Nightbitch

by Rachel Yoder

You light a fire early in your girlhood. You stoke it and tend it. You protect it at all costs. You don’t let it rage into a mountain of light, because that’s not becoming of a girl. You keep it secret. You let it burn. You look into the eyes of other girls and see their fires flickering there, offer conspiratorial nods, never speak aloud of a near-unbearable heat, a growing conflagration.

You tend the flame because if you don’t you’re stuck, in the cold, on your own, doomed to seasonal layers, doomed to practicality, doomed to this is just the way things are, doomed to settling and understanding and reasoning and agreeing and seeing it another way and seeing it his way and seeing it from all the other ways but your own.

She held two master’s degrees, whereas he held none. (She also held a baby.)

Who ever thought a mother would need to sanitize a counter of the milk meant for her baby? The milk should be sopped up using a ceremonial rag that’s then set at the foot of a towering, infinitely beautiful sculpture carved to honor the Eternal Mother, Giver of Life and Maker of All Things.

I think working mother is perhaps the most nonsensical concept ever concocted. I mean, who isn’t a working mother? And then add a paid job to it, so what are you then? A working working mother? Imagine saying working father.

Imagine trying to shop for crunchy snacks with a toddler and heightened near-animal sense of smell while the enormity of patriarchal society loomed behind every box of farm-themed crackers, in the crackle of every pretzel bag you picked up.

The mother had been indulging him for years now, and she reminded herself—again and again and again, she simply must remember—he was not a bad man.

and so her feelings were immediately discounted, even though she knew them to be the truest things in her human experience, a light to show the way.

She paused, tears in her eyes, which she harshly rubbed away. As if the book itself was her most cherished friend. As if its pages knew her heart.

How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream.

She knew enough to live inside an entire life all on her own, and yet her husband—with his electronics skills, his engineering—he was the one who made all the money, even though she could make a world, and then, too, make a person to live in that world.

She would always have that moment, and many others, locked inside her, a perfect little glitter globe to shake whenever she needed.

I am interested in longing, in longing so deep it threatens to splinter a person apart. I am interested in a profound longing for an unknown existence, or for a better life, without any idea of what the specifics of that life would look like.

It’s almost as if having a child does not sate a deep yearning but instead compounds it. Look, the mother says, look at what I am capable of. I make life. I am life. But how can I become a god?

She wanted to save her mother. She saw now she had always wanted this.

That he would do for her whatever he could, because of his love and devotion, his near-childlike adoration of her, which had gotten lost in the ho-hum of every day after day for years and years.