fractured literary

You were 48 hours old when I called the midwife and told her that my uterus was falling out, hanging on by a thread. “That’s simply not possible,” she said, far too cool. I told her I was splayed on the bed, naked, holding a hand mirror, and nothing down there looked familiar. Sure, the reds and the pinks and the browns of me remained, but something had come untethered. Something gaped and was lost. You lay next to me sleeping, unaware, wrapped tight in a blanket like a burrito, the way they had taught me at the birthing center. In the morning, she nursed the baby, ate an apple. In the afternoon, she nursed the baby, found her husband’s lunch forgotten in the fridge. Mid-afternoon, she ate a bagel. In the evening, she cooked spaghetti. In the morning, she picked up Cheerios the toddler threw on the floor. In the afternoon, she ate chik’n nuggets the toddler left on her plate. In the evening, she made salmon. In the morning, she packed the kindergartener’s Hello Kitty lunchbox, found the woman’s text messages on his phone. In the afternoon, she ate an edible, waited. In the evening, she ordered Thai.

When Tía Amelia died, we ordered KFC. “Kentucky Fried Cruelty,” she used to call it, before biting into the flesh of a drumstick, brown breadcrumbs on her white teeth, fingertips slick. Red ink bleeding on paper bags scattered before us now outside her empty bedroom, cardboard buckets gray with grease; we trained our teenage grief on this coffee table altar in her dark living room. Unable to eat like the rest of my cousins, I picked at the embroidered veins of the couch, the same couch where Amelia’s husband Gustavo once tried to explain to me how big his dick was. How familiar, the ever-present task of choosing which feelings to play, to keep inside, a 5-CD changer of inappropriate emotions, eject, eject, eject.

She calls herself Rat Girl, but she looks like a little Swiss doll. Now in the Chapel, she is singing round-eyed over our heads and serpentine-ing her head in the shape of infinity as she always does. Her arms are sinewy, pounding at her guitar; bracketing small breasts in a tiny pink t-shirt. Now she is reading from her book, about that time when she was hit by a car. How afterward she saw her reflection in a Good Samaritan’s mirrored sunglasses. How she saw her own blazing eyes in a bloody mass of meat. Then she puts the book away and the sound of her singing tears the air between us again.

The Marys—mothers, daughters, whores, saints, queens and killers—meet every Thursday afternoon in Riverside Park during the spring and summer months. In inclement weather they go to the New York Public Library on 67th Street, between the firehouse and Lincoln Center, across from sharpened condominiums that obliterate history. Some prefer the park, where they can bring doctored tea and smoke on the sly. In the library, they have to dress to recede, to invisible visible among the stacks. A foursome plays Mah Jongg. One Mary plays fast, annoyed that Marie giggles girlishly, takes her time, flips her curls (who would believe a woman her age has skin or hair like that without professional assistance), and despite her utter stupidity, wins often. Another Mary wonders what Universe could have made them both queens, and if the beheading was the cause of such vapidity, or perhaps the powder inadvertently inhaled when they fumigated her wigs. For this Mary, her own towering exile still seems a particularly vicious vengeance, though ultimately it pales against other losses, ones which divested the soul, and split sacred covenants.