Nestlings

by Nat Cassidy

She still had a soft twang from her Midland, Texas, upbringing, as well as a dry, sarcastic wit that made Ana like her immediately.

What do you do when you’ve lost faith in everything? Even your own body?

because the nighttime is the right time to cruise the Panic Attack Expressway, baby, keep your useless foot on the gas and let’s crash into that wall

Ana and Reid had no at-home care in their insurance plan and, by that point, their premiums would have been through the roof if they’d signed up for some. They also made just enough money to not qualify for subsidies. It was one of those catch-22s that only something as cruel as the American insurance system could conjure: if Reid or Ana quit working, maybe they’d be able to get some financial assistance … while also not being able to afford anything else in their lives.

A garden of resentment was sown that day. Its hideous plants bloomed at irregular, unpredictable intervals. A sprig of hate. A blossom of blame. Entire teeming hedgerows of depression and alienation.

But mothers can handle a lot of sensations at once, can’t they? It’s part of the job: to be torn open and persevere.

How much pain is caused by hiding pain from others? Wait, why the hell am I thinking I’m about to be in pain?! Then, suddenly, the staircase stopped. No more steps.

Adulthood was all about compromises, wasn’t it? You decide what you need, what you want, and shift your priorities around until you find the least bad combination. Each compromise was a link in a chain, and if that chain dragged you down to the bottom of the East River? Well … at least you had Netflix and Spotify to distract you while you sank.

He didn’t know where he was going, he just had to get far away from that fucking cruel pantomime of normalcy, that filthy blood-caked fist which had wrenched into his hair, rubbing his nose in a life that would never be his.

None of this was fair. Those happy, laughing, idiotic moms would never know how bad it could get. Their fucking husbands or boyfriends or partners or whatever didn’t have to live those awful early days where Reid had to wipe his wife’s and his newborn’s asses. The agonized screams of the newly born and the newly paralyzed, the intense pain, emotional and physical, the begging to just die, please just let me die. None of them had to live through that one horrible night.

They probably all had jobs. Or money from their fucking parents. They probably all still had sex lives. They probably all had help. That’s why they laughed. Because they weren’t so fucking alone.

No. No, I will not break down. She can, but I can’t. I won’t. For all his defenses, he suspected if he ever did break down, there’d be no end to it.

“I don’t get bogged down in the past, you know? All that matters to me is here. Now. Know your home, that’s what I say.”

“Know your home. Where you belong, you know? This moment.” “And, sorry, just to confirm,” the reporter asked, “is that ‘your’ possessive, or ‘you are’? Know your home or know that you are home?” “Is there really any difference?” Terry asked back. “Once you’re there, you’re there.”

It was Ana’s job to heal. It was his job to make Ana and Charlie feel the way he already felt. At home.

Frank was not a hateful or bigoted person. Lefty faggots like Reid liked to throw words like racist around about some of the things Frank said or thought. But Frank knew plenty of good Blacks and good Mexicans and good Orientals. And Jews! If Frank had been given the choice between a Jew for an accountant and anyone else? He’d take the Jew seven days out of seven. They all had their purposes—was it racist to think a race was better at certain things? Nah, Frank didn’t think so. That’s a frickin’ compliment. Hell, Frank had been okay with renting the apartment to Reid and his wife in the first place, hadn’t he? He knew they were Jews, you could practically smell it, even before you saw some of the crap they hung on his walls.

Jewboy and Roller Bitch were probably laughing about Frank right now. They wouldn’t be laughing long. Let them underestimate Frank. They wouldn’t be the first. Frank had ways. He was smart.

“Be careful you don’t get taken advantage of. One problem with absurdists is they don’t always know when something stops being funny and starts being corrosive.”

“He was struck by how organic it was. By which I mean actual organs. Organisch was his word; translates from the Dutch as, essentially, made of living tissue. The city was much smaller compared to what it is now, but even then, it was massive. Congested. Compact. Like the secret jewels inside a torso. Each separate part fulfilling a unique function. Each separate part comprised of its own component parts. Each separate part as important, as fundamental, to the body as the next.”

“Viscera upsets us. Our own biology is monstrous to us. When all it wants to accomplish is life for the greater organism. Life for the body. The system.”

We’re ‘vampires’ the way a woman with bad PMS is a werewolf, I suppose.

“Would a name really give you comfort? We are a family. We are eusocial. Organisch. Each of us has our function, and we contribute to our greater whole.”

It was an old bronze paperweight in the shape of a chai—the Jewish word for life, a combination of two letters that Reid always thought looked vaguely cow-shaped. It was big and heavy, about seven inches in each direction. The story went that it was made from candlesticks that had been secreted out of the synagogue in Reszel, the village where Reid’s grandmother had been born and from where she’d fled. Dull, clumpy seams marked where the metal had been merged together, like scar tissue.

“But why do we always have to survive so much, Reid?” Isaac leapt to his feet. “Is that really survival? Running from one set of jaws to another? What did we do to deserve the Shoah? Or bondage in Egypt? The destructions of our Temple? The pogroms? The ghettos? Why do we need armed guards at our synagogues now, today? What did I do to deserve my son’s death? What did you do to deserve your own sorrows? ‘Happy is the person You discipline, Adonai!’ Why are we so damned disciplined? I know you agree with me! What was it you said when we first met? When you were asked if you were Jewish?” Real Jews know not to answer that whenever strangers are at the door. “That was a joke.” But Reid burned with the embarrassment of recognition.

Isaac laughed poisonously. “No, Reid. That was memory. And that’s why heroic stories of fighting monsters with symbols of some glowing Messiah’s godhood aren’t for us. They’re for them.” He indicated the other people in the park. “Hey, but don’t let that keep you from whatever you’re writing, huh? We deserve our own silly fantasies, too, dammit!” He shouted this at the passersby. Most ignored him. He chuckled, pleased with himself. This man is a vampire, Reid realized. He’s not a monster, but he thrives on misery. He needs to drink from my cup of sorrows to digest his own.

I got her where she was meant to be, Ana thought. I did the job. Mother’s gift.

Her darkest fears had always been that she didn’t have what it took to be a parent. That conception had been a fluke. That Cathy had been right: Ana was too stupid, too broken, too selfish to even do the piss-poor job she’d done. What does it mean to be a mother? But that was the trick. There was no one meaning.

Motherhood was her, was Cathy, was Reid’s mom, was this monstrosity in the bowels of a Manhattan skyscraper. Motherhood was joy, was pain, was standing over the crib with a knife, was standing over the crib with a lullaby. Motherhood was breakage, was expansion, was depletion, was fulfillment, was creation, and an endless series of goodbyes. Motherhood was contradiction. That was its beauty. That was its horror. And if it drove you mad trying to square its inconsistencies, well, tough luck, because motherhood cared nothing about what happened inside of y...

Ana looks up, smiling, and watches the bird against the sky. She bears the bird no jealousy. She knows that feeling of flight. It’s all the same. A flap of wings. A step. A push of a wheel. A blink of an eye. A breath. Movement is movement, no matter how small or how achieved. She points herself forward and moves.

Grief is the space between two states of being: who you were and who you