I was seven years old the first time Mama told me about the monster living inside me. She flipped over a card on her little round table, looked at me through a haze of cigarette smoke, and said, “I don’t want to scare you, Rosie. But it’s better you know. Better we all know what’s coming.”
I wrapped my arms around myself and squeezed. I felt the same as always: skin covered in bug bites, stomach full of breakfast cereal, breath moving in and out, in and out. “There’s no monster in there.”
She tapped some ash into the little pinch pot Stella’d made in kindergarten and gestured at the spread in front of her. The purple scarf she’d draped over the table was edged in beaded tassels and clotted with candle wax, half-hidden by the sprawling pattern of cards on top. “It’s just a seed now. It’s sleeping, like a seed sleeps in winter.” While I watched, she turned over another card, and nodded as if the picture on it meant something. “You got a while yet, but it’s gonna come out of you eventually.” She sighed and swept the deck into a neat stack, evening the edges with her fingers and sliding them into a silk pouch. “The cards are never wrong, Rosie. I wish to hell they were sometimes, but they’re not.”
That night, I stripped down to my underwear and stood in front of the full-length mirror behind the bathroom door, trying to imagine where the monster was hiding. Would it burst out of my back like the spikes of a stegosaurus? Or from the top of my head like a mushroom? I opened my mouth as far as I could and tried to imagine a monster slithering out of my throat, scales scraping my back teeth. I told myself when the time came I’d clench my jaw, swallow it down, keep it safely inside me forever. I’d prove Mama and the cards wrong.
Mama passed before she could say I told you so.
***
It was clear early on that Mama’s gift had skipped me and gone straight into my little sister Stella. Stella would sit at the table before her feet could even touch the floor, thin blonde hair in spiky pigtails, memorizing the deck card by card, developing her own intuition, her own flair. Even though I had no interest in sitting at that table for hours and hours, it rankled me. Stella was almost two full years younger than I was. If I even reached a single finger towards the deck, Mama swatted me aside.
“This isn’t for you, Rosie. You got other things to worry about.”
“Yeah,” said Stella, all prim and proper. She pointed at a card. “See? Your monster’s starting to grow.”
“No it isn’t!” I was still a good girl back then. I brushed my teeth morning and night, did my homework and chores, never turned on the flashlight after bedtime. I was as far from monstrous as anyone could imagine.
“The cards don’t lie,” said Stella. “Right, Mama?”
“Hush,” said Mama.
“But it’s not my fault,” I told her. “I don’t want that monster inside of me. I never asked for it.”
Mama shook her head and lit another cigarette. “It doesn’t matter what you want, or what you asked for. It’s there. Any fool could see it.”
I hated when she said things like that. It made me feel like a ball of tin foil was crumpled in the pit of my stomach, and every time she talked about the monster she added more foil to the ball, packing it tight. Eventually I stopped asking to learn to read the cards. I stayed away from the table when Mama was reading or teaching Stella, stayed away from the house as much as I could.
By the time I was a teenager, I’d come to realize Mama was right. The thing inside me—the monster—consistently led me to ruin. Staying out all night; driving Mama’s car when I was so plastered I could barely tell road from sky. Dipping my fingers inside open purses, fishing for phones and wallets. I knew the difference between right and wrong, is the thing. I knew what I should do, how I ought to behave. But every time, the monster took the reins. And I let it. When everyone knows you’re an irresponsible fuckup, what’s the point in trying to prove them wrong?
A month before Mama died, she changed her will so that everything she owned—the house, the car, what was left in her bank account—passed to Stella, and Stella alone. When I found out what she’d done, I hurled a glass across the room so that it shattered on the far wall.
“Rosie,” Mama wheezed. She’d taken up residence on the living room recliner, tubes snaking into her nose from the hissing oxygen tank beside her, and she could only speak three words at a time before taking another labored breath. “I did it. To protect you. Both of you.”
“Stella’s only seventeen! She’s not even a legal adult!”
“She turned eighteen.” A ragged breath. “Two days ago.”
I looked around for something else to throw—another glass, the remote control, anything that would shatter into pieces that Stella would have to pick up. But Mama reached out surprisingly strong fingers and grabbed onto my wrist.
“Rosie,” she said. “The monster inside. You have to. Accept it.” Her breath hitched and she started coughing, deep and juicy, but she didn’t let go of my wrist. When she was done, she wiped the spittle off her chin and pulled me closer. “Even though. You don’t. Want it,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “It’s yours. It’s powerful. And it’s yours.”
