Marja's Baby

Maybe it’s these walls that make me think of her—suffocating beneath coats of lacquered enamel, swollen and shadowless. Or maybe it is because from where I am standing, I can look out through the window to the sea, and imagine her sinking, the acting anchor of the S.S. Nevermind, trying to tread the icy water and sail back to the warm port of my hands.
She told me not to touch her anymore. Each word deliberately ebbed and flowed in a thick stream of Americanized Swedish to tell me that my waxy hands were always too cold and my touch too close. I told her my fingers couldn’t sense distance like my eyes and that all I ever wanted was to dissolve into her bloodstream, like so many other things had.
She was an expert at bleeding, a professor of all things that cut, and often gave her dissertations on the tiled floor of the bathroom and sometimes--once— on the kitchen table. She was happiest with a box cutter. Sometimes she would write poems for me on her legs nd let the blood pool around her as she cut through a new layer of skin, expecting the sting, watching herself glisten under florescent lights, admiring the artistry of her perfectly curled “s’s” and “t’s,” noting the sardonic humor in the depth of each line, starting shallow and working down towards the bone.
She used to make me sit with her on our front porch in the summer and count the all of the fireflies as they hovered under the electric lantern dancing frantically to try attract someone to love them hidden in the grass below… and we’d talk about the importance of spheres and her fear of drowning. (She let me touch her then.) “It is strange, that babies live first in water. What if they should drown there? They are not able to swim. What if they must swim before their hands are made in full… I should imagine they would be frightened.”
Then I would have to find her hand, silhouetted in fake blue light, and hold it tightly and promise her that babies never drowned inside their mothers, even if I didn’t know for sure. But she wouldn’t ever listen and insist on crying on my lap, and scratching her long, naked nails on her legs. “My baby would find a way to drown within me, then I would have to carry it around, dead inside of me. I couldn’t be able to bear it. I am not a mother kind, I do not know how to be… I am not a murderer, but I am not a mother.”
Marja had a strange way of stringing words together to though she had been speaking English fluently for more than eight years. Marja was from Sweden, that’s where her mother was born and her grandmother and so on, and that is where Marja’s baby should’ve been from too, but she didn’t want a baby. She didn’t want to stop bleeding.