Metaphors

I keep seeing pregnant women. For a while I thought that maybe I was just imagining it, but I’ve started keeping count and I passed six heavily pregnant women this morning alone. The total for the whole day was probably somewhere around ten or eleven.

When the fifth woman overtook me on the sidewalk, a toddler towed behind her by a limp arm, I thought of a line from Sylvia Plath’s “Metaphors.” “A melon strolling on two tendrils.”

Two nights ago, when we were both too drunk, the condom broke. “I’m sorry,” you apologized, “this has never happened to me before.” “It’s alright,” I said. “It’s ok.” A headache was ebbing and flowing with my pulse. There had been a fridge full of cheap Mexican beer at the party. “Should you get the morning-after pill or something tomorrow?” you asked. There had also been a round of whiskey shots. “No.” We’d left the party walking hand in hand, but I was tired and lagged a stride behind. You towed me, reeling and liquor-blind, back to your block. “I’m on birth control. It’s fine. Don’t worry.” You laughed. “Why didn’t you tell me?” “I don’t know.” Laughter again. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

It was easier to say birth control and allow the inevitable misunderstanding than lay out the truth, naked and silver like a caught fish. Birth is controlled in that it’s entirely prevented. “You see this leg?” I wanted to ask. “I traded one part for another. I preserved the exterior at the expense of the interior. This leg cost me all my children before I knew what that cost really meant.”

We talked in the dark until one of us didn’t respond. I watched streetlight wash the matte bedroom walls.

I’m a seedless grape, beached urchin husk, pumpkin scraped into a
jack-o-lantern; a compliment to a garish woman, plans made never to be kept, the saline depths of the Dead Sea.

Erin Brady is a native of South Texas living in New York City. She is presently an undergraduate at NYU. She writes best in the morning with a bowl of cereal.