Slow, and dull, it rolled around my tummy in the place where hunger should've been. It felt like almost the same place, the raw and vacant cavity of my hunger spot. But the new sensation was definitely not vacant, as it filled me with a pain so dull and so thick that I felt like I was drowning from the inside out. I pushed eight fingers against the naked peach flesh of my abdomen and turned onto my side. My thumbs were too nervous to cooperate; they bent away from my body, rigid like two shotguns ready to protect me from any more demon invasions.

The sheets were hot. I could feel thick droplets collecting in the valleys of flesh between my thighs, pressed together as I connected all the parts of my body into a circle. It was hotter this way, but in any other position I felt defenseless. Each and every toe curled under, elbows tucked in, eight fingers desperately trying to soothe, chin snug, set back in layers of pudge. A smooth curve from the top of my neck to the bottom of my spine, like a crescent moon in season. Hunger scrapes at the deepest, pinkest insides, tearing at rosy abdomen walls, which surrender their color. It makes each breath cold on the way down—frigid and lonely in the center. I knew it wasn't hunger. My breaths squeezed through water-filled balloons. I ached with an abysmal ripeness.

I was overflowing.

Rolling my body out of bed, tummy first, I followed the rippling sensation to the toilet. I suddenly had the strong urge to empty myself. I sat; the ache subsided, nothing. The cold, ceramic seat brought some faith back to my thighs, and I spread my legs just far enough apart, so that I could see between them. I felt the pressure of something liquid well up at the bottom of my tummy like a tear and then spill. Thick, violet tears, dropping out of me. I watched, awed. The rusty, crimson fluid fell first in long drops, then poured in the bowl water like a string of syrup. When it slid down through the water, it curved, swirled and disappeared, like tinted underwater cigarette smoke. I was astounded. I wanted to sit on the now warm toilet seat until morning. I wanted to collect the sliding black fuschia in a bottle. I just watched. Cautiously, I offered two fingers to the thinning stream, and then brought them to my face. Sour sweet. Smells like a sweaty, rotting, garden of purple orchids. Rotting—but not dead.
There is a sound outside the bathroom door, but I'm too entranced by my body's new eruption to notice. It's the cat. She nudges the door and lets herself in. I offer her my stained fingers and she sniffs at my new smell and rubs her cat body against the edge of the broken cabinet door beneath the sink. Her toasted, yellow fur is falling out all over the rug. A little embarrassed, I pull my underwear up around my knees, and then I lean over and call her name. She doesn't come to me. "Sesameee. . ." I whisper to her as loud as I can without making an actual voice, "something is happening to me!"

One day my vagina opened and swallowed a whale. It was extraordinary to say the least. A little awful to say more. I always wondered how a vagina expands so to allow a baby to pass through those very delicate, very sore, and supposedly incredibly elastic walls. I couldn’t understand the depths that lay there. “I must be bottomless” I thought, “and completely elastic.” A baby would be bigger than the whale I had stuck inside of me.

At least I was ready; the ocean wet my thighs and I saw it approaching—very damp and determined. I leaned back, took control of my hips, and lifted myself out of the sheets of fluid that had soon reached my waist. It rushed through me, over me. I was drenched in a wild, warm sea. I had to hang on, so that I wouldn’t wash away. Maybe that was the mistake, maybe I should’ve let myself go right there and been over with it. But I threw my head back instead, and squeezed my eyes shut so tight that all the blood there, and everywhere else in my body, rushed down to my vagina. I groaned at my predicament, and found that all I could do was scream and smile about the whole thing. A flailing, red-ribbon kind of scream. A bottomless, hip-shaking kind of scream.

But that was all right before the whale entered. I can’t say it swam, it sort of . . . plunged. I waited for it to wash away on the same ocean it arrived on. But it didn’t move, for a few moments, it just laid there. Beached. My vagina was like a dead shore all of a sudden. I didn’t know what happened. I guess I thought about it too much. I had never had a whale inside of me before.

i could feel baby's head against my inside. i could imagine the loosened, tiny fingers, once greedy for my life, for my vine, now limp and yellow. for eight months, i cradled, i fed, i sang. i flowed in and out of rooms, heavy with stretched flesh, beating, bleeding baby. covered you with white sheets, scarves for dresses. lay us down to sleep, on a naked mattress. i could at least call it my own. and i couldn't rock us both, so i put my arms over my ears instead. hoped that baby would never hear the thrashing. i didn't want your first words to be curses. i promised that i would keep you on my lap, watch every hot stream of milk soothe your fresh tongue. fresh cries. who knew he could give life and take it away. i promised i would set you on the fat of my hip and run you to the woods. never cut the vine, so we would always be connected. i wanted to take you to the grass. i wanted the air around you to be silent. then i felt baby, in every part of me. you were the unearthly rage in my hands, fingers sweaty on the metal. i had to do it. i had one more promise, that i would never let you know you had his eyes. his nose. anything. i had to keep one. lost you both. can't say i feel anything now. except sorry. i drag my body to the concrete, feel my nipples cold and hard on the surface. wrap my own, limp and yellow fingers around the bars. my round belly, now deflated, feels you gone. heavier than before.

i can't cry. my hands, they won't make fists. nothing to fight for, or against. i don't care about heaven. i wanted to be a mother.