Woman Lost
By Claire Taylor
It starts with the photographs: One day she is there with him, smiling wide while dressed in a life jacket and grasping a paddle, then the next only he remains, alone and illogical in the back of a double kayak. The dog is playing fetch with himself. The infant is cradled by air. It’s a trick of the mind, she tells herself, a side effect of endless exhaustion.
“I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things,” the postnatal depression screening reads.
She places a checkmark next to Not quite so much now.
When the dog stops responding to her calls from the back door, and the baby screams when she holds him, desperate for the comfort she is already providing, she tells her husband she’s afraid she’s disappearing. “Hmm,” he says in his usual way. “What can we do about that?” Perhaps there’s a pill she can take. Should she plan a night out with the girls?
“I have felt scared or panicky for no good reason,” the screening reads. What makes a reason good, she wonders.
One morning, she prods the scar above her pubis and is surprised to discover that she can press her fist through her belly until she feels the wiggle of her fingertips against her spine. The cavity of her core is empty—her once-womb an emergent extraction when the baby arrived on a river of blood— and she climbs inside it now. First, her arms vanish inside her belly. Then her legs. Then her head. She disappears into the dark hollow of herself, folding up like a magician’s assistant waiting to be sawed in half. She hears her husband call for her. Hears the baby cry, muffled and far-off, like sound trying to reach her through water. Knees to chest and head to knees, she floats, cradling herself, buoyant in the center of her being. Outside, she is only a pile of clothes on the floor. She is only a memory. An idea.
The next time she disappears inside herself she films it and posts the video online. #postpartum she writes on the post. #motherhood #wherehaveigone #womanlost
Planned Parenthood shares it: “This is the future Republicans want.”
After that, the video goes viral and suddenly her feed is full of disappearing women. Mothers lost to themselves. One video after another of heads enveloped by abdomens. Bodies swallowed. Women gone.
They organize demonstrations on street corners and city squares. They march to the Capitol to disappear en masse.
“Get back in the kitchen,” one man screams at the marchers.
“Die, bitches,” another yells.
The men rage and rail against them. They surge into the crowd, knocking the women to the ground, bloodying their faces.
The news footage plays live and she watches in horror from her couch while cluster-feeding.
“I have blamed myself unnecessarily when things went wrong,” the depression screening reads.
Yes, most of the time, she checks, though she is not sure how to define unnecessarily.
THE END
Author Bio: Claire Taylor is the author of multiple chapbooks, including “Mother Nature” and “One Good Thing.” She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Little Thoughts Press, a literary magazine for young readers. Claire lives with her family in Baltimore, Maryland, in an old stone house where birds love to roost. You can find her online at clairemtaylor.com.