand.
“I’m sorry, too,” I shake, “What should I do?”
The Fetus wobbles when she tries to stand, and when she does, she pushes the jar of formaldehyde towards me and jumps onto the carpet by my feet.
I take the jar in my hands and I look at the teary-eyed Fetus.
“You will have to drink it very fast, because your body will reject it,” she says between sniffles, “I am terribly sorry it had to be this way, but I don’t want you to feel pain anymore.”
Those watery eyes get round and her body expands before me. The baby hairs on the top of her head grow long and brown like my own, her belly stretches out, and the little nubs on her hands and feet develop into fingers and toes. She unbends her body and rises from the carpet, a little version of me, more and more identical by the second.
I try to think about my future but I can’t. There is nothing. It’s like trying to imagine a color you’ve never seen before. There is nothing ahead of me. No pages left.
“What’s going to happen?” I ask her.
“I will take good care of your life,” she says softly as I sit on the carpet and lift the jar, “I promise.”
I have been waiting for this for a long time, I suppose. I'm sad and scared. I curl into a fetal position next to the wall and watch the Fetus nod at me. I swallow and swallow and swallow and there's a sharp pain in my stomach, pregnant with poison. The Fetus asks me what I see, and I want to tell her, but I'm gasping and choking. The formaldehyde burns and burns and burns. I want to tell her that I see nothing. Nothing at all, while I waste away. But it's not true. The last thing I see is the smiling Fetus and I smile back.
I'll never feel sad or scared again.
I'll never feel sad or scared again.
COPYRIGHT 2010 CARRIE-LYNNE DAVIS
