28. THE CHILD
THE CHILD
The nightmares follow Isela. She’s taken without any means of escape.
A beam of light shines down and lifts her up into the purple sky.
She breaks the ceiling with her body. Fragments of wood pierce her skin and stick in her hair.
Blood spreads onto her pajamas and pools on the backside of the fabric, dribbling down, drop by drop.
She's suspended in the air with her spine toward the earth and above her, as she's floating and bleeding, she sees births. Babies being pulled and pushed from the womb and spilling into the stars. Then, the babies in their frenzied screams, start dropping onto the earth below. Wet plops and splats and bursts. Isela knows she’s next. There’s a tingling sensation in her fingers and the back of her neck.
She falls slowly at first, and then her body gains velocity.
It feels as though all of her bones break.
The throbbing pain starts at her toes and works its way through the rest of her body until she’s just a spasmed mess on concrete.
She falls into her old neighborhood. She sees old neighbors come out to look at the spectacle of her.
Their mouths, revolted caverns. Her sisters and her brother come to gawk at her.
They point. They whisper to each other. In embarrassment, she rolls over onto her belly and drags her body into the darkness at the end of the street.
She drags herself into The Inflorescence.
The placenta has returned. Surrounded by wild violets and soft shield ferns, the placenta purrs.
Isela gains strength, crawls over, and peers through the walls of the placenta.
Something is growing inside. Isela pierces through the placenta by digging into it with her hands.
She excavates an opening into the gelatinous orb until she’s in past her elbows and stops.
She holds her breath and squeezes herself into the slimy sac.
It gurgles and squelches as she’s squirming inside of it.
Isela feels for the growing creature and pulls at its hands as hard as she can.
Needing air, she slithers out of the placenta, which is now leaking red into the rest of the room, drowning the violets and ferns.
Isela plops back in and pulls out the creature by the shoulders.
A birthmark on the back of its neck and in its inner thigh matches Isela’s.
Isela shakes the creature, which is completely hairless and a slight shining green.
She swats its back as though she were burping it.
The creature coughs and opens its eyes under a thin opalescent membrane which Isela peels off.
Glints of gold flakes sit in the irises of the creature’s eyes.
The creature smacks its lips together in hunger.
Isela feeds it some of the placenta and some violets by hand, the creature suckling her fingers as it takes in the offerings.
Isela peers into the deflating placenta as a distorted wailing emerges from it.
A portal.
She witnesses her own birth.
She watches as her mother feeds her milk, as her mother smiles down and kisses her on the head.
Isela’s breasts prickle and begin to fill in, they harden and tingle at the tips of her nipples.
Milk spouts from each breast. She nudges the creature toward her chest and it latches.
Isela watches and her belly aches. Vomit billows in her mouth.
She can’t keep this creature. She never wanted any of this.
Who would want such a thing? She pulls the baby from her breast, covers its eyes and mouth with bloody ferns, and places it on the floor. The Inflorescence understands.
The next time Isela ends up in the room, nothing grows but a single sunflower in its center.