***
I was twenty years old, queasy in the bathroom, counting the days since I’d last bled, when I realized the seed had sprouted.
Stella already knew. She’d known before I did; she didn’t need to see the plus sign on the stick I’d buried under dirty tissues in the garbage can. When I came downstairs she was sitting at the cloth-covered table. Without the haze of cigarette smoke blurring its edges, the table looked too crisp, too sharp, too real. But Stella looked just like Mama sitting there, and she was fully in possession of Mama’s skill. She turned three cards out onto the table, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “This isn’t going to turn out like you expect.”
“What isn’t?”
She flipped over another card, horizontal on the table: the Empress. “You’re pregnant.”
“So?” I said, too loud. “I’m gonna take care of it.” Even though I knew I couldn’t. We didn’t have the money for me to travel to the nearest clinic, two states away, and anyone local who might have taken pity on me had been scared into compliance by the last wave of arrests.
She flipped over one more card and laid it down on top of the Empress, making a cross. The Devil, grinning at me. Right-side up, of course. “I’m sorry, Rosie. The cards are never wrong.”
I couldn’t help it; I laughed. Mama’s voice snaked up from her grave and whispered in my ear: See? There’s always been a monster inside you, and now it wants out.
***
For nine months the monster grew its own flesh-and-blood body under my skin. Every day I stood in front of the mirror, just like I had when I was a little girl. Back then, I’d promised myself I would keep the monster contained within my body like a snake coiled around my intestines. But I wasn’t a child any longer, and I knew that this monster could not be contained. It pressed against my bladder, settled itself heavy on my pelvic floor, reminding me which direction it was heading.
Accept it, Mama had told me. But how could I, when it had turned my body into something unrecognizable, something not mine? The monster had stretched my skin and shoved aside my organs and loosened my ligaments. Whenever I tried to relax, my muscles seized and cramped, my body preparing itself to give birth with or without my help. My ankles were swollen and my stomach was tiger-striped and everything hurt. This thing inside me—I could swear it had teeth and claws already. It was devouring me from the inside out. And if it was doing all this damage now, what would it do when it was released into the world?
Stella was downstairs, washing the breakfast dishes. I knew without looking that she’d swept up any crumbs I’d left on the floor, and wiped the counters until they gleamed. Soon, she’d flip the sign on the door to OPEN and welcome the first of the day’s clients to sit at her card table. She worked hard, when I’d gotten fired from every job I’d ever had. She cleaned up the messes I made, replenished the food I ate, kept the house running as best she could. She took care of me as best she could, too. Her big sister. The fuckup carrying a monster inside her.
I got downstairs when Stella was setting things up at the table. She didn’t try to stop me when I snatched her car keys out of the bowl by the door. She just sat there shuffling her cards.
“Do you have money?”
“Took some from your purse,” I said, daring her to argue.
“I’m not gonna see that car again, am I?” she called as I slammed the door behind me.
I squeezed myself behind the wheel and turned the key in the ignition without strapping on my seat belt. I wasn’t a good girl; I hadn’t been in a long time. But I could still make this one last good choice: to leave. Mama told me this monster was mine: my fault, my problem. Not Stella’s. I knew it would be the death of me. I’d come to terms with that a long time ago. But when it came down to it, I didn’t want it to be the death of Stella, too.
***
The sun was setting behind me, glaring in my rear-view like the world on fire, when my water broke, and the contractions got a whole lot worse. Before this, I’d been able to keep my grip on the steering wheel and my eyes on the road; now, the pain was too much to breathe through. It was just about nighttime, and the monster wanted to come out, because nighttime is when monsters are born.
I parked in front of a darkened restaurant, one of those breakfast places that’s only open until early afternoon. A contraction stopped me in my tracks as I made my way through the parking lot. My body, which had been in the process of betraying me for months, had fully defected; it was controlled by a greater force now, a terrible and implacable force that wrung out my insides like a wet towel, pulling and twisting and squeezing with no regard for what it broke in the process. While I panted through the contraction, I thought about how much I hated this monster, this thing that had turned my body against me. It wanted me dead, and I wished I wanted it dead, too, but I didn’t. No matter how much I hated it, I didn’t.
“Just hold on.” I said. The contraction ebbed enough for me to pick the lock on the restaurant door. It was a cheap lock; I could have picked it in my sleep, which was good, because another contraction hit as soon as I got inside. I bent over a counter and screamed until it passed.
