By Adara Schwartz

It shot through me, pain like something scraping deep inside, ripping. My mother said it would be like this. Said when she pushed me from her body she’d begged God for forgiveness. Yet when seeing my fat, dimpled face, her frantic prayers hushed, all that mundane violence at once alchemized to intimacy. She kissed my warm, sticky brow, felt connected to the thousands of women before her. I didn’t feel like that when I saw my son. I felt like I needed to vomit.

I had met his father at a gas station when picking up my weekly lottery ticket. I always thought I’d win big, big enough to take the only train out of this city living in the guts of the water. The train runs under the ocean, and out into the sky. I had been spectacularly unimpressed by the men our city had on offer, all of whom made me want to unfurl any effort to preserve myself, resign to a life of recluse. They were good men, lukewarm. I wanted to burn. 

My son’s father had some sickness over him, his skin cling-filmed in pearl, shining like an oil slick under the fluorescents of the store. He wore an eggshell western hat, and when I paid for my ticket, I pretended I was lost so I could tell him how it made him look like a real space cowboy. How do you know I’m not? He flashed his teeth, odd things, shark-shaped. Once, in high school, I watched a boy get bitten by three dogs as I hid behind the bins, inhaling the sweet rot of summer. That night I slipped a hand under my silken pajama bottoms, dreamed I was taken by a creature with serrated teeth that sunk deep into my thighs. I thought of the boy as I leaned in close to my Space Cowboy, told him my place was five minutes from here, imagined his mouth tearing me apart.

He was nice enough, took his shoes off and told me I had a clean face. I ignored how he seemed more liquid than flesh at various angles, how he twisted his neck backward to look at the moon through my window. The moon pulsed blue each time he did this. What are you thinking? I said, indigo flush all over the walls. I am thinking of home, he said. Then, please remove your clothes. He dragged his teeth over my neck, and I imagined the boy and the dogs and the blood. I asked him what it was like outside of the city, and he held my wrists. 

When it was over with, and I had made all the noises, collapsed into him like those black holes at the edge of the universe, he slipped his hat back on and stood by the window. I sat like a child shrouded in blankets as he pulled his boots on. Will you visit again? I said, trying at an intimacy I knew would take years to build. The blue of the moon dripped through the window once more, and with it, he dissolved just as fast as he came. 

I felt it festering inside of me as soon as he left. Each week I walked from my house to the gas station, spent hours on my face, only to find the store clerk and all his indifference. I imagined that one day the numbers on the lottery ticket would match the numbers on my television, how I would take the money and get on the next train out to find my Space Cowboy. I ate cold noodles and stared at the sky deep into those thin hours of the night. All the while I was growing something ugly inside, something that was mine, intrinsically, yet filled me with a dull dread each day I felt my skin stretch tighter around my bones. I willed him to come back until it was finally time to see what he had left sleeping inside of me. 

I didn’t know what I expected. Perhaps I thought that the blue of my son’s skin would remind my Space Cowboy of the blue thrum of the moon, that he would be called back to a home he did not ask for. I stared dumbstruck at what we had created. It had the look of something clenched, half-formed. Oily sheen of skin, dog-toothed and ready to scream.