Motherhood

She sat on a shelf, her breasts two bellies on her poked-out belly, on which the navel looked like a sucked-in mouth— her knees bent and apart, her long left arm raised, with the large hand knuckled to a bar in the ceiling— her right hand clamping the skinny infant to her chest— its round, pale, new, soft muzzle hunting in the brown hair for a nipple, its splayed, tiny hand picking at her naked, dirty ear.

Twisting its little neck, with tortured, ecstatic eyes the size of lentils, it looked into her severe, close-set, solemn eyes, that beneath bald eyelids glared—dull lights in sockets of leather.

She twitched some chin-hairs, with pain or pleasure, as the baby-mouth found and yanked at her nipple; its pink-nailed, jointless fingers, wandering her face, tangled in the tufts of her cliffy brows.

She brought her big hand down from the bar with pretended exasperation unfastened the little hand, and locked it within her palm— while her right hand with snag-nailed forefinger and short, sharp thumb, raked the new orange hair of the infant’s skinny flank— and found a louse, which she lipped, and thoughtfully crisped between broad teeth.

She wrinkled appreciative nostrils which, without a nose, stood open—damp holes above the poke of her mouth.

She licked her lips, flicked her leather eyelids— then, suddenly flung up both arms and grabbed the bars overhead.

The baby‘s scrabbly fingers instantly caught the hair— as if there were metal rings there— in her long, stretched armpits.

And, as she stately swung, and then proudly, more swiftly slung herself from corner to corner of her cell— arms longer than her round body, short knees bent— her little wild-haired, poke-mouthed infant hung, like some sort of trophy, or decoration, or shaggy medal— shaped like herself—but new, clean, soft and shining on her chest.