This is a thing I wrote ages ago. It is fiction, but familiar. Three kids later and not much has changed.
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I feel the dampness first, rising florid and dank where my skin meets the bedsheets. The smell of sour milk and earth comes next; the crusted puddle is beneath my torso and my chest is throbbing. The light rimming the curtains deepens; the room is the colour of a plum.
His cries send a spasm skittering through my womb but my head sticks to the pillow, heavy with sleep. I don’t want to leave the humid warmth of the bed, but his cries escalate into one shrill wail, grinding into my skull.
A damp wind moans through the open window; the air is a wolfish breath in my ear.
Bile rises sourly and my mouth is gluey as the waves of warmth peel off my body. The bloated heat between my legs is a reminder, and soon it will dry the milky puddle in cracking blotches.
The blankets are clammy. I heave upright and pull my nursing singlet up above my midriff, cooling the sweat on my lower back. I need space around my body now, room to spread and grow and move.
Occasionally, the cries start with one harsh scream, like he is being poked with pins, and I am up and in his room before my eyes have adjusted, and when I wake properly I am hovering over the wrong cot, grasping at the smooth sheet, before I locate the source of the sound and fling him to my breast, shaking.
We had bought the monitor at one of those baby chain stores up near the ring road, the size of a barn. The blue screen shows a tiny screaming face, lips grimacing black. A gargoyle rendered in greyscale.
The nursery smells of paint and birth, fecundity and vomit. The nightlight casts shadows up from the floor, turning the nursery furniture into gargantuan caricatures with the hooked noses and long hands of Disney villains. My body moves bovine-like through the dark room, shins bumping against the hard corner of the chest of drawers.
He latches on and I wince; the afterpains contracting my vacant uterus. I picture it folding like a tent, collapsing a cardboard box bound for the recycling bin. I hold a tissue to the other breast as the milk pours out. It soaks my top and the pillow. He is drinking loudly, slurping and schlucking. His head smells of meat and copper.