Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

“Inside her, in her stomach, I heard the sounds of…opposing forces. As of enormous rocks grinding against each other, deep in the bowels of the earth. And beneath those grinding noises, what, for a moment, sounded like a scream, of an animal being slaughtered.”

That’s just what cramps are :// I can’t believe men didn’t even consider she could be hiding things in her coochie zzkmalnshshshja

I’m a queen with a mouth full of blood.

In a man’s eyes I am meant for motherhood, and that only; otherwise I may as well be mute. Tongue cut out; lips sewn shut.

Do you know what carrying a child inside you does to your idea of space, of what you own? Even the poorest man takes for granted that he holds clear title to the space inside his skin.

Oh, but ask a man about a woman, and he’ll tell you that her body is so very different from his, that it holds empty spaces that stretch and hold mysteries, that measure time with strange and bloody clocks—whose empty spaces are those? Who holds their precious title? Ask a man again, and he’ll argue that the case is not so simple when the sex is switched. The mere pockets of air inside men that erupt in belches and farts are of little account, but the spaces inside women are meant by God for so much more that women’s ownership of them is clearly only ever provisional.

Those empty spaces cannot be left unoccupied for no reason—they are intended to be penetrated, colonized, stuffed to bursting. The ru...

Now you know why I would hold my tongue, even if I believed I’d be heard if I spoke. When my husband shoved his fingers in my mouth and yelled, Bite me, bite me you idiot bitch, harder, they have to see the mark, then the taste of the blood I drew from him was the sweet and hard-won declaration of his love. And it is good to be loved, and to love in return.

I sometimes consider that the only difference between a hoax and an article of faith is the number of people who profess belief in it. If ten million people were to believe in these miraculous births of yours, rather than a hundred or a thousand, then perhaps there would be no doubt: perhaps it would be as good as if it were true, and the belief would cause no harm, might even do some good, might become a cause that convinced people to join in harmony. I find myself asking, in my darker moments: what matter is the unproven nature of an assertion if enough people become convinced of its truth?

Because history is an act of continuous collective imagining, and the perception of truth is a constant, unending negotiation, with others, and with oneself when one is alone.

And I will tell you this about God—that despite his presumed omnipresence he often arrives in the company of men; that men fear to interpret the world on their own authority when they are aware of his presence, because his senses are complete and perfect and his experiences are unlimited; that the standards for proof are much higher when God is involved, especially proof of life, or of what goes on inside a woman’s body; that weighed against God’s displeasure, or against a man’s feeling that God is displeased by his actions, the life of one woman is no great thing.