GRATING SPACE

(This story originally appeared in The Black Warrior Review)

The bedroom smells like meat. It must be us. Abigail’s sleeping, but as always her crocodile-jaw legs clamp me in place. I’m pressed against her belly and can feel our child kicking inside, like a rat in a sack on a stick. He will grow to know bedsores, tucked between his mother and me, crying from atrophy and the sweat of August. A clump of hair tumbles off Abigail’s head into her mouth. Before I can reach it, she inhales and sucks it to the back of her throat. She retches and chokes for six hours before her convulsions wrench my body into the bedpost and I’m knocked unconscious. I awake four days later with my eyes beneath a wet rag. It’s cool, but has kept the gash in my forehead moist and unhealed.

Good morning, Abigail says.

She squeezes my waist with her legs and strokes my bare collarbone. I pull the cloth from my eyes and kiss her on the mouth. Her inner thigh runs crosswise along my pelvis, her calf wraps behind my hips, so I rest snugly in her crotch.

I can’t tell if Pong is in the house. I used to think if I couldn’t hear him he was gone or downstairs. The one night I tried to leave, my ears worked madly to detect any noise outside our room over the snowflakes padding onto the deck. The shock of silence against Abigail’s meek snores terrified me. I stared outside until a car sloshed past and broke my trance. I unwrapped myself from Abigail’s legs. She did not stir, but a stream of urine hurried down my thigh toward the carpet. As I edged into the hall, I heard a flourish of ruffling clothes a moment before my eyes adjusted to Pong’s face. He smashed what must have been our wooden desk lamp into the tip of my nose. I crippled to the floor, biting off most of my tongue.

Pong found us after our first three days in bed. He fixes simple things for our landlord and speaks to Abigail in French he learned from missionaries, asking her what she wants, and how to keep us alive. Abigail wouldn’t let him touch her for months, especially after we became pregnant. Now I pass out for days, and we’re too sick and thin to fight. He rapes her while I oversleep and I wake to her weeping in my hair, soaked like I’ve been swimming.

Ever since Abigail and I shared a bed, I’ve had to escape from her tangle of limbs, but on the dawn the leg hold trap began, she didn’t clench to me like normal. Instead of her sleepy smile, she stared with flaring eyes and a locked jaw. I yelped and startled, turned away from her face and tried to get up. She buckled down and immobilized my torso. My body shook, but we were a tight knot. She began humming a drone and I freed my arms to start beating her face, sides, and chest. Each blow made her tone skip and resume, even when I felt her ribs snap. I tired finally, and panicked and panting, slumped into my pillow. She fell silent, nestled me hard into the nook of her body, and slept.

I utterly love Abigail. I can feel her dying each day, like a polluted stream or a spoiling fruit. Both our lives seep first through each other, then into space. Anything more intimate is impossible.

To conceive the baby she timed the precise night her birth control would diffuse, then straddled my erection while I dreamed. It took all her biceps, cheeks, and hips to build the little kid. I tried to strangle her when I noticed her flesh migrating to her stomach. I crossed my thumbs and dug them around her esophagus, but when she started to gurgle and make spasm fists, her death shot into me. I let go and draped her leg back over my side.

Pong comes in and presses his knuckle into the gouge on my head. It’s wet. He sets an empty bucket by Abigail and slops the other out with him. Beneath a sheet veneer, Abigail and I crook our stiff fingers over each other in mutual massage. She murmurs as I knead up her forearm and groans as I gently twist her toes. We listen to library jazz and watch our view through the patio door: It starts on the left with a blooming laburnum, and moves to a brick fence, sometimes with birds. I pet the swelling stomach. The baby’s writhing for release. I imagine him born, living beneath our legs, learning to speak from my ripped tongue, but not to walk. He’ll never know the touch of clothes besides greasy sheets. I polish his sad house with one firm palm, then two, transfixed. I lose myself in the bald, pink orb. My eyes stay open in awe for days.

In three weeks more it’s a fat drip of honey, stretching off a spoon. Abigail rolls to her back and begins to expel him.

What a godly little pearl, she whispers after it’s over. A pink and peach marvel.

I’m sopped with sweat and birth fluid. The baby flaps its limp mouth. Its slick, sapling limbs tense and relax across my hands. Its skull dangles over my thumb. Abigail’s arteries bulge under what’s left of her flesh, then slowly flatten into still plum lines. I fold the baby into my elbow and roll out of bed. I crush its foot between my chest and the floor. I rest on my back to prepare for the long crawl and become dizzy looking up at the hugeness of our room. Abigail appears at the edge of the bed, upright and magnificent. She swoops upon us. The sag of her stomach covers my face and smothers me.