Eve Henley-Rayve is an LA based writer and recent graduate of Beloit College. Her writing has appeared in Girls Right the World, New Square Literary Magazine and Allium Journal. Her awards include the 2021 Lois and Willard Mackey Award, and an honorable mention in the 2022 Nick Adams Short Story Contest. She is a member of the Sancho Panza Literary Society out of Trinity College, as well as a staff writer for their magazine. 

Suppliants

“Ray’s eye?” She questions, once again.

“Yes,” I say. “His eye.”

“Like a reflection in the toilet bowl?”

“No, his eyeball. Like the organ.”

She’s not unsettled by my calm. I suppose that’s the professionalism that’s required in this line of work. Still though, I was expecting at least a little bit more from her. I may have even been looking forward to it.

“You’ve been through a lot. As I’ve told you in our past sessions, grief often manifests in strange ways. You’ve experienced waking nightmares before, yes?”

She holds her hand up when I go to speak, continuing in her clinician's droll.

“Sometimes they’re hard to identify, especially after a period of continued insomnia, such as you’ve been experiencing for some time now.”

“And in waking nightmares, do people often piss out their dead husband’s eyeballs?”

I wait for a response. She doesn’t provide one, just staring straight ahead, straight through me, until she turns to check her watch.

“Well, it looks like our time’s up, Celia.”

It isn’t.

“Now, I want you to consider that just because it wasn’t a human eyeball doesn’t mean that it was nothing. The brain can work in incredible ways.”

She was suggesting that it was a miscarriage, I surmise. A stupidly simple one, too, based on the stories I’ve heard.

Still though, I nod my head in acquiescence and walk out the door. I make sure to smile at everyone I pass, to smile with teeth that turn sharp in the industrial haze of fluorescent lights.

When I get home, I mull over her words, her meanings. I think about her logic, her carefully cultivated expertise. I spend more sleepless nights aching in my sweaty bed, more dinners forcing food down my throat.

At the doctor’s office, I sit as still as I can. Around the room, there are women with varying degrees of swollen bellies. I think they know that I am not doing enough, that I’m not meant for this anymore. Their whispers reach out to me from behind tired eyes and glossy women's magazines.

I am told, shockingly, that everything is fine. I am glowing with pregnancy. Deep in my tissue, it continues to develop, right on track and perfectly healthy. I am asked if I want to know the gender yet. I don’t. I know it will be a boy. I can feel him creaking within me, his bones scraping together with creation.

Back at home, my bathroom mirror doesn’t show the alleged fullness of my cheeks. My reflection is hollow. It’s bone dead and purple in all the worst places.

I don’t believe the doctor, just like I don’t believe the lying mass of my stomach. Inside, he spreads away from himself. He claws up every inch of my torso, making his way slowly towards the thrumming of my heart.

I know intrinsically that there is not a child in my belly. I am aware, I am convinced, I am certain. The grave did not contain him. He has found his way back to me.     

At my therapist’s office, I smile just sadly enough. I tell her my husband is dead and buried somewhere in the deserts of war. I cry because I am a grieving wife and a lone mother. I breathe in time with her when I talk of false nightmares, when I pretend to fear the impending responsibility of motherhood. It’s that easy to convince her I am acceptably upset. I never bring up the eyeball again, nor the corpse in my stomach that’s now missing it.

He starts to take from me every morning. He uses the tightness of my throat, the softness of my lips. Through my mouth, he expels his body.

Today, in the watery green, I feel a fingertip scraping up my trachea. It takes three heaving gags to pass it, each rhythm squeezing it further and further towards the opening of my lips. When I finally spit it out, it’s just the pad, the fingernail probably lost somewhere along the way. If I concentrate, I can almost feel it scratching around in my chest, stuck deep somewhere into the fleshy pink of my body.

The taste of a corpse leaves much to be desired, but at least the flavors are varied. Every fluid and organ has its own unique rot. The worst, I’ve decided, is when it's just the skin. It always slides so smooth, detached and stinking, and often catches on my back teeth. When that happens, I have to chew it off, otherwise the rogue flesh flaps unbearably at my uvula. I gag with each touch, already empty of whatever he decided to detach that morning, my eyes threatening to bulge clean out into the toilet bowl.

I can picture him clearly inside of me, floating in the darkness, breaking away to infect every inch that he can. I was wrong on all counts, it seems, in every late night imagining of him drying out in the desert air. From what I can tell, his body seems barely a few days dead.

Horrifyingly though, he has started to bloat. My stomach expands grotesquely, swelling and stretching past the strictest boundaries of my body. My skin turns sallow and green, the septic coloring especially visible in the yellow lights of my bathroom.

