COULD YOU BE DOING SOMETHING MORE?

My first child consumed everything inside me, devouring whatever I ate—milk, eggs, honey, ham, and stranger cravings. It was never enough. I plucked gnats from the carpet, chewed through the shower curtain, swallowed blood. Baby was always hungry, always wanting. His teeth scraped my insides, his nails sharp and gleaming like the razors I once used on my skin.

I knew I wouldn't hold him much longer.

Soon, my belly became my entire being, my weight his alone. I hunched through the apartment, my back straining, my body no longer my own. I was alone then. The man who had made this child with me had disappeared, lost to the television. His remnants—sheddings of past selves—clung to the air, and I inhaled them without meaning to. I pulled strands of his long hair from the sink. I swelled beyond bearing, beyond remembering where I was or where I had been. I'd find myself speaking into a silent phone, my fingers greasy, my body half-hanging out an open window.

To hold onto my sanity, I whispered to the child. Some words painted my vision in color—"where" washed the day in yellow, "ouch" tickled green, "tomorrow" pink. Other words became sounds that echoed inside my skull. The ceiling would tilt and cave; some nights, I lost my sight. My hair thinned. My face blurred into something unrecognizable.

And then, one night, I felt something inside me give way.

A door. A threshold opening in my stomach. A collision deep within.

I crawled to the front door and out into the night. The air burned. Porch lights had long since died, but moths still throbbed around them, their wings glistening in the moonlight, their bodies pulsing like something half-dead. Trees swallowed the stairs. My belly stretched, swollen with something more than flesh—something waiting to be born.

I might have gone on forever.

I don't know who took me in.

On the table, they cut me open. I watched from above as they slit me from navel to sternum. My insides spilled into the room—unfurling like a strange, fleshy flower. My eyes were open. My skin was pale.

The doctors replaced my soft parts with metal, fitted my face with a mask. If there was sound, I couldn't hear it over the brightness, the hum of fluorescent lights, the deep, bruised churning within me. My vision flickered, raw spots of color at the edges. My head was wrapped in gauze, my breath unsteady. I drifted above myself.

And then—he emerged.

My firstborn. My son.

I watched him rise from my body, vibrating in silence. I had longed for something for so long, yet I had never expected to be called back down.

The boy was enormous. His skin slick, too bright, too soft. The doctors struggled to lift him. The air filled with shrill, high-pitched sounds.

Back in my body, everything distorted. The walls breathed. My tongue went numb. My son stretched longer than a machete, his skull too large, his chest blotched with something dark. Blonde hair—like his father's—spread over his face, veiling his closed eyes. I could see him. He could not see me.

They took him away.

I waited, arms empty.

They did not bring him back.

They did not bring him back.

I screamed, demanding my child. My voice cracked against the ceiling. The years unraveled into a slow ache, time thinning into something distant and cold.

"Please," I begged, my voice raw. "Please, please."

They hushed me, patted my hands, spooned applesauce into my mouth. I spat it out. The lights blinked in and out.

"Where is my baby?" I asked, over and over. "What's his number? Let me hold him."

The answers came:

You are not ready. The time is never. He won't live.

Above me, the lights flickered—day, night, day, night.

Days later, I took my child home in a state-issued sack. He could not yet withstand sunlight. The sky outside was thick and black, cracked like an old plate. The air reeked of something burnt, the wind whispering in voices I couldn't name.

With him came a pamphlet, heavy as stone. I memorized the instructions, whispering them like a lullaby:

There are holes in every home.

Consider the effect of light on the child's skin.

If you become tired, remember—someone is always awake somewhere. Rest well.

Try to smile.

If the child misbehaves, consider these punishments: threat of hair loss, short confinement, gravel picnic, distorted speech, scalding bath.

Sometimes, to invoke power, pretend the child isn't there.

Sometimes, press your eyes to his.

Despite the injections, despite the creams, his skin remained thick and mottled, always on the verge of breaking open. He smelled of cabbage. His pupils spun neon yellow, like his father's. He moved easily in his body, towering by my waist at only six days old. He ate endlessly—raw meat, soup from the can, anything slick or sweet. He belched, laughing with his entire being.

His body was strange. His fingerprints coiled in unfamiliar patterns.

On rare afternoons, we walked beyond the house, into the forest that had swallowed the backyard. Trees stood gnarled and bare, their highest branches veiled in mold. The stream that once lulled me to sleep had dried to mud. The land was littered with refuse. No other people ever appeared. We marked our path with neon tape, trailing it behind us like breadcrumbs.

At a charred valley, where the sun sometimes rose, I told him of the home I had once known, before the running, before the pain.

At the riverbed, now dammed and dry, I spoke of the days I swam with my brother—water rushing just above our stomachs, the current forever pulling.

I did not tell him what I would have done differently, if I had known then.

I showed him the places where life had once been. He listened, teeth gnawing at his knuckles, his thick fingers flexing. Whether he understood or not didn't matter—my words were sinking in. They would settle in his flesh, in his marrow. One day, he would remember.

I would make this world a place to rest.

We would not be alone.

As the weeks passed, the earth itself cracked apart—plates snapping, windows shattering from the force of wind, flies breaking through the glass. And my son, my child, only grew faster.

I could not sew quickly enough to keep up with him. He stretched past the fabric in days.

Soon, he was a man.

Already, he was too large for me to hold.

I called him different names, and he answered to them all.

The apartment was bitterly cold. The heater barely worked. Our breath hung in the air, crystallizing. The chill made him restless, violent. He tore apart the furniture, ripped pages from my books, beheaded his dolls.

A restless child. An eager one. He didn't mean to bruise me. He only wanted, like me, something to hold a certain way.

At night, when exhaustion overtook him, I tried to teach him language. He had an appetite for learning. He watched my old tapes—shows from before the broadcasts had ceased. I no longer remembered the storylines, but he watched with sharp, unblinking eyes.

He could see things others couldn't.

In the newsreels, I let him witness the collapse of the world. The anchors, powdered and placid, spoke of disasters with too-wide eyes, their smiles barely holding together.

The land split.

The cattle rotted.

The moon leaked steam.

The babies were born with hair tongues—

Like my child.

Like me.

And in the dark, his voice hummed along with the jingles of old advertisements, singing in a language I had yet to understand.