Cradle your darlings
Erin O'Malley
It began to rain when I pushed your stroller uphill, past the Cracker Jack houses of North Waltham. You pointed to the iron storm drain, its bars separating this world from the underground pipes, a prisoner’s window. Some leaves, wrapped in plastic, strung with hair, and a melted mouse bending backwards through the metal bars. Its head was molded perfectly around and I wondered at how a thing could even happen without disfiguring its body. You remembered the bird I killed in the road last week. Saw it hopping to the curb, flutter, and lay down. I’m always killing things to you. With my heavy can of Raid, cockroaches in the tub disintegrate beneath your mother’s hand, house millipedes are struck and smeared across white walls, cups of red wine with poked plastic the last drink a fruit fly takes, the poison traps I set beneath the refrigerator lie in wait.
In labor, I could not dilate past 5 centimeters. Cervically constipated, you were removed in the only way possible, through a delicate slice in my abdomen, the procedure so improved that years later I can barely see your exit wound. When I asked the doctor if I would have been one of those mothers who died in childbirth in the last century he just smiled and did not answer. So, it seems, I would have killed you too.
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