Water. I was going to need water, and maybe a first-aid kit. I stumbled behind the counter into the kitchen just in time for another wave of pain. “Wait,” I whimpered. I wasn’t ready. I was never going to be ready, but the monster didn’t care. It’s gonna come out of you eventually, Mama had said, and “eventually” had become now now now. I took off my pants and underwear—both were soaking wet anyway—and squatted over them. My whole body screamed at me to push, and I couldn’t have resisted if I’d wanted to, and I gritted my teeth and bore down even though it felt like I was on fire, and then all of a sudden something squirmed free of me like a fish wriggling out of a net.
I sat back heavily on the disgusting floor, dazed and depleted. It’s done, I thought, and then I said it out loud: “It’s done,” like I was reciting an incantation. After all these years—my whole life—the monster was out of my body. I hardly knew what that meant. I blinked tears and sweat out of my eyes and looked down, to see what I had made.
There, writhing on my bunched-up pants, covered in the fluids of my own body, was a baby.
Ten fingers, ten toes. No teeth.
Just a baby, squirming and cold. A cord still tethered us together, as if reminding me where it came from.
Not it—him. Not a monster. A boy.
I leaned over and picked him up. His little head bobbed like a bird, seeking milk, seeking skin. Holding him in one arm, I unbuttoned my shirt with shaking fingers and pulled aside my bra so that he could nuzzle close.
That’s when I looked up, and saw I wasn’t the only one here.
He was hardly more than a kid, eyes huge, crouched next to a bucket of mop water. He wore a rubber glove on one hand and held a phone in the other, filming me. Filming us.
“Holy shit,” he said. “Holy shit.”
I flinched, and felt my baby flinch, too. He was so small, so fragile, and he’d just had his first fright in this world. The injustice of that awoke something steely inside me, something bigger than the pain and confusion and exhaustion that followed giving birth. I cradled my baby to my chest and held my other palm forward to block the all-seeing eye of the kid’s phone. “Leave us alone.”
“Holy shit, are you okay? How did you get in here? Should I—should I call an ambulance?”
“No. Don’t.” He was still filming, and I shifted myself sideways so my arm would shield my baby.
“I’ll call an ambulance.” He lowered his phone and pulled his other glove off with his teeth. “Hang on, I’m calling right now.”
“Don’t,” I said again, but the kid was already fumbling with the phone, already making the call.
My baby’s tiny fingers were probing and pinching, his mouth tasting my flesh. We were both so tired; we just wanted to nap together, to get to know each other from the outside. But that wasn’t going to happen. An ambulance was going to arrive. EMTs would take my baby and weigh him and test him and let him get chilled away from my skin. Would they know how to hold him correctly? Would they let him cry? Would they take him away from me, his fuckup of a mom? I wouldn’t be able to stop them if they did. I was, after everything, still powerless—against the state, against whatever force controlled the cards. Against my own body.
With that thought, I felt another urge to push—not as hard, but just as impossible to ignore. The placenta slid out of me, and the monster did too.
New teeth pierced my gums, razor-sharp and dripping with my own blood. Talons ruptured the tips of my fingers. Wings unfurled from my collarbones and I spread them wide, knocking over bowls and pans, casting shadows of leather and bone. It was easy, so easy to let the monster out. It had been waiting for so many years.
This isn’t going to turn out like you expect, Stella had said, and she was right. She and Mama both.
I blinked my new eyes and looked up at the kid. He was frozen, clutching the phone, his pants dark with urine. I let a low growl slip between my pointed teeth. The kid screamed then, scrambling to his feet and running, slipping in mop water and piss, crashing into the counter, until he made it out of the restaurant. Leaving us finally, blissfully, alone.
I looked down at my baby; he had not stirred, other than to begin gnawing at my nipple with his hard little gums. He was completely unafraid. He trusted my talons would never scratch him. He trusted my wings would shelter him, would keep him safe, even though I hadn’t asked for him, hadn’t wanted him. I hadn’t asked for this newfound strength coursing through my veins, either, this power thrumming in my chest. But it had been mine from the beginning, since I was born. And no one was going to take what was mine.
Holding my baby gently but firmly against me, I stood and stretched my rough-scaled legs. The kid had left the restaurant door ajar when he’d fled, letting the damp night air come through. I closed my eyes for a moment, drinking it in, like my baby drinking in milk. Then I stepped outside and spread my wings, and let the night claim us both.