I eat when I can, when he allows it. I enjoy the dryness of burnt toast especially, so different in texture from what comes back up. I like to feel it scratching my cheeks, savoring the taste of fresh blood. Only this seems strong enough to wash away the rotting taste of the morning. No amount of toothpaste or ginger tea settles me the way that the crisp metallic liquid can.

At night, I try to speak to him.

“Ray, why are you doing this?”

My stomach gurgles in response, the quiet speech of a bubbling newborn.

“I just want it to be over.”

This provokes silence. I think I feel his bony hands pressing against my midriff. Another echo, the way he used to hold me in bed on those particularly cold nights. I wonder, absently if he doesn’t want this either, if the sands blew him into me with unwilling wails. There is a comfort, at least, that whenever this ends, there is no new beginning. I will not have a greedy mouth to feed at the end of the road.

I think back to when I was younger. The goldfish I’d won at the fair died three days after we had brought him home. My parents made it clear that he was my responsibility, and I was horribly embarrassed that I’d let him die so quickly. I stacked books on the ledge in front of his tank, hiding my failures from them, and from myself, with all the ingenuity my small mind could muster.

I dared to check on him a few days later, and could barely see past the sickly grime of the water. Pieces of him floated around, skin and fins broken off into smaller and smaller bits, until the water was entirely saturated with his indifferent contamination. When I poured the sludge out in the backyard, under the disapproving stare of my father, the water sloughed out of its tank with slow, slimy scrapings. My fish, with nowhere else to go, had expanded his body to the shape of his environment, had infected the fresh water with a last, desperate form of himself.

This morning, I rest my head on the edge of the toilet bowl just before sunrise. My old fish floats, unwelcome, into my mind. I try to look away from the image of his gelatinous water, pockmarked with bits of cloudy skin, but am unable to see clearly through the rising tears. Ray is flaking off in all directions, hardening the water in my womb and staring up at me through the dark grime, his remaining eye whispering accusations into my esophagus.

A bout of retching brings me hurling into the present. Sometimes, the bile tastes familiar, like food. Stale MRE’s, not quite digested, floating up my intestines. This bit of nostalgia tastes worse though, more rancid than I’ve encountered. In the toilet, around bits of skin and slimy orange tissue, there are unmistakable ropes of white. The sight launches me into further sickness. It was the same salty taste I remember, but burning hot like acid, a sour soup pursing my lips and watering my eyes.

I have a feeling, new and delicate like the porcelain toilet bowl, that this might be the last of him. Or at least, the last that he’s willing to expel. My stomach is still protruding heavy on the tiled floor, and I imagine that whatever’s left is just the bits too big for my aching throat. I feel a peace, quiet and unassuming, lulling my head down onto the bathroom mat. I’m so tired, so full, so empty. At last, it’s time to rest.

I dream of burning aches, the tight coils of progress releasing eagerly from my muscles. Ray is hovering over me, entering slowly, brutally, with the barrel of his father’s hunting rifle. I want to stop, to staunch the flow of red wetness now burrowing out of me, but I haven’t seen him in so long. Even the hot, impersonal metal can be handled gently in his hands. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t coo or shush, just nuzzles the gun in further, hitting the absolute edge of my tolerance. Now, I start to scream, rawness running up my vocal cords, yet nothing but a hollow screech comes flowing out.

He stares at me still, and I want to beg him to touch me. I need a comforting hand, the warm softness of his cheeks, anything but the brutal contact he maintains below. I mean to ask him why, but something in the darkness of his pupils prevents it, wipes away all question from my face. My eyes widen like a newborn, suddenly taking in every inch of his form. I am able to withstand the pain, I think, as long as I know it is him who is causing it. I have not felt his gentle manner in months, have not molded myself into his softness in the cool gray of morning. This is fine. He is hurting me, yes, but at least he is here, at least he is full of the same eager flesh and blood as I am.

I feel his next action impending, that same intimate instinct which led me to the kitchen on Sunday mornings, that told me he had hidden flowers in the closet, that tracked a bullet from its chamber to his skull hours before the phone call confirmed. I perceive a phantom of my body, a specter from the second ahead as she screams away the early impact of his finger on the trigger. An eerie click sounds hours in front of me, infinities coalescing rapidly before I finally feel it burning through my insides, blooming violence at every barrier and failsafe it could. It’s tearing inside of me, outside of me, sucking the air from every inch around my body, like the heat of a searing blast.

