nathan’s Reviews > Tantrum > Status Update

My husband’s arms are strong. Bones full of marrow and covered in tendons and muscles, striped with veins, and finished off with skin. He smells like woodsmoke and coffee. He smells like my children. Their small bodies are latched onto ours and ours to theirs, fastened into a family.

The tunnel is warm and tight, a regurgitation that I hope she doesn’t mind. Ahead there is light, and I move forward. Lucia’s jaws open wide, wider, widest to free me. I keep crawling out of the bedroom, out of the house, and into the dark night of the desert. I crawl until day breaks and the heat of the sun bounces off my back.

As my family sleeps, I dream myself born anew. There are no labor pains, no busting out of my daughter’s belly. Instead, I crawl upward through the long tunnel of her esophagus—the same path I took to hide inside of her and clear her gut.

Life is just a slow wearing away of the soul.

Start to finish sexy. My mother warned me. She warned me over and over again when I was growing up that a baby ruins a body, so my resolution to never have kids happened early in the fitting room of a Gap at the Coronado Mall.

I knew if I wanted a family, someone with a uterus—me—would have to carry the babies all the way up until D-Day—when you’ll be so excited to get normal-size fingers and ankles back that you won’t care your vagina is being ripped open by a presumably human skull. It’s super sexy. The whole process.

What do I do first? A normal mother would grab her child. Get the decapitated head away from her and take her inside to bathe off the blood. But a normal mother of a normal child wouldn’t stand and watch her daughter play with said head in the first place.