Darcey Steinke - Milk

Junot, who had overheard what Walter was saying, stuck his head into the doorway. He held a shepherd in a cream-colored robe. “Father, do you think if you step on a crack your soul flies out from your body?”

“Who told you that?”

“My mother,” Junot said. “It happened to her.” Junot lived with his mother in the Smith Street projects. She was, according to him, in nearly constant contact with the spirit world. She spoke to God in the middle of breakfast, condemning him for her lousy night’s sleep. She prayed on the subway, in the grocery store. When her sister in Puerto Rico was sick, Junot said her prayers were like a form of surveillance.

“Did she get it back?” Mary asked.

“Oh, she has some story about an angel putting her soul back. This was after she’d been through three trials. She had to assist a stranger in need. Help a sick animal. I think she fed a stray cat for that one.”

“And the last one?” Walter asked.

“She had to speak with a flower.”

“She talked to it?” Mary said.

“Yeah, that’s how she knew which night the angel would come.”

“And you believe all this?” Walter asked.

Junot shrugged and smiled. “I guess,” he said as he walked back down the hall toward the church basement.

The baby’s eyes bulged a little and he spit up a few drops of curdled milk.

“Oh dear,” Walter said, passing him back to Mary and using a Kleenex to wipe off his black pants.

She heard pounding footsteps on the basement stairs, and Junot ran into the office. He was holding the baby Jesus. The plastic baby was no bigger then a football. His legs, arms and head were peach. He had blue eyes, blond hair and wore a tiny white toga. Junot held Jesus up to Walter’s face. “FUCK YOU” was written on the infant’s forehead in black Magic Marker.

On the subway ride back home Mary tried to pray. Lord Jesus, have mercy on me , but her words were overwhelmed with the Desitin Ointment she needed to buy for the baby’s rash, the ear thermometer, that weird thing her husband had said about the French actress’s ass. Over her head was a placard poem about how numbers repeated rapaciously into infinity, how apples never lie, how the body at best is a transitory vehicle. A few seats down, a pale man wearing an aviator’s cap began to cough, his hack like syrup at rapid boil.

The baby fell asleep, his body warm as a patch of sunlight against her sweater, his tiny mouth open and his eyelids as fragile as flower petals. Maybe he dreamt of the time before his conception when he’d inhabited every blade of grass. She figured he could read the consciousness of objects; that’s why the pot of ivy fascinated him, as if each shiny leaf transmuted an idea. He got as much from watching the aura around a lightbulb as the expression on her face. He slept, drooling into the material of the baby carrier, until the thud of the elevator doors jolted him awake.

As she unlocked the front door of her apartment, he arched his back, wrinkled his face up and screamed. Mary pulled off her coat, unbuttoned her blouse and yanked down the flap of her nursing bra. At the scent of her body, the baby agitated his face against her nipple like a baby bird. His tiny features relaxed as he latched on and sucked. The glands high in her breast tingled as her milk came down. Usually her milk was exclusively for the baby, but occasionally the sweet liquid came for flood victims on television and when the homeless man asked her for a quarter. Sometimes she leaked milk when the neighbor’s dog barked or at the memory of how excited her mother got during her favorite TV show. The baby emptied her breast, and so she shifted him, hand cupped around his black hair, and forced his mouth onto her left.

At first she’d read magazines while nursing: articles about endangered albino owls, and how a deaf doctor was the best surgeon in Soviet Russia. But now any word longer than two syllables exhausted her and made her feel nervous. So she stared out the window at the snow coming down, until the baby’s mouth released her nipple and she burped him against her shoulder, changed his wet diaper and lay him in his bassinet.

She tiptoed out of the room and flung herself down on her bed, listening to the sound of the occasional car tires muted and lovely in the new snow. No matter how tired her muscles felt or how much her head ached, blood raced in her veins. She tried again to pray. Come, Lord Jesus, have mercy on me . But the mole above her left eyebrow started to throb. Was it cancerous? She jumped up to check it in the bathroom mirror. Settling down again, she imagined sweeping all her petty thoughts off the end of a dock with a long bristly janitor’s broom, but just when her head felt clear, she thought about the steak and mashed potatoes she wanted to make for dinner, that she needed dental floss and more liquid Tylenol.

The sensation of the baby’s lips on her nipple lingered. Walter would understand; he himself believed in the necessity of physical pleasure. So she dragged her pointer finger over her tongue and slid her hand beneath the waistband of her underpants. She felt her clit begin to rotate. Only God could infuse something so rudimentary with life. She was made out of cosmic refuse — stardust, smoky vapor — and so occasionally if she concentrated, she could tease down the life force for her own selfish use.

She sank her finger inside herself, and really, though she didn’t mean to brag, she was ridiculously wet and decided therefore to split the universe. Fuck me , she said, and then again, but more politely, Fuck me, please . There was so much vulgarness inside her; it was beautiful really. But she could be tender too. She planned to ask the Man at the coffee shop about the scar over his right eyebrow and he would tell her that as a little boy he’d fallen onto the ice. And that worked for a while: the little boy falling onto the cold, hard ice, wet blood pooling above his blue eye, a drop or two saturating the snow.

The phone sounded like the twill of a metal bird. Her husband calling from the office to tell her HE wanted to come home but that THEY wanted him to go out to another Christmas party. The baby shifted in the bassinet, and Mary closed her eyes and went directly to the babysitter’s thin teenage body entwined with her boyfriend’s thin teenage body, as they fucked crazily on the couch. And for a while that was okay, the scent of Coca-Cola and sweat as their flat stomachs and sharp hips collided. But then it wasn’t enough and it was time for the father to walk over to the couch, lower his pants and offer the babysitter his cock.

This worked immediately; a sweet sting infused her flesh. But just as quickly the water began to leak out of the drain. And she tried frantically to inhabit each of them, father, babysitter, boyfriend. Each had characteristics as mysterious as the holy trinity. She decided to kick the babysitter out. But it was too late. She was the babysitter, the unbabysitter, the ur-babysitter, the ghost in the babysitter. She tensed her pelvis and a swarm of butterflies careened up her spine. The vibrations entered her like radio waves, her bones felt molten and she was a twig pitched out into the universe. And that WAS IT: Her sex twitched and she felt the lobes of her brain open like a flower and she was inside of a wave, made from torn-up flower petals. Broken petals filling her mouth as she swung open the car door and staggered away from the crash. Flames jumping from the engine, her head banged up and spacey, her pelvis tipped and aching as if she actually had gotten fucked. Blood beat inside her ear and as the impact dissipated, her sadness swelled. Nothing had changed. Sure, the snow under the car tires had degenerated into slush, but that had more to do with decay than divinity and it was infuriating, really, having to wait so long for him to come.