THE NASTY, HIDEOUS, DARK, TERRIFYING, FUCKING BEAUTIFUL STUFF OF AN ENTIRE UNIVERSE II By Jenny Heineman
18. There is another human being inside me who dreams her own dreams about colors and sensations.
19. The repetitive boom-boom-crash of renovations signals our privilege—we are now the kinds of people inside little dollhouses with brightly colored walls and bookshelves stuffed with feminist literature, Zen poetry and plays, with eroticism peppered throughout. We are now the kinds of people who call craft stores looking for Martha Stewart embossing punches in clever shapes like butterflies.
20. The official medical conclusion is that the baby is either huge or I’m fat. I imagine an Australopithecus afarensis female reaching for her measuring tape in order to make judgments about the size of her furry, life-giving abdomen.
21. Because I no longer harness the ability to express myself maturely, either through dialogue or other adult means, I resort to weeping, pouting, or accusatory hollering about my fundamental un-lovability. After finishing a 1972 essay by Nora Ephron in which she bashfully alludes to her rape fantasies and names false consciousness as the culprit, I respond to his naked, beautiful cock with callous silence. Ephron’s collection was a wedding gift bestowed upon me after my besty drunkenly called me a “shitty person” during her wedding toast and I can’t shake the thought that demanding he refer to me as a “pregnant slut” is somehow connected to both my false consciousness and/or being a shitty person.
22. My mother’s eyes were wide the time I saw her next to a gold-plated Saint Wenceslaus. There was one moment, a passing moment just before the moment when I saw her, when she was still somebody’s daughter.
23. The glowing, coriander-yellow purge of my first Indian curry indulgence since getting knocked up, spicy level zero, overflowed the dishes that were soaking there and so I wept and blamed my absent companion for getting me pregnant.
24. The senile priest at my grandmother’s funeral gave a eulogy in which he praised this particular day as the best day to die despite knowing that my grandmother had passed almost a week prior. Then, he revealed a list of his top ten favorite days to die.
When my grandmother’s husband died, a nameless woman in black lace gave a eulogy in which she apologized for the abuses of her lover, my grandfather. My seven uncles with first names that rhyme joined the posthumous accusations, claiming that, indeed, he had been an abusive letch. Years later, these same uncles, at our wedding in ironed, collared shirts and wool, winter coats, would remark that my breasts had nearly doubled their original size.
25. I wake, now, to the perception of color. Blue is the most overwhelming. I am not simply witness to it, but engulfed and loved in its fabric; I am a tiny piece of every melody hidden within the waves of blue and light blue and paler blue and deep, dark blue. She’s chosen to share these sensations with me, these primitive dreams that exist in the cloth of her soft skull and radiate into the finite spaceship of my body.
26. I am Freud’s Little Hans, though I’ve replaced horses with planes—a simultaneous fear of their inability to stay in the air or the captain’s tragic humanity and a desperate obsession and desire for its crash. If the horse’s bite is Hans’s fear of castration, an Oedipal fear of being unable to fuck his mother, my inevitable crash—or the machinery that facilitates it—is the object, the fallible object that keeps me from my mother. The fear of crashing, the fear as a thing, is the manifestation of everything that keeps me from my mother—namely, my mother herself—so I also wish and obsess over her crash, her demise. Ergo, I simultaneously fear my separation from my mother and hope for it; indeed, I hope for our eternal separation through death or a similar crash.
27. She is a beauty, to be sure, in designer fashions and vintage clutches. Her bird arms are like snowflakes just kind of breezing through the bloated, slobbery world of desire and when she holds her belly the way she’s learned to do from the magazines, it’s unclear if she’s cradling a fetus or indigestion. She calls herself a “whale,” the way she’s learned to do from the magazines, and longs for her body past, like her body’s gone, like she’s a floating, postmodern consciousness or, worse, fat.
She’s been trained to forget that her body is the greatest artist that ever lived, creating sentientness out of body stories, nurturing and sustaining a sweet, dreaming babe. Her body is nature and it is wild and it is unforgiving and brutal and expansive and, most of all, soft and fat and round in all the places it should be.
28. Experts advise my partner against viewing the birth of our child for reasons concerning his potential inability to ever see my pussy— “his play zone,” as they call it— the same afterwards.
29. The coolness of the situation is conveyed through a distinct lack of color. Shadows and the things they shadow are monochromatic; even the ice cream store is an assortment of grey. Hushed, solitary profiles spoon globs of frozen sugar into their mouths. I search for a specific kind of feminine energy within these silhouettes so that we may eat ice cream together. The feminine energy and I know full well we won’t exist tomorrow. And then I wake up.
30. I always suspected the slight smell of feces was coming from the materials comprising floss. Turns out, it is the smell of my rotting teeth, a process now expedited through hormones or something.
31. Doulas and whores are infinitely similar—we make webpages devoted to our various techniques, endeavor to mask our commodification processes for reasons of “authenticity,” work primarily in the overlapping realms of emotions and genitals, and offer testimonials that are markedly alike, such as:
“My husband agreed to hire her. Truthfully I think he thought he should be all I need, but after we went through with it, he told me he was SO happy to have seen her. She made him feel at ease and included.”
32. Light dusts of snow fall into tiny, sunken pockets where the squirrels hide their walnuts. You drag your sleepy body to the kitchen to make pancakes. Sugar butter dances with conversations between you and the dog and blossom into dreams of a young boy in his mother’s wigs. I dream of you; your childhood home, flanked in forest and winding creeks, a home that provides continuous sustenance and imagination despite the inevitable loneliness that accompanies being one piece of a larger family. You want to be an artist when you grow up.
33. Today, we are one person. Tomorrow, we will be two people. And, someday, she will be just one person again. Perhaps she will experience the stages of grief after her parents pass and, maybe, she will know that we loved her.
About the Author
Jenny lives in Las Vegas and Omaha with her geriatric poodle and lovely partner. She’s a doctoral student in sociology and a kind-of-former sex worker. She (very) infrequently blogs for Sheri’s Ranch, a brothel in Nevada, and has written for Tits and Sass, Nerve, and some academic journals here and there. She’s also a preggo lady who is very much looking forward to her kid’s angsty teenage years.
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