I had always assumed that I would have a baby and I was right. There was a ball of flesh inside me, and it grew so large and heavy that it became a separate entity. She still eats from my body. My sweet milk coats her tongue, her throat. My nipples crack and burn with the pain of feeding. When she was on the inside, she gathered my blood for her own. Her flesh plaited itself together in the nest of my womb. She sprouted eyeballs and the thumping jelly of her heart. The sparkling web of her brain flashed in the darkness. She ripped me open like fabric and now, her screams for milk or comfort or sleep make my synapses crackle. She eats that, too. I think about feeding myself to her piecemeal, about carving long, thin slices of my brain and pushing them past her tiny pink lips. I think about how they would slip against her gummy mouth.

The Earth is hell. The evil piles within me, building around my organs like sludge. I have to be vigilant: it might have sneaked into the assembly of my baby’s flesh. Sometimes she looks away from me, at the piano pushed against the wall or the tree outside the window. I hate these items. They are cold and without flesh. They seethe with the violence of potential. The tree that she might one day climb, when the bones of her arms and legs have lengthened enough for the task, the piano she might play. I move my face with her shifting eyes: Look at me, baby; just focus on me.

Nothing that happened before her matters. She gazes at me with a love so infinite that it knocks out the world from beneath my feet. I’ve been crying for her all my life, I know now, pleading across time and space for her to come to me. There is no piano, there is no tree. There is nothing in this world but us. I stick her toes in my mouth and suck, holding a piece of her inside my body once again. She gurgles and looks up at me with her big, hungry eyes. My face is printed on her wet pupils.

Sarah Zell is a writer and teacher in Minnesota. Her writing usually contains body horror, romance, and other gross things. You can find more of her writing on her website, sarahzellwrites.com.