Matt Alberhasky

Domestic Violence

      It's like waking to the sound of gunfire in your house. I'm sweating and the sheet is balled between my knees. The scream comes again, and my stomach cramps. I'm confused because Tom is still sleeping. I can hear his heavy breathing, and I'm in a panic because I sense invasion. Why can't I make it stop? It's only a little thing. I'm wearing Tom's white shirt and it's soaked. At first I think it's sweat. My breasts ache and my nipples are chafed like they've been exposed to raw winter for days. For fourteen days I haven't been able to wear anything but Tom's undershirts.
      My eyes adjust to the darkness. With each scream from the next room, I snap into action. I kick the balled covers off my legs. I hover over Tom wondering how he can sleep through the screams. I strip off the drenched shirt. I smother my pillow over my face. I even ask God to make it stop. It's two in the morning and I've been up every hour for the last fourteen days shoving my tattered tits into the mouth of that screaming demon and now I'm exhausted and I'm frantic and I'm wet with the milk that keeps pouring out of my swollen chest and however it is that Tom can sleep like a walrus because he thinks his dick is a ticket out of this and now yes at this moment when my eyes are newly adjusted to the darkness and I'm stripped to my panties with the bulging pad that will be soaked in the morning yes right at this moment with my pillow smothered over my sobs and swears I beg with a cramping and heaving stomach the omnipotent God to do whatever it takes to make that scream stop.
      And God does nothing. So it screams. I bite the pillow, harshly, gnashing my teeth and growling like a rabid dog. I want it to tear. I want to rip out the insides. I want Tom to wake up and make it stop. I want to shove my leaking tits in his unsuspecting ear. I want to stop his peaceful sleeping. But it isn't screaming for him. It doesn't give a dick about the dick. The screams are for me. I hear them in my sleep. I hear them when I close my eyes and when I open them again. They make my milk drop and my stomach cramp and my teeth gnash and my brain mad and they make me bleed. And not Tom and his dick not even God can hear them.
      So I do it. Only I can stop them. I launch the pillow into the darkness as I storm across the bedroom. The pillow breaks a picture and Tom stirs from his rest. I can see the outline of his bedhead. "Nothing," I hiss. "Go back to sleep." And he does.
      I take it from the bassinet with strong hands. I want it to know that I'm only doing this to stop the scream. It opens its mouth to scream again and I thrust my tit inside, stifling the noise as it tries to latch on. But it only gets the end of my nipple in its furious suck and I flick its nose to break the suction. The tears run down my neck and mix with the milk. It screams again and fails a second time to latch on. Take it! I cry. Take it if you want to live! I cry. And it does the third time.
***
     I must have dozed off while Silas was nursing in the rocking chair. Not only had I thrown my pillow across the room, but also my wet shirt. Left to the open air, my nipples burn, wrinkling and cracking. That's what woke me up. I still have Silas cradled in my arms. His tiny moans warm on my chest and his hands still cupped around my breast. His perfect lips parted i n a prayer of thanks. Content. Satisfied. Safe. My heart aches for him in a primal way. My love is as brutal as hunger. I'm his mother. My body gives him life. My milk, my womanness, is the craving tremor that shakes his being. He is a part of me. It is my body that he mistakes for his own. His body clutched to my nakedness is an unseverable bond.
***
      The cuffs of my bathrobe are frayed. As I sit at the kitchen table, I pull the loose threads of fabric till they break. Then I roll the string into a ball and place it on the table next to me. The color of my robe is a dull marine green. It is a weary, lifeless color. Tom sits across from me. He's slurping the milk out of his cereal bowl. The sucking, swallowing, gulping sound is vulgar.
      "Did you get any sleep?" He says.
      I can only stare at him. I wonder if he sees my left eye twitching.
      "It's still early. You should go lie down."
      I flick my mound of rolled stings, scattering them across the linoleum floor. No longer visible, it's like they never existed.
      "It won't make any difference," I say.
      "You can't go this long without sleep," he says, pouring coffee into a silver thermos. The waist of his pants is too tight, and I can see the discomfort in his movements.
      Lying my head on the table, I run my fingers along the hairline cracks in the wood. The surface is both smooth and sticky. The table shows wear beyond its age. These surface cracks run everywhere when I look close enough. They divide and multiply. They splinter off. They cross paths. The stickiness is as hard as a glaze. It bends my fingernail back till a sharp pain makes me stop. These flaws are superficial. I know there's no threat to the integrity of the thing.
      "I want to help you, but you've got to tell me how. You've got to communicate," he says shrugging into his overcoat and picking up his leather briefcase.
      The last thing he says before leaving is that he's not a mind reader, and I'm staring at his empty bowl and the spoon making a small pool of milk on the table. And I'm following the cracks.
***
      I live on the last developed street North in the furthest Northwest suburb of Des Moines. Tom and I bought the house last March. Our house backs to a walking path and then a cornfield that stretches as far as I can see. Since the frost in mid October the trees have all lost their leaves and the cornfield is gray and barren. But the temperatures warmed again, and now a few weeks later it is in the seventies and the earth is dead and gray and flat.
