Cataclysm Baby

Lakin, Lamia, Lakshmi

Remember the difficulty of your labor, and how at first the doctors mistook our daughter for a breech birth, but then came no foot, no other hard limb or promontory leading the way?

What was stuck instead: Only this plump fluff of flesh, these greased rolls of fat. Only flush skin in handfuls, leaving nothing for the doctors to do but tug the mess free—And what a baby they found within, what gigantic girth of daughter, her face hung with meat, her fingers barely able to poke free from the folds of her wrists.

Remember how afterward you were too weak to hold her weight, how for the first months of her life the only way to feed her was to bring your breast to her buried mouth, those lips moving within the pancake of her face? How at bath time you would stretch her skin tight so I might wash within her creases, so that together we could clear the lint-slop between, scrub free the mold grown in every hanging crevice?

Remember the surgeons advising operations to remove that excess, to suck the fat from around her eyes so she might be able to see? From around her ears, so she might be able to hear?

How you hated the doctors then: for trying to decide in what ways our daughter could be beautiful, how she should see the world, and how the world should see her.

No, you said. She will eat what she wants to eat, until she fills out that great skin, until she stretches it taut, until jagged lines of purpled flesh mark new territories upon the body of her person.

My daughter could fill a room, you said, and still I would think her perfect.

Remember saying these words?

Tell me you remember. Turn around from the stove, from the meat-stink you’re making, and tell me.

Remember how she grew, how she continued to grow? How her head sagged so she needed a brace to support it, and yet there was no device that could fit the trunk of her neck? How she toddled, now a worm the size of a bulldog, buried in rolls of flesh that restricted her movement, that reduced her to a slither, to lunging and dragging across the carpet?

Blind and deaf, mumbling behind the smother of her face, she cried for help, but all we heard was a muffle, a moan, and still you refused, named her your pretty darling, your shining star.

Remember how you buried your face in her belly, laughing and tickling her with your lips? How you said she was so delicious you wanted to eat her? Or how the salt-shame of her tears collected in the shelves of her face, left their etchings for us to find with the washcloth?

When the doctors finally cut our skin-gorged daughter free, when they returned her wrapped in bandages, mutilated of face, but escaped from the flapping weight of her birth, how bad was it for her then, because we’d pretended for so long?

How much worse when the bandages came off, and we saw what skinny creature your honest love had hid?

How hungry she was then, how little food there was left in the stores, the depleted and shuttered supermarkets, and how dry your breasts were, empty as our larder—

And then what? How to feed our daughter, who you loved, whose forgiveness you wished to earn?

Remember how once, long before this gristle-spat daughter now munching and chewing in her highchair, remember how then you said my legs were my best attribute, that you fell in love starting from my feet and working your way up?

Remember how thick the muscle of my thighs, how fine the curve of my calves?

Say you remember, then look again upon our daughter’s re-fleshed face: As awful as it was to make a monster of her before, how much worse to have made her so once again?

Remember how once I claimed I would stop this—But how you believed me wrong, because who am I, without those legs?

Who am I, without those hands, offered in the absence of better gifts?

Who I am: I am still her father. I am still your husband, your partner, a half wedded to match your half, and even if you have made me less of a man to make her more of a daughter, still I mean to retake the whole of what is mine.

Come close, my one-time love. Come closer and find out our ravening daughter is not the only one with teeth, nor the only one who hungers.

Closer now. Closer.

Closer: Taste what’s happened to me, to you, to our daughter, this fat wedge shoved between us until we splintered. Open your mouth as we have opened ours, and taste how soon I will tear you both free, how I will wrench our daughter from you, from where you are together wrapped tight, trapped, floating mad within the weight of all she once was.