Darcey Steinke - Milk

“I can only stay a minute,” she said, waiting for him to unlock his front door. Inside he nodded to the chairs by the table and went into the kitchen. Mary heard the sound of crinkling plastic as he put away the groceries. He’d bought himself a few things for Christmas, a pumpkin pie and a rotisserie chicken. She laid her coat on the bed and sat at the wood table; she read the word “aniseikonia” in his journal and the definition—“when one eye sees an object as bigger than the other.”

“You look nice,” he said as he carried in the teacups and the bottle of brandy.

“I was out at a party,” she said. She watched him settle into his chair and lay down a stack of napkins.

He was wearing a blue sweater with holes at the elbows and his face carried a flush of cold. He looked at her intently.

“I’m sorry about yesterday.”

“It makes a lot of people uncomfortable,” Mary said.

“It’s not that,” he said, walking over to the mantel and picking up a snapshot. He handed her the photo. “You see,” he said, “I almost had a family.”

The photo was faded, curled at the edges. A woman in a calico dress smiled at the camera. She wore feather earrings and her stomach was huge. “It happened twenty-four years ago. I got the call right around dinnertime. My wife had pulled off the highway to help a lady with a flat tire. But it was foggy and a truck hit her while she walked along the shoulder.”

“I’m sorry,” Mary said as she stared at the photo. The woman held one hand under her stomach and one hand on top, displaying her pregnant belly. Her pale hair hung around her face, and her lips were open as if she were about to speak. Mary handed the photo back and he slipped it inside the pages of his notebook. He sat very still and stared down at the gold liquid in his cup.

Mary moved her hand across the wood and touched his fingers, and he leaned forward and kissed her mouth. His lips were not food exactly, but just as sustaining, and she opened her mouth and his tongue came inside all delicate flickers and so much more lively and nuanced than she would have anticipated.

Everything was going pretty well except that she felt bad about his dead wife and baby. Felt bad for crack addicts, bad about the Middle East, bad that people got operations they didn’t need because of the American medical machine. But then she opened her eyes and every object seemed as delicately constructed as the baby’s loose tummy. Everything had soft bones configured into beautiful skeletal patterns; she was just a fragment of the world seeking another fragment. He came around to Mary’s side of the table and turned off the lamp and picked her up and carried her to his futon.

Light from the window made a little shadow-puppet theater of snow coming down on the wall above them. He said into her hair, It’s been a really long time . And she tugged at his belt and helped him pull down his pants; boxers over skinny white legs. She yanked off her tights and lay back in her bra. Her nursing bra, which was wide and puffy. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to take it off. Her breasts might leak.

A couple walked by on the street talking. She remembered the baby; her breasts were so tight she knew he’d need to nurse soon. But John was kissing her neck, all down the raised tendons and on the soft skin between, and she began to feel his cock defining itself, like a little god, against her thigh. Hadn’t she been a good person? Hadn’t she sold Girl Scout cookies and collected every Halloween for UNICEF? Didn’t she recycle? she thought as she moved between his legs and set her tongue against that delicate circumcised V. Tasting the first bit of cum, musty, green, she closed her mouth and sucked as if his cock were a tiny breast, and she slid her tongue inside the slit at the tip and tasted salt; and there began the slow descent into the animal kingdom where the halos around streetlights seemed to be singing, and she remembered how, when the baby’s head first appeared between her legs, she’d felt for a moment like a circus freak.

She put her hand between his thighs, traced her fingers over his balls, then reached into the crack of his ass and pressed her pointer finger against his anus and she wanted butterflies to gather in a heap on her abdomen and the ice teaspoon to spill its dirt. She needed soil for the garden and the rose trestle and the little lamb who recited French poetry. He pulled her up to his face, and Mary rocked her pelvis against his and looked up at the tiny black shadows falling down over the wall and over his features; his face was wet. Water trickled out the edge of his eyes. Mary rolled on top of him, and they kissed until his cock dug into her stomach. She reached back and unlatched her bra; her breasts fell forward, heavy as water balloons. The sensation made his eyes jump open and he strained his head up, took her nipple into his mouth. His brow furrowed and his features compressed with intense pleasure at the taste of her milk.

When she finally got home her husband still wasn’t there, and she paid the sitter and walked to where the baby slept. He’d kicked the blanket off and she pulled it up to his chin. She turned the Christmas tree lights on in the front room and sat down in the blue chair. The lights illuminated the pine needles and tinsel. She saw the silver church with the snow on the roof and the miniature present wrapped in green paper and the painted rocking horse and the crocheted snowflakes and the little silver bell; and she watched snow fall into the dark alley and brush against the window.

Walter always said that the chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separate from him. But really, at the moment, that sounded to her like a bunch of bullshit. She walked down the hall and swung open the closet door. On the floor was a box filled with shoes, her mother’s house slippers mixed with sneakers and vinyl thrift-store boots. The mop lay in the bucket beside a lampshade and a bag of old videos.

She kneeled down. The sleeve of her ratty wool coat brushed her forehead. Inside her coat pocket was a half-sucked cough drop. Inside the cough drop were atoms, and she knew that atoms, like flowers, had individual parts, protons and neurons. Mary pressed her palms against each other and squeezed her eyes shut. The world was on the edge of revolution, pregnant with a different kind of life.

THROUGH THE DOORWAY of his office, Walter watched Mary help Junot paint the hall. The trustees had agreed she could stay in the rectory rent-free as long as she helped with the church’s renovations. Mary painted the baseboard with a brush, while Junot, using a roller, got at the wall higher up. She was on her hands and knees and Walter could see the dark roots of her hair and how tendons stood out from her neck.

It’d been a month since she’d left her husband. Christmas had transpired as had New Year’s, and while her crying jags diminished, she still felt flimsy. Her features were not unified, but seemed at odds with one another. Shades of pink, yellow and a delicate blue showed through in her complexion.

The baby lay in a basket beside his desk; the former laundry hamper now tricked out like the reed-boat that had carried Moses. He coughed as he held an athletic sock in a tiny fisted hand. Mary insisted the baby had allergies but he worried; the cough sounded harsh and adult. Walter grasped the end of the sock and jiggled; the baby smiled and bicycled his legs. He felt responsible for Mary; if he were straight they’d be married and the baby would be his own. He loved how the baby sometimes held his hands out when he wanted to be picked up and how the rectory now smelled like melted butter. In the evening when Mary nursed the baby by the fire, the white skin of her breast marbled with blue veins, her face flushed with exhaustion and the baby’s face was as new and uncorrupted as a peach.