I observe, for a moment, my body come apart. My lower half is nearly numb with the agony of it, and I can scarcely wiggle my toes in the haze of excruciating exhaustion. There are two parts of me, an eggshell cracked jaggedly in half. My intestines leak out of the wound, sliding through me, ending their path at the precipice of Ray’s sweet touches. He’s gone from above me, lost somewhere in the hazy dark. Still, I imagine it is him sliding out of me, coated only in the innocent blood of unfamiliarity. The echo of his heavy breath is the last sound I hear before the encompassing cold. There are calm orders from someone far away, frantic, and moving increasingly closer.

I wake in a soft suddenness, my eyes fluttering open on instinct. All around me is a dim white, with soft blue lining the edge of every glance. It smells dull, like a space sucked clean of all sharpness. My body is swathed in soft, thin fabric that lets in only the most persistent chill.

I could still be in my bathroom, entrenched in the neat tile floor, but even in my first few seconds of awareness, I am unable to shake the distinct familiarity which a hospital demands. I still can’t form a question of why, only the empty space of the unknown bookmarked lazily for later. Slowly, I become aware of another shape in the room, a person snoring quietly across from me. Suddenly, the nagging ache all over my body becomes too persistent to ignore. It’s dull, but fiery, and I remain unmoved a second longer before it causes me to cry out quietly in pain.

The shape rushes toward me, her fussing filling the heavy silence.

“It’s okay baby, don’t try to move, it’s all okay.”

I’m surprised by the voice of my mother, far less shrill than usual.

This is how I know that something is really wrong.

Another person enters the room, a doctor, blending with the walls in his starch white coat.

“Ray…” I mumble, trying to warn them. I imagine they’ve been debating for a while what’s wrong with me, grotesquely round and likely septic.

My mom lets out a soft cry, a sob which she immediately stifles.

“No sweetie, it’s the doctor, it’s the doctor who’s been helping you.”

“Ray… he’s… look at my…” I grasp my stomach, less full than before, and try to catch my breath enough to tell them.

“It’s okay, Celia,” the doctor says, shocking me strangely with the use of my name. “You’ve given birth. I’m sure you must be confused right now, but your baby is fine. He’s resting right over there.”

He motions to a raised plastic box I hadn’t seen before. My mind begins to clear, jolting into its senses with the realization of movement in the crib. A small hand raises up occasionally, grasping at the air.

“Do you want to hold him?”

I’m entirely mystified as my mother lifts him, carries him over to me. It’s as if I’m watching her through a thin film of plastic, stifling the noise of his soft cries and the doctor’s continuous droning.

“Now, he does have a mild case of iris hypoplasia in his left eye, but we’ve run all the necessary tests, and we don’t believe that it’s anything to be concerned about.”

My mother is hovering over me, the squirming bundle in tow. His movements remind me of a dying spider, jerky and undefined.

In an instant, he is on me, so quick I am unable to protest.

I immediately freeze, like a live tarantula has just been placed on my chest. My instinct is to swat it away, to jump up and shake myself until my skin stops crawling. I am panic encased in unrelenting concrete, my limbs refusing to sway from the position they’ve stuck themselves in. My mind is a symphony of fear and disgust, my thoughts conjoining into one, long rambling:

“get it off get it off get it off get it off GET IT OFF GET IT OFF”

On my body, it continues to jerk and twitch, its little fists grabbing nonsensically at the air. Its whole body moves in a death rattle, a last, spastic grasp on life, and when it finally turns and meets my eyes, I see that one of them is clouded over, hazy and unfocused.

It is half a corpse already, it is marked for a bullet in the head. I can feel it infecting me, reaching for my skin, hoping to drag me down too. A scream lets loose, though my body remains unmoving, and it's removed from me at last.

There is a commotion, high-pitched wailing and low, stifled sobs. I am grateful to finally have the thing off of me, to be able to breathe again with my full chest. I can’t be calm though, as it still reaches toward me through the arms of my mother. Its dead eye locks onto me, a rifleman’s mark. It's accusing, mighty as a dead man, and I can’t stand it a second longer.

I lunge for it, meaning to pluck it out and crush it under my foot. My mother, for the first time in my life, looks at me in horror. I am held back suddenly by infinite sets of strong, scratchy arms. I use everything in me, unconscious of the pain. I will save my child. I will never again be a haunted woman.

A needle sticks into me, though I barely feel it, and my vision starts to fade. Before it does, I glimpse back at the child. My mother has turned him, shielding him from me, but over her shoulder I still see his face. His left eye is blocked now by the fabric on his head, his right in full and glimmering view. It is the same green that Ray’s were; a cooling forest, a dangerous sea. My heart lurches, and he smiles, his wide empty grin ushering me into the waiting darkness, forgiving and warm like a mother’s womb.