Insides by Erin Regan

The baby’s hand grabs at the flashing silver chain of her necklace, tiny fingers fumbling against her clavicle. The stray, sharp corner of a fingernail grazes the mole at the hollow of her throat. As the baby latches on, she rubs the hot, cherry-pit lump in her breast, clenching her jaw until the lump softens to ripe fruit under her thumb so the clogged duct doesn’t turn to mastitis. Again. Loosening, her feet push off the floor to gently tip the rocking chair backward. Her body is always in motion now, even to soothe phantom cries—pushing an empty shopping cart back-forth-back-forth, bouncing and swaying alone as she waits for a barista to hand her a to-go cup.

The saw of a dull knife hits her below the belly button, deep in the deflated balloon of her uterus. Her menstrual cramps always flare when she’s breastfeeding, a little shadow contraction spurred by the oxytocin flowing along with her milk. When her period finally returned months after birth, it came with more throbbing and aching than she was used to, a sludge of blood that lasted longer and pooled thicker in her underwear than before. The first cramp of it after birth baffled her, something rhythmically familiar but new and changed in this new and changed body.

It felt a little like that first-first time, in the bathroom stall during a fifth grade field trip to the zoo, when she pulled down her pants to find a tarry red stain. She folded the toilet paper squares into a thick packet and stuffed it in her underwear. Washing her hands with the pink, marzipan-smelling soap of public bathrooms, she looked down the busy row of sinks and marveled that there was a wound inside her that no one else saw. Afterward, she trailed her classmates, peering into the enclosures and watching the baboons pick insects from each other’s shoulders and the javelina scrub their leathery skin into the dusty earth, only thinking about her own strange, animal body. She was still herself behind her eyes and in the marrow of her bones, but her rounding and softening and bleeding body belonged to someone else. And she felt a splitting then, a fragmentation of herself—into child, woman, beast, stranger.

Her best friend’s dad dropped her at home after the field trip, 20 minutes before her mom would be home from work. She dangled her bare feet into the pool and ate spoon after spoon of Cherry Garcia ice cream out of the cardboard gallon. Her parents never let her eat it straight from the container; it felt very reckless and adult—something she saw heartbroken women do in movies—the ice cream going soupy around the edge of the tub. Her stomach twisted, and she threw up foamy, pink vomit flecked with maraschino cherry into the sun-patchy lawn next to the pool. It looked a bit like fake blood, like what she imagined her insides might look like. But now she knows that what’s inside is dark and thick and raging and tender. That evening, she lay stretched out on the couch, her head propped on her mother’s pillow-soft stomach while her mom’s fingertips looped soothing figure eights over the prickled skin of her back.

Now, she looks down at the baby’s full-moon face—the hair-thin blue veins snaking across the eyelids, the swirling conch shell ear. She knows that later tonight she’ll lay in bed awake and feel a pull deep in her belly. She’s been split again—a self, an other, a mother, a pair, alone. A piece of her will lie sleeping in the room next door—a piece that was her body but was carved out and now has a name, a soul, a little pearly tooth coming through the gumline, a collection of needs that her body answers for. She’ll wonder if, in a bed 800 miles away, her mother is feeling a tug in her gut.

She traces small circles on the baby’s back — her palm against skin soft and gauzy as a nectarine, two fingers running along a shoulder blade as delicate as a bird’s wing. It feels like a hole has been ripped through her belly, her brain, her heart. But in this moment, in this chair, it feels like (maybe, maybe, maybe) she’s becoming whole.

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ERIN REGAN — Erin lives, reads and writes in Phoenix, Arizona. A former journalist, editor, fundraiser and a forever dabbler, she loves making things with her hands and exploring the world with her almost 1-year-old. She has previously worked as an editor for Superstition Review and Lux Creative Review at Arizona State University.

Art by AMANDA BERGLOFF — Amanda is a mixed media artist whose cover and interior art has been published in Non-Binary Review, Tiny Spoon Literary Magazine, Utopia Science Fiction, Mud Season Review, Invisible City, Women Artists Datebook, and other publications.