Noor Qasim
The Cube
I ate my daughter yesterday. It was quick. I took her out of her container and sliced her slowly, into long, rectangular pieces, the edges round, like Spam. I heated a pan, greased it with a thick slick of butter. Then I took her, piece by piece, and let her fat sizzle on the skillet. She looked and smelled like pork, pink flesh browning into crispy meat. I ate every piece. Fork and knife, one bite after the next.
I never wanted a baby. When the other girls played with dolls and cooed over tiny fingers and toes, I sat stiffly, unsure how to behave. I would ooh and aah like the rest of them, but my act was unconvincing. Even into our teens the other girls knew I was not to be trusted. They began to whisper in corners, speculating over illicit acts. The air thrummed with collective arousal. Puberty dripped off them. It stank.
I, however, was sure I had emerged unscathed. I felt no low hum. I felt no flush beneath my skin. It was clear to me that this vibration formed the soft center of their lives. It seemed that my spinal column, though everyone else’s were made of cartilage and fluid, had been replaced in the womb by a crowbar. I was not asked to go ice-skating or to make out at the movies. None of the boys thought to bother me, at least none of the boys my age.
On my walk to the bus stop, men would whisper words I had never heard before but somehow understood. They would tell me what they wanted to do to my juicy cunt. Or how they would wreck my ass. These words seemed to ooze out of their mouths, jaws swinging open and shut over thick wads of chew. At first, these men twisted strange knots in my gut. What did they know? What had I unwittingly revealed? I soon realized that they, like the perverts of my grade, were simply exposing themselves. In so doing, they became easier to wound. I could kill them if I wanted to. I imagined how their eyes would shift as they emptied of light. How childlike they would become in their final moments.
While the other girls wrung their hands over dances and dates, I did all the things they spent so much time discussing. When the men leered, I leered back. I dragged men into bathrooms and pulled down their pants. When I walked the dog, I scanned every living room I passed for someone old and hairy and round. They were usually in front of the TV. Even from that distance I could pry men open. I could lift my shirt or just stick out my tongue, and they would be undone.
For many years, I lived alone in a large city in which I knew no one. I did not speak to anyone outside of the dentist’s office where I worked. I enjoyed putting metal tools into people’s mouths, shutting them up.
By the time I knew I was pregnant, there was not much to be done. I don’t know how my daughter was conceived. I don’t know who it was. There were men, there were always men—wordless signals exchanged around corners and over counters. It may have been that gas station attendant, in the shallow woods behind the rest stop upstate. Or the old man who cried every time he came. Or the short one—the way his eyes drooped, maybe a little inbred.
I changed as she grew within me. My body swelled to accommodate her, my flesh making way for hers. I was constantly on the verge of tears, as if the dam that had held for years within my heart were at risk of collapse. I was warm all the time. I began to smile graciously when offered a seat on the bus. How kind, I would say, my eyelashes batting gently. I found myself asking after the children of patients: And how is Tommy doing? Is he settling in at Tulane? This frightened me. I felt I was mutating into some other woman. The doctors said it was hormones.
In the final days of my pregnancy, I took to preparing elaborate meals. As I stirred sauces and sliced meats and took breads in and out of the oven, I imagined the people I was feeding, people whom, for years, I had kept away. One evening, I made a roast and set the table for seven. I found candles and lit them. I chewed one small bite after the next, surrounded by massive piles of food that no one would ever eat, congealed hunks I would later scoop into the trash. My heart beat so quickly, harder than it had in years. But I could feel her heart beating, too. Against my belly. I was not alone, even in that empty room. She was there with me, inside me. It was then that I began to consider joy.
My daughter does not have a name because my daughter was a cube of flesh. She was born smooth on all sides, with rounded edges. She was light pink, marbled with fat beneath her skin. When she first came out of me, we knew something had gone terribly wrong. She lay there, still. The nurses did not attempt to swaddle her strange shape. I felt something inside of me, which for many months had softened, revert to steel. But then she began to cry. The cry cracked the thick stillness of that room. It emerged from her every pore, a startling vibration full of need. At the sound of that cry, I knew that I loved her. I could not help myself. Every part of me yearned to hold her. I wanted to smooth lotion over her six sides. I wanted to massage my milk into her skin.
Three weeks passed before they let me hold her. The doctors and the scientists conducted a series of tests. What was this thing? What were its boundaries, its limitations? What could it feel and what did it need? They conducted one experiment after the next, while I gazed through double-sided glass. They dunked her in tanks of hot and cold water. They left her all alone in an empty room for many hours. They deprived her of food for a week. They prodded her with thumbtacks and timed how long it would take for the bleeding to stop.
One day, they tested her response to light. The room was very dark, save for a single bright spotlight aimed directly at where she sat atop a steel table. They flashed the light on and off, on and off, and she did nothing, but I quickly became woozy. I felt on the verge of collapse, gasping for a breath that had been stolen from me. The world expanded and contracted around her, my neck no longer strong enough to hold my head on straight. In another life, I had felt a thrill of joy when scraping the gums of children. I had come to anticipate and delight in suffering, my own and that of others. But this, somehow, was different.
When the doctors finally released her with a shrug, I vowed to never let her go. In the early years, I carried her close, swaddled against my chest. As she became heavy, we switched to a stroller. We marked her growth in the bathtub, and over the years she occupied more and more of it. She could not do what the other girls could. She did not learn to walk or talk or run or skip or jump. She did not take ballet classes or join a soccer team. She did not wriggle and whisper in corners. Yet she somehow managed to be warm and soft, while also uncompromising, unyielding, revealing nothing. She could be hurt, but she did not know how to seek it out. All my life I had lacked a suitable companion, until she had emerged from within me.
I am lying on the bathroom floor. The room smells sour and sweet, of vomit. I am drenched in sweat. I am very cold and very weak.
Yesterday morning, I found her sitting in blood. It was a shallow, rusty pool. The doctors had not known if this day would come. I had hoped, beyond hope, that it would not. What would it mean for her to become a woman? I did not want to know.
For me, it had meant men behind the pharmacy, in the cemetery, on the fire escape. Men prodding me with long, yellow fingernails. A sharp pain accompanied by a dull ache, an ache I felt determined to contain. An ache I feel even now, sprawled on cool tile, eyes strained, throat raw. I was built for this long, low suffering. But my daughter, she was not.
I lifted her, I bathed her, I held her close to me. But I could not hold her close enough. Her beating heart, which for years had seemed so near the surface, had submerged, had become only a faint pattering, only the softest vibration beneath her skin. I remembered the girl I was all those years ago, the woman I had become. So cold, so ruthless. All I wanted was to feel her inside of me. To feel her warmth against my rigid spine.
I should have known by how quickly her flesh shriveled on the skillet. I should have heeded my body, my hand trying to escape the knife in its grip, a hot white cloud within my lungs. I should have known when I rested the blade’s edge upon her skin, that the words I heard were not imagined. Mama, she shrieked as my knife pierced her flesh, Mama.