BY CAITLIN RAE TAYLOR
I am in a kitchen full of men, the morning after my mother-in-law has died, boiling a menstrual cup. The men, my partner Max and his brother Link, sit at the kitchen table and watch me boil a hot-pink cup of medical-grade silicone in Link’s stainless steel pots. Barefoot, I hold the cup aloft in the water using a pair of metal tongs. The metal heats, and my fingers begin to burn.
It’s a brand new cup, I tell them. It’s never been...but I trail off, because I realize I am about to say in my vagina. Vagina doesn’t seem like a word you can say when your mother-in-law has died. A bong shaped like a mushroom sits on the counter next to the stove. It smells of skunk and smoke, but when the light hits, its delicately curved glass leaves shatterings of color against the walls.
Yesterday, when we piled out of Link’s sedan, we already knew she was gone. Our bodies stood heavy in the summer heat against the black asphalt. My unsocked feet sweaty in the furnace of my shoes. As we walked to the hospital doors, we stepped over a mouse, perfectly formed but entirely dead, a trail of ants delighting in their snack. Later, I will reflect on the high heat index and how this poor mouse likely died of heat stroke against the boiling ground, but in the moment all I could think was, well that’s a little on the nose.
At the funeral home, the owner made jokes to put us at ease as he opened a brochure that told the bereaved an outdoor celebration of life where they provided neither seating nor food would cost $5,000. What does that pay for, I thought to myself. The programs? Lawn services? Sadness taxes? I shifted my chair and accidentally bumped my breasts against the table. A sharp pain erupted in my nipples, and I remembered that I left my menstrual cup seven hours away in Alabama.
Because I went the whole meeting without speaking, because the deceased was not my mother, the funeral home director turned to me and asked, “Wife?” vaguely gesturing to Max beside me, holding my hand. I shrugged, because the semantics of our partnership were none of his business.
“You got nothing to say?” he asked me. Something in my ovaries bucked, an egg falling from its stem like a petal. My feet began to itch, and I wondered somewhere in my lizard brain if I was developing athlete’s foot.
“I don’t...I’m not...no relation,” I said, like he had asked me if I was related to James Taylor.
“Well you can be in charge of the weather then,” he said with a wink. That same wink older men give young, quiet women that’s meant to say you can trust me, I have a daughter.
My period hits that night while my partner Max and I play Mario Kart on a couch that smells like dog food. I have just emerged from the guest room after an hour sobbing uncontrollably, thinking of my own parents’ inevitable death.
“Fuck, shit, damn,” I scream as Rosalina gets T-boned by a green shell on Hyrule Circuit. As Toad spins out in Baby Park. As Peach falls to her doom at Shy Guy falls, and I think that no matter how many times she plummets to her death, she will never really die. She will always be there with her yellow hair and pink dress, smiling and smiling and smiling. There is no blood inside her. There are no feet in her shoes. Even when I put down the controller and turn off the TV, she will still be there, inside, waiting for me.
I lose, and Max consoles me with a present. A small grocery bag full of decorative socks that, until recently, belonged to his mother. I retreat into the guest room and try them all on, pair after pair, their looped fibers catching on the rough heels of my feet. I settle on a pair of plush black fuzzy socks, crosshatched with red rhombuses. When I stand, my feet no longer feel as if they belong to me. I walk in circles around the bed, convinced I have lost all feeling below my ankles. I sit on the floor and remove the socks. I smooth them out and stare at them and half expect them to get up on their own, move around.
I leave them there on the floor and crawl into bed. In the morning, I am greeted by a bright red bloom across my sheets. Beside me, Max weeps quietly into his pillow. The socks are still on the floor, and for some reason this makes me sad.
The menstrual cup is new, from the Walgreens around the corner. It’s too big and a bitch to shove inside myself. My uterine muscles seize around it, and I think how relentless the body is, even in the face of grief. During breakfast, I listen to Max tell a joke that is only funny because it is not funny and wonder if his body has paused to honor his grief, in the way mine cannot.
I try not to laugh too much.
I try not to enjoy my breakfast.
I finger the red and black socks, which I have stuffed in my pocket. I cannot bring myself to try them on again.
My toes are cold.
So strange, this morning after someone’s life has ended, that toes can be so cold.
That blood, hot and harmless, can free itself of a body.
Caitlin Rae Taylor has an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington where she served as fiction editor for Ecotone magazine and publishing assistant for Lookout Books. She is currently the Managing Editor for Southern Humanities Review at Auburn University and the Layout and Design Editor for Press Pause Press. Her book reviews and fiction have appeared in Pacifica, Adroit, Hobart, Moon City Review, Germ Magazine, and the Alabama Writers Forum.