is the author of Kissed By.
© FC2
Short creative work of hers has appeared in print in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Post Road, Chain, sleepingfish, Hotel Amerika, Phoebe, and online in Exquisite Corpse, Diagram, jmww, and elimae, among many other places. She teaches fiction writing at Eugene Lang College, The New School, currently serving as co-chair of the Literary Studies Department.
The drug washed over me like a truck.What did you just give me, I asked from under it. Morphine, the anesthesiologist called down from the driver’s seat.
The baby was just born that minute, dangling – steamy, bloody – from the hands of the tired attending, somewhere across the room, beyond the flip side of the blue crinkly all-purpose all-weather synthesis of all the best efforts of product design to shield me from my own body, with the sad side effect of shielding me from everything else too, so I could see nothing but the blue underside of a truck. I could only hear the baby say, I’ve been born, as babies do, with a waah. I waahed in turn, relieved to hear his humanness after months of deepsea silence, spouting a quick spray of joy into the fucked-up fluorescence, and an urgent Is he okay Is he okay.
Then, something soft on the side of the cold head I couldn’t lift – my own – his washed, dried heat, the powder of his emergence into air. Toward which, with the need of all time, my junked-up face.
She wasn’t there, she didn’t see, she didn’t ask, and I didn’t say any of that. I didn’t say anything but that I hated the morphine. My beautiful blue-veined baby fish was born the night before as I was temporarily run over, or vice versa, and something in the gasping afterfact must have reminded my mother of the night her own blue-veined baby fish was born, and how she must have wished she’d have been hit by a truck – pharmaceutical, metaphorical, or otherwise – for good. How deep under she would go in the face of the tonnage of the toddling turtle I would soon become, the lizard of my latency, the eohippus of my adolescence. How too slowly I would recapitulate phylogeny. How like a dirty vehicle I would say, Wash me. Feed me. Keep me warm. How, later on, I’d boo back like a bear on two feet.
How having to attend to me would drive her, and to what.
Afterwards. Closed back up and out from under. Repackaged. The next day. My mother rode in on the cart carrying the aqua-coated pain medication being pushed by the nurse. Take it, she said, Take it. I said, No, I don’t want it. And then, which should have seemed to come from out of the clear blue, I hated the morphine. But who but a mother takes for granted the antecedent, who but the mother of all knowing it all, who but she says, No, you loved it. I said, I hated it. No, she said, you loved the morphine.
She can’t tell me nothing, what I love and don’t love. I’m telling you, I hated the morphine. I’d rather suck the puke straight from the mouth of my brand-new twitching little person than swallow, shoot, snort, smoke, or drink the stinking drugs. That’s the difference.
© 2010 Alexandra Chasin
