She shouldn’t have gotten back with her boyfriend, she knew that. Deep within. The sour marrow of her bones told her she did not like him at all. Didn’t like the bucks and chortles of his conversation. Didn’t get his sense of humour. He found intelligence funny. He liked a clever reference that alluded to the intricacies of his mind, maybe something to do with politics, most often an erudite pun. She liked videos of cats falling down. They had not learned how to bridge that gap. She faked orgasms with him, but she also faked laughter, and the latter was decidedly worse. If she didn’t cough up a giggle at a joke, awkward like an armful of dropped cans, he would conclude that she was young. That she was a few decades away from truly understanding him.
She hadn’t meant to take him in again – but who could deny the impulses that came at 3:43am on bitter-cold February nights. It was the witching hour, the world violent in its ice and stillness. It was either kiss him or google search how to tie a noose. Sitting on her bed, she considered knotting her urges and letting them dangle from the light fixture. Instead, she made herself sick in the toilet, then texted him to meet her in the park. Romance is the manic act that looks the least like self-harm. They got back together that night.
The worst thing was that he was intimidated by her, so young and with such deep-set green eyes. That was why they needed the Viagra: his wrinkled cock took one look at her and bowed its head, unworthy. He said it was because she was an unfathomably beautiful woman. She felt it was because she spooked him. A truth of the coldness within her, which seeped out and tainted the air. Her cracked boundaries leaking ice. The ice made it impossible to consider arousing an erection, because an erection is hard and hot. Was there a beauty in the power to enfeeble cocks? If there was, she didn’t know what to do with it.
The only part of herself she could accept as beautiful was her pubic hair, which for some reason had always grown in grey, despite the jet-black fact of her head. She could see its silver fur through the fleshy gauze of the teddy, a downy mound of a creature. It comforted her, until his cock began to rise. His crotch was dirty with hair.
Reflexively, she shuffled back on the bed, into an inexplicable lack of mattress. She fell down through the blankets, suddenly swallowed by the black folds of a tunnel she had not known was there. His room disappeared. It became a yellow dot of light above her. Soon she couldn’t even see that.
She didn’t scream, though the darkness was immediate, and her stomach dropped out as she hurtled down. Her fingers reached out to the walls as they went by and they felt like slimy velvet. She liked the texture and the fright of being unable to breathe, so she dug her fingers in, to slow her fall. The viscous substance collected on her fingertips, elliciting a schlucking sound - but not like the schlucking sound she was about to have to experience with her boyfriend. A schluck that is kind to the ear.
Slowly, she descended the tunnel, away from the buzzing lights of the world. It was like a deep well, except a well would be freezing - no it was warm in there. Like being inside an oesophagus, or some strange creature’s gut. The ugly teddy was shed from her body, pulled off by the bumps on the walls. She knew then it had actually happened.
The universe was granting her wish.
The tunnel dropped into a little cave like a stomach, as though she arrived to be digested. She landed painlessly, like a child dropped onto a mattress, and was immediately comfortable. The darkness in the stomach was purple, tinged with warm orange light that glowed from nowhere in particular. Nonsense light. Enough to see her hands, her naked body, but without the usual discomfort/doom that accompanies looking down. Her body just lookeds like a thing she hads. The only thing to which she belongeds.
She blinked, and a duvet appeared, heavy fabric writhing into the space around her legs. When she stroked it, it seemed to purr around her fingers.
This was her womb. The one she had often fantasised, was swallowed by in her mind whenever she got overwhelmed. Whenever the distance of dissociation proved not to be enough. But this one was not imaginary. It pulsed. She could swing her arms around in coherent motions. She could pinch herself but she didn’t feel like it. She was definitely not dreaming. When she shouted out ‘Hello?’, she could hear her own voice. The shadows grew briefly closer, as if in response. She accepted the reality of the womb so easily. She had yearned for it, and so it had come.
She could stay down here as long as she wanted. Doing something, doing nothing. She could take a nap and not mourn the loss of hours. She could curl up, awake, just staring, and the act would have no meaning. She could take as many breaths as was necessary to feel normal, a number she had no time to reach in the rush of the un-wombed world. She could avoid until she felt ready not to. As she lay back, the womb leaned up to provide a pillow for her head. Her relief and sudden comfort were indescribable. He was somewhere up there with Tarantino.
She remained down there for nine days of womb time, in the easy embrace of the darkness. She rolled over occasionally. She did not feel hungry or need to pee. Every now and then, she conceived a string of thoughts and eventually, those thoughts formed a decision. But it did not require any intensive rumination. Only the intensity of being, which was far less in the womb than under the diamond pressure of her life. Up there she was a carbon atom being crushed. Down here, she was a calm and contented foetus. A way of being wasted on actual foetuses. Nine months of nourishment, warmth and padded silence, only to be evacuated into a screaming world? No. She wanted much more. And she got it.
When ready, she crawled back up the tunnel, collecting a nourishing viscous coating on her skin as she went. At the last moment, she donned the ugly teddy, then was reborn back onto his bed, climbing up through the folds of his blankets. No ‘real’ time had passed. She was there in the same moment she’d fallen and if she’d been gone, he hadn’t noticed. His cock was shining, erect and seemed to be causing him pain.
‘I don’t want this,’ she said. She apologised to him sincerely and nodded goodbye to sweet hag, Tarantino. She left his flat with her clothes in her arms and got dressed as she descended in the elevator. She had remembered to bring herself a knit hat.
When she exited into the cold wind of winter, she started crying and that was the first sign she was alive.
🧸🕳️
