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“Good as new”

One day, my mother came home after gathering a vast collection of snakes, insects, worms, and spiders, from eggs and larvae all the way to rotting husks.

She delicately arranged the maggots and other vermin inside my abdomen, her face held still in soft focus. I felt in that moment like she could love me.

Would it feel like this, I wondered, if she were able to show the same care and softness outside of the times when I am ill?

In the years since, I have grown into a woman who is always ill, but even that was not enough to win my mother’s love. Saying “you are enough” is such gaslighting.

Each day as the sun sets, I feel the slithering of worms and filth within me: snake eggs hatch, pupae fatten themselves on my brainstem. Yet I conceive nothing.

When my mother could no longer cram any more of her horrible creatures into my chest and belly, my father sewed me up nice and tight so I could keep quiet and not be a bother.

If only I could be grateful for the stitches in spite of the scars and the infections. The years harden the incision; moth wings flutter from behind my ribcage.