MONO ISSUE 2 - Flipbook - Page 75
MEIN SCHATZ
by Daniela Esposito
AFTER NUMEROUS FAILED ATTEMPTS at falling pregnant, Marie accepted that she was
too old for motherhood. The blood has run dry, she said to herself. But then it happened.
It was a Tuesday mid-morning, a slice of day that until then had not been of any
consequence. She felt the intuition of life in the form of a nausea that rippled through
her abdomen. And she just knew, knew it in her bones, in her gut. She sat across from
her husband as he scrolled through the New Scientist on his iPad. At that speed, she
wondered how he could ever digest anything beyond the fragments of headlines. ‘The
blood from a mother’s umbilical cord,’ he said, ‘has been proven to make the brains of
mice young again.’
‘What’s that?’ Her ears pricked up. Normally his reiterations of headlines went right
over her head, ‘The blood from an umbilical cord can make the mother young again?’,
‘Well, hold on, I didn’t quite say that’—But Marie didn’t hear another word. She leant out
the window as she listened to the distant chime of an ice-cream van, her eyes glassy
with pale enchantment. He kissed her on the head as he slung his satchel over his
shoulder. A flake of croissant danced from his body onto her. She scattered the crumbs
and then he disappeared off to work, to return smelling of the outside; of trains, filing
cabinets and economics.
She would leave later, or maybe she wouldn’t go at all. On rare occasions, she felt
suddenly, enormously aware of a sense of freewill. This mostly transpired when she
happened to catch herself at an angle in the mirror so that she appeared as a different
person altogether. She could do whatever she wanted right now, from pulling a sickie, to
playing God and hurtling herself down the stairs. Then, she felt another spasm, a ripple,
the great wave of Kanagawa! And she was vomiting into the basin of their toilet which
Elliot had imported from Tokyo. Her breast plummeted onto a button causing a fountain
of warm frothy liquid to shoot into her nostrils. Then she played herself a lullaby. She
didn’t understand the words, but felt soothed anyway.
One evening as Marie lay with her feet across Elliot’s lap as they watched an episode
of reality TV of questionable ethics, she felt herself suddenly wet. She raised herself
onto her elbows to peer over the great hump of her stomach, finding her cup of tea
untouched on the coffee table. She realised that the spillage had come from inside her.
‘I think my water’s broke, Elliot.’ She had imagined something more volcanic, say, a
shattered fire hydrant on a New York street corner. They looked at each other and
giggled deliriously. Soon they were flying down the linoleum of the hospital corridor, she
in a wheelchair and he her courier. Faster, faster, faster! Her mind raced back to the
supermarkets of her childhood as she reclined in a trolley, feeling the cold metal cut into
her thighs, her sisters obediently chasing after her as they revelled in the dismay of the
elderly onlookers.
The baby was born at 19:00 hours. The room quietened to a humdrum. Marie listened
intently to the tinnitus she had since she was young. A swishing and swooshing like
butterfly wings, that had first visited her on an unusually warm night in December. That
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