Coney Island
For a moment, carried. A relief unlocked in her jaw, spreading down through her tired body before seizing suddenly at her hands.
His hand warm in hers, mother and son plunging into cold saltwater, the baby wailing as the waves swelled. A monster’s hand at the small of her back.
She blinks back into the warm, bright world where lights pulse and a gurney holds her. Her arms free of babies, her breasts and bones unbothered.
In the hospital again, the patient. Not mother, nor monster. Pain required for entry, her hurt belonging. Cared for, curled up, herself. Quiet, save the delicate beep that affirms her beating heart.
Concerned faces found her walking along the beach. They swarmed her, eyes wide and words gently prodding, prodding. “Erin, where are the babies?” Pleading in voices that the ocean’s gusts plucked from their lips. Words tossed into the hungry monster’s gaping wet mouth.
She glanced their way. They scanned her body like everyone always had, looking for something besides her. She continued walking.
“Erin?” New hands found her then, somewhere in this dream. Fatherly fingers. “Come with us,” they pulled. She walked to lights blinding, the ocean’s screams fading as a new sharp hum bleated from within. A flat-line alert of space breached somewhere between mother and monster.
She’d lost her babies in dreams before, but always found them. Now she awoke again and again, with a gasp for air, lungs punctured, blood cool and slow like cement, waiting to fill her empty body. They were gone. So she left too, ascending to a height near the ceiling, and hovered there, watching the dazed and dirty girl below.
So much had coursed through that body, dicks and babies and milk, in and out, pumping and pulling til there was no room for Erin. Hiding in her head, she waited for them to leave. Instead, they came pounding at her mind’s doors. Rent and babies too cold and what’s this bruise and look at you mama, give me some of that. The lights went out, the heat went off, the food crusted over until shriveled and weak, she emerged.
Emptied, she walked with them, inhabiting a body borrowed, a mind raided. She didn’t know how to make them leave, and soon her heirloom monster saw its chance. Pacified at first with drinks and rage, it bled into her dreams, sleeping and waking.
Three daddies left seeds that took. Satiated, they returned only to lean on the mother as the monster might hope. Their weight slowly buried her where hidden nearby lay three extra spots.
She dragged this growing monster along for years, reporting it to no avail, fighting it with exhausting futility. And then one night, it blew out the pilot and took her hand.
Erin rolls now in crisp white sheets, diving deep into motherly dreams. She’ll take the nightmares of lost babies in a raging sea. She’ll take the nagging feeling that something’s gone too far. She’ll take anything but the reminder that her monstrous heart beats on without them.
