GUMMY MUMMY
Our soft wet parts are messy jazz. Glistening, lips and teeth.
“Are you hungry?”
“No”
“You’re never hungry?”
“I am hungry when I am hungry…”
“I am always hungry and so I eat…”
“Okay…”
I run the shower.
In the mirror I admire my ribs just under my small breasts. If I turn my head to the side slightly, I am a vase carved from bone, slathered in blood and nice things like skin and hair. I let down my hair, and it brushes the back of my arm, just near my armpit. Techno thumps in the rooms next door. Everything smells of sweat. It is Friday.
When I get out of the shower, I drop my wet towel on the gaudily upholstered cuck chair in the corner of our room and pick up a packet of three complimentary crackers from the faux-leather tray beside the yellowing plastic kettle. I never use hotel kettles because what if someone boiled their piss in it? He is on the bed, with a glass of scotch, neat, in one hand and is cradling his laptop on his meaty thighs, they sustain my appetite by sight. I never do, but I want to bite them so hard I draw blood. Then I want to look up him smiling with some of the blood between my teeth and sinking into my gum lines. I want to laugh, but innocently. I don’t want to scare anyone. Never.
A bit of his hair flops over his forehead and his jawline is illuminated by the green light from outside. This also makes me ravenous, but in a way in which I want to look away. It reminds me that one day I will die, and he will die, and Fiji will be over for us, and what’s left of copulation and capitalism with be left to new people constantly being born. Born and born and born. School and work and walking and driving and bees dying and chicken farms and plastic and cheap petroleum rags to cover our bodies, OH I WEEP. The future is shiny and it is beautiful. Everything costs a dollar but your soul. Wet parts, sick parts, beautiful parts and conventionally ugly parts coming out of vaginas. “BOTOX. WE NEED MORE BOTOX PEOPLE, AND MONEY” they will scream from the skyscraper tops (there won’t be anymore trees and whatnot, but there will be babies and electric vehicles that don’t make a sound. The plastic in the oceans will also be quiet. People looking at screens to book cheap flights to get away somewhere to look at screens in hotel rooms and on trains. Half-finished chewing gum packets in gutters, headphones and unread paperbacks left behind on buses. Big square eyes. The life we all want.
Paw Paw Rod plays from his laptop’s speaker, and he glances up from the screen. Big old brown-green eyes, really heavy brow. He notices the crackers in my hand. When he looks back down, I put them down on top of my suitcase. Mother’s Day is tomorrow I say. I climb into downward facing dog naked as I count the days since I last spoke to her. At least 90. My breasts are pulled by gravity away from me. My breasts are largely unused I think to myself, I haven’t been a mother. I’ve been beautiful and am, but never in the way a mother is. Spread out on a hospital bed with all that blood and placenta. I have never had someone rest my guts in a dish behind a curtain while they snipped mini-me out of me. Giving birth to an over achiever or an under achiever, someone who doesn’t care what clothes they wear or someone who wears couture and colour. It sounds nice. Someone who covers their mouth when they laugh or throws their head back when they laugh loudly. I stand, stretching my arms above my head. I adopted a Cavalier a little while ago and she’s perfect. She came with her name and a history. A mother herself actually. So many puppies and not a single one to keep.
“Did you remember to take your pill babe?”
“Yeah.”
I move towards him, still wet and climb onto his thighs. If he cums inside me I might have a baby that grows into a fine young woman who stares me straight in the face and blames me for all her suffering. We will make up over coffee and a split Shein order.
by Ruth Niemiec
Ruth Niemiec is a writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in English and Polish. Her work has appeared in Dumbo Feather, ABC Everyday, Mamamia, Revoloon, Pigeon, fly!, Coffee People, ARC Journal, Farside Review, Rhodora, Anti-Heroin Chic, Fugitives and Futurists, Block Party Magazine, Adelaide Magazine, creatures, Parliament, Sad Girls, Minnow, Morpho, Aphelion, Oddball Magazine, Gypsophila, Dollar Store Mag and other publications.
Ruth was first-placed winner of the 2022 Brimbank Writers & Readers Festival Microfiction Award. She was also shortlisted for the Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction.