Two days before she gives birth, the thirty-eight-year-old watches a breastfeeding video from a national health institute, but it’s hard to practice without a baby. When she remembers that masturbation is generally a solo activity, she is able to secrete colostrum, an amber bead forming at her nipple.
*
Two nipples like two shower heads with some pores clogged. The thirty-eight-year-old doesn’t know which directions milk will squirt, nor when she will stop leaking.
From the bike commutes of her twenties, she knows that black hides wet spots better than any other color.
She reads that the “maternal skeleton is borrowed from during lactation to provide much of the calcium that ends up in breast milk,” and wonders about this import-export business.
*
The baby is a by-product of fluid exchange from one parent to another, and calcium flows from one skeleton to another.
Sometimes the zero-year-old unlatches during a feed, and the milk sprays across the zero-year-old’s face. Opalescent drops cling to the zero-year-old’s eyelashes like dew on the tips of a crabapple tree in October.
*
If she rides her lover’s body, she faces away from him, so she doesn’t shoot milk into his face.
*
Years earlier, when she nestled in bed with her eight-week old puppy, he had latched onto her nipple and sucked.
*
After years of unrequited sexual longing in a past monogamous relationship, the thirty-eight-year-old discovered that her libido disappeared when she brought the puppy home.
*
Two years before his suicide, the thirty-eight-year-old’s younger brother told her that his libido was back.
*
The thirty-eight-year-old’s lover told her he found pregnant women to be erotic. But when she was pregnant, his libido mysteriously vanished. The thirty-eight-year-old didn’t feel like any of the pregnant women she’d seen or read about. Like a creature undergoing transformation, she was alien to herself, host to another alien inside her.
*
Alien, client, patient. Once she knows she loves her parasite, the thirty-eight-year-old will assign it a different name. Once she’s a parent.
*
The thirty-eight-year-old knows what the one-year-old doesn’t: that both have moles on their genitalia.
*
When the zero-year-old is a one-year-old, she will point at the mole on her mother’s jawline and say, “Mama.” She will point at her father’s mole and say, “Mama.” Sometimes after pointing at her mother, the one-year-old points at herself where there isn’t yet a mole, and says, “Mama.”
*
The thirty-eight-year-old doesn’t recognize herself when a photograph is taken of the right side of her face. She knows the face is hers, like how she knows an avatar is her in a dream. But she doesn’t feel that her face is actually hers.
*
The one-year-old isn’t mine, the thirty-eight-year-old thinks, but belongs to the one-year-old herself.
When the one-year-old grows up, will she recognize her features in her parents’ faces?
The thirty-eight-year-old couldn’t find her parents’ faces in her own, but sees them in the one-year-old’s.
*
“Mama,” the thirty-eight-year-old says, pointing at the one-year-old, “Mama.”
