I also have a couple interpretations of this short story. Perhaps I will share that another time, on another post. That is not what this post is about though. This post is simply a log of the lines I underlined while reading the short story, “Mothers” in Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado.
a crack that passes through her lip like she is dirt that never known rain
wide eyes that shimmer like Japanese beetles
a one-beer-deep feeling
The hard pears roll, and the overripe ones splat.
Identical tears slide down eye to ear on each side of her face, like a picture of a baby crying and not a baby at all.
A sea of hats and veils covered up women's updos, as per request of the couple.
a woman in a cummerbund swept by me. I became very conscious of the way I chewed.
something inside of my cracked open, and I let her step inside.
This baby's head is bothering me because it's like a piece of fruit gone bad. I understand that, now, in the middle of this endless desert of sound. It's like the soft spot on the peach that you can just plunge your thumb into, with no questions asked, with not so much as a how-do-you-do.
packing a glass bowl as she straddled me, poking the weed gently with her finger
the smoke crawled out of her mouth one limb at a time; an animal.
filling my lungs with a heady smoke
as we languished there, I felt my whole self loosening, my mind retreating to a place somewhere around my left ear
we drifted in water warm as soup
my legs gently scissored through the water
I felt like she was seared into my timeline, unchangeable as Pompeii
I would look over her smooth pale skin, the pink shock of her labia, and kiss her mouth in a way that sent quakes straight to my fault lines, and think, Thank god we cannot make a baby.
wiping soft little gnocchi pieces from the gabbling chin of a baby, of our baby.
in the good bed, as she slid her hand into me, and I pulled and she gave and I opened and she came without touching herself and I responded by losing all speech, I thought, Thank god we cannot make a baby.
a collection of six dozen mugs that we have found beautiful or ironic over the years,
a collection of glass jars, the labels peeled away
Two glass containers of milk, one good, one sour, a carton of half-and-half, birth control from the age of men that I still haven't thrown away, a near-black eggplant, a jar of horseradish the shape of a bar of soap, olives, sweet Italian peppers tense as hearts, soy sauce, bloody steaks hidden away in the dry fold of paper, leaking shamefully, a cheese drawer with balls of fresh mozzarella floating in their own milky-water broth, and salami with a dusty white tubing
In the freezer, cracked plastic ice trays with cubes swollen past their banks
shallots the size of fists
sesame oil whose glass bottle never seems to lose the greasy sheen on its outside no matter how many times it is wiped clean
a nightstand that, when opened reveals--shut that, please.
in the bathroom, a mirror flecked with mascara from when Bad leans in close, the amoeba of her breath growing and shrinking.
In the tangle of branches, baby birds--the gray and pink of half-cooked shrimp and with bones like dried spaghetti--scream for their mothers."
In the winter, the ground more exposed than we thought possible.
inside, parched and itchy skin, cool lotion whorled onto backs
holding each other in a pocket of warmth beneath the quilts
shoving aside Tupperware with velvety leftovers, a can wrapped in tinfoil
the smell of baby is replaced by something red-hot, like the burner of an electric stove with nothing on it.
I am a continent but I will not hold
she awkwardly addressed it in the hallway that afternoon, her hands twisting around the cap of a ballpoint pent...She accidentally flipped the cap out of her hands, and it went skittering down the long hallway.
Even as she vanished around the corner, I was still nodding.
I slept the kind of sleep where you wake up and know that you didn't flop around like a fucking hooked fish…
the bodies around me, rumpled and stale, do not react appreciatively to the silence or angrily to the sound, for which I am grateful