Murderous Womb

Blood.

So much blood: clotted blood; spattered blood; thickened and dried. Everywhere, but especially in the puddle where I sat. My eyes burned from the smoke as I winced to see the destruction around me. I choked. And when I caught my breath, my lungs were filled with the stench of rotting flesh, sour and bitter and vile. I used all my strength to sit my body up from where I laid, cringing in pain from my midsection. Between my legs laid a baby. A dead baby. My dead baby whose lifeline had turned pale but still held on to the placenta tucked inside of me.

My stomach was fat but deflated and covered in vines of red stretchmarks, yet I felt nothing maternal toward the purple body of the baby boy between my knees: a stranger. I had no recollection of ever conceiving him. I didn’t even remember me.

I grabbed the umbilical cord on the end nearest my body in a tight fist and pulled forcefully away, whaling out a pitiful sorrow from the unexpected tenderness of my womb. This startled the crows that I hadn’t realized were beside me picking at the bodies decaying on the ground. They took flight.

I remember standing up for the first time, having no balance and feeling lightheaded. I wondered how long I had laid there before I awoke. I wondered where I was going or where I had been coming from. Most especially, I wondered where I was to go now. I looked around trying to make sense of my surroundings. I realized that I was in a park, adjacent to what was a city. The park had trees. The trees had fruit, but all things lied dead now on the ashes of the field. I suspected that the earth had been wiped out by some type of nuclear-missile hell fire, based on the smoke and the char of the fallen civilization.

I started to walk.

But as I stepped, my knees buckled from the pain in my mid-section and I collapsed into the grass next to the dead body of the boy.

“Raise up your head and look at what you’ve done,” an authoritative voice hissed at me.

“What I’ve done?” I raised my head with confusion, and this time when I looked up, the park had been reborn. The trees bloomed, each one of a different fruit. The city was gone, and in its place, there was a forest and a river. The air was cleansed. White lily flowers raised up from the grass, and the baby boy opened his eyes to blink. He curled his fists and whimpered the loudest cry his tiny voice could muster.

Suddenly, milk released from my breasts, pouring down my stomach. I grabbed him awkwardly and fumbled him around until I figured out how to latch him to my darkened nipple. As he suckled from my body, he looked up at me and I down at him. All at once, I fell in love with the glimmer of his dark colored eyes and brown skin. As I stared at him, I noticed a heart-shaped locket dangling from around my neck.

Though it ought to have been warm from the mid-day sun beaming on its copper casing, it felt chilled to my touch. I used the thumb of my free hand to pry it open, sliding my nail between its gorgeous doors. I hadn’t considered what might be inside, but if I had, I may have expected to see another face that I had forgotten; perhaps, the father of my child. Now, I wish that is all I had seen.

Instead, I saw an image of 6,000-pixels, which captivated me. I saw creation and destruction; life and death; riches and poverty; joy and suffering. Suddenly, my memory was crystal clear.

However, just as soon as I recalled the world, the locket turned to dust between my fingers and the baby turned cold and stiff in my arms. All at once, I was back in the destruction, gagging on the putrid smell of rotten fruit.