Immaculate Conception

Cybele stood at the grave where her son’s body was rotting beneath her feet. The bitter air of midwinter swam around the exposed areas of her skin, but as she looked at his name on the rock before her, she was engulfed by an anesthetic numbness so powerful she wondered if she’d every feel anything again, for the rest of her life. She didn’t expect she was long for this world anyway; she thought perhaps she’d kill herself.

She remembered his birth: the pain, the tearing of flesh, the endless rivers of blood that poured from within her. And then, a boy. A marvelous baby boy with skin like silk and cotton hair. The doctor had put him in her arms, and she promised that she’d protect him. No matter what, no matter when, she’d be there to keep him from harm.

And she had broken that promise. Her baby, a full grown man now, on the piss stinking bathroom floor with a mouth full of vomit. “Asphyxiation,” they’d called it in the autopsy report. If only she’d gotten there faster. If only she’d loved him fiercer. If only she’d never let him grow up and move out on his own.

She wanted—needed—to feel it one last time. To feel what it was like when he was so fresh and new. The fear, the excitement. The overwhelming responsibility that comes with pushing life from within one’s being. She slid to her knees and rested her back against the stone, the last gift she’d purchased for him. She closed her eyes and tried to remember the agony that was thirty three years old.

But merely thinking was not enough, so she started to push, to grunt. Her eyes squinted, and despite the snow that fell around her, she started to sweat. One, two, three…one, two three…she numbered each breath, and held her own hand for comfort, support. You can do this. She brushed her hair from her forehead.

Something stirred within her stomach and the skin fluttered like disturbed water. Cybele choked back a sob, and she frantically removed her pants, her undergarments. She folded them neatly and set them off to the side, not wanting to disrupt the space around her. Her back arched as her legs spread open, the wind filling her womb like balloons from so many birthday parties.

The knife in her pocket was there at all times; she had toyed with the thought of slitting her own throat. She removed it now and flicked it open, a thick onyx blade sharp as a butcher’s cleaver.

Cybele placed the blade at the entryway to her womb, delicate fingers like surgeon’s holding the handle, guiding it on its journey. She applied pressure, testing its limits, testing her depth. As she felt it pierce flesh, she slit herself open in one swift motion, and the dam was broken and the rivers of blood flowed forth with life once more.

She put the knife aside and thrust her fist inside of her vagina. Hair met the tips of her fingers, and she screamed to the tune of a lullaby. She pulled at the head, not ungently, eager to see his face. She was ravenous for his face.

Cybele pushed one final time, shouting to heaven to bring him back, and from her loins slid forth a man with vomit green flesh and maggots falling like tears from his hollow eye sockets. As he spit the putrid creatures from his cracked lips he cried, “Mommy? Mommy what have you done to me?”

And Cybele crawled toward his head and held it in her bosom, rocking him back and forth and whispering, “baby, you are perfect.”