Cannibal

In the movie theater I could waste the afternoon. I could pretend. I could pretend until one day a baby was crying on the screen. A baby was crying in a pram stranded in a green field studded by green hills. A baby wailed and my breasts engorged, filled, pulsed. 

In the bathroom I squeezed my sore breasts into the sink and in the mirror I saw a man’s sharp face. It was the Cannibal. He’d been in and out, though present, in his lurking way, since I was a girl. The Cannibal said, Can I taste? He knelt beneath me and I bent down to his mouth. He sniffed, milk ran down his pink lips. Water ran from his lids and nostrils. He was so moved he was having trouble breathing. I made a fist and I hit the Cannibal in the eyes and nose. I made a fist and I pretended the Cannibal was a bad dog.

In the mirror the Cannibal bit me. In the mirror he sucked. I watched. In the mirror I imagined I was the Cannibal’s mother, nursing the Cannibal drunk. The Cannibal’s mother had a cold, opalescent face and blew smoke in the Cannibal’s eyes. The Cannibal’s mother wasn’t good or she wouldn’t have birthed the Cannibal.

In the mirror I said, You be your own snake eating its tail, you be your own heaven and hell. 

You honor thy mother by eating thy mother. A leech is a leech is a leech. A breast is a globe. A breast is an oblong. My baby died inside me and I pushed and pushed and the doctor pulled her out blue and not breathing and said there was nothing we could do because it was too late, it was out of our hands, but my milk continued, milked into mine, and the Cannibal came back. 

Once I watched a little girl pull apart worms. She should have been on her knees worshiping worms. She wasn't, she was murdering them. She kept saying, This is how you make a baby. She said that every time she ripped a worm in half.

When I was a little girl the Cannibal chased me with an axe. He chased me all around. I knew he could kill me and I knew he didn’t understand death yet. I understood death. Yes, I understood. The Cannibal could split my brain in half and only after I was spilling everywhere pink and red in the dirt my head open wide would the Cannibal understand death. And I would have become immortal because I would have been the image of death forever in his mind. I’m still alive so I didn’t become immortal. I could’ve, a second more, but I didn’t, because somehow my mother knew. My mother came outside and she screamed. She screamed and her scream became immortal for the Cannibal holding the axe over my head. In the movie theater the darkness sealed me from the light of day. I stroked the Cannibal’s hair. I stroked his hair and I felt him suck and I remembered the story my mother told me about the woman who drank too much and passed out and woke in a pool of blood and then lit a cigarette only to find it slipping from her lips because her lips were sliding off her face. She walked to the mirror and her face was gone. It turned out the Cannibal, her beloved Cannibal, had eaten her face. Her eyes were closed and he’d eaten her face and she hadn’t screamed. In the dark all images were possible. In the dark a girl could stroke a Cannibal’s head. In the dark a Cannibal could shroud himself inside a girl. In the dark a girl’s baby was not dead. In the dark a girl could remember how she used to count: now my baby is the size of a blackberry, now she’s a plum. In the dark a girl could say it wasn’t her fault. 

In the dark the Cannibal’s eyes drowned and dilated. Children must swallow their mother: that’s how they grow souls. In the dark the baby was gone. The pram was gone. The green hills were gone. The walls were wet and mushrooming and the credits were rolling. The Cannibal nursed, the Cannibal dropped his knives, the Cannibal learned to cry.