      When you have a newborn it is important to find a routine and it is important to get out of the house at least once a day. Though these two things may seem simple enough, as the mother of a newborn, I am finding them frustratingly difficult. However, I am discovering that Silas enjoys taking short naps during the day in his stroller, and that if I take him outside in the late morning before the sun is at its hottest but after it has lifted the morning chill, I can accomplish both my goals.
      I walk him on the path behind our house. The air is refreshing, though the ground around me reminds me of death. My life, my child, is bundled snuggly in the stroller. I put a loose blanket over him as he sleeps to keep the direct sun off his pale face and to keep the wind from chilling him.
      We haven't met any of the families in our neighborhood. This summer on weekends, I sometimes saw them outside doing yard work. Just looking at the houses on our street, you'd think there'd be lots of kids around, but I never see any.
      I haven't decided if I'm going to go back to work or stay home with Silas. Sometimes when he's sleeping I think that I could do nothing else with my life but look at him and observe his beautiful features in a peaceful sleep. The sleep of innocence. Not the ugly walrus sleep of Tom with the nasal whine and the foul mouth, the hairy chest and armpits and the prodding erection. Sometimes I want nothing but to look at Silas and kiss his lips and hold him next to my nakedness to feel his strong and fast heart beating next to my flesh.
      Sometimes there is claustrophobia. My clothes reek of sour milk and vomit and feces. My eyes burn when I force them open then stick when I want them to shut. The incessant screams and the squirting milk through my pulverized nipples. I pick him up with strong hands and I want to squeeze it out of him or shake him to make it stop.
      I hear the cry of a bird. It's a frantic sound. The laughter of a group of crows follows. Looking out into the cornfield just beyond the edge of the walking path, I see an injured crow hopping along the ground, leaping for flight and failing. The pathetic bird is surrounded by five or six fat crows cawing tauntingly. They hover over the struggling bird and take turns swooping down to peck at its head. Their frenzy fills the void of the field. I keep the stroller in a back and forth motion as I watch. With a terrific lunge one of the crows cracks the skull of the weaker one. The other cry excitedly. They converge on the prey at once pecking and squawking and gobbling out its brain. Bright chunks of red flesh contrast violently against the gray unflinching earth.
***
When I get home I put Silas in his bassinet to finish his nap. I sit in the rocking chair and watch him sleep. Animals are violent by nature. I don't understand why a crow would kill another crow. For those birds it wasn't for survival. It was recreational. How can a mother protect her baby from all the violence? It's impossible to keep them safe in the home forever. Even then it's a matter of keeping the violence from invading. If God was as loving as a mother he would protect us. It's in his power anyway. Yet he remains silent. But I'm Silas's mother and I will protect him with all my power.
***
      Tom came home and he's eating a spaghetti diner that he brought from a restaurant and he's watching TV and he wants me to be with him. The spaghetti sauce is rich and I'm afraid the garlic will hurt Silas's stomach, so I only eat a few bites before I scrap off the sauce and run the noodles under water for a few seconds. Tom also bought garlic bread, but I don't eat that either. Instead I eat a banana and a slice of cheese with peanut butter on a saltine cracker.
      Tom is flipping the TV during commercials from network primetime to a baby show. I find myself coming to attention at the canned laugher and wondering what the joke was. Or suddenly transported to a screaming bleeding mother and wondering what I had been watching before. They don't even censor the vagina and I'm both horrified and awed watching it yawn feeling it tear like my own did. In sympathy I cover it with my hands.
      The mother is screaming, and something is wrong. The nurses all freeze for a moment with the same horrible look on their faces. The instantaneous look of human reaction. They snap back into their professional roles. The doctor cuts the cord from around the baby's purple face. I'm sickened to watch this, and I can't see how they can air this kind of show. I thought these were supposed to be happy baby stories. Tom doesn't seem disturbed by the images. He slurps down his spaghetti. It makes me sick so I can't even ask him what the show is. I can't turn away either so I accept it. Tom washes down his food with Merlot. I can't drink because of Silas. I have to put my plate on the coffee table because I'm too sick to eat. But it doesn't bother Tom, and what makes me sicker is that Tom casually flips back to the drivel on the sitcom and then back to the mother who is screaming to hold her baby. His reaction is unchanging. There is no discernable discrimination in his face. She doesn't understand why she can't hold her baby. The doctor is trying to resuscitate it. It's too late.
      They let the mother hold her dead baby. She cradles it in her arm next to her breast as if it were trying to nurse. Her breasts are small without milk. Her tears are running down her neck and onto the dead baby. The doctors and nurses and attendants have left the room. The narrator tells us the mother refused to give up her dead baby for two days. She sat there without food or water for two days with that decaying body cradled in her arms and she sang to it and kissed it with her hands gripped ferociously to the unseverable cord.
***
      After watching the baby story, I creep into Silas's room to watch him sleep. I want to make sure he's still breathing. I watch closely to his chest to see it rise and fall. I wait for him to exhale his tiny moans. When he does I relax and know that he is alive and that he is mine and that mother on TV was not me and that baby was not Silas.
***
      The weather is perfect for another late morning walk down the path for Silas's nap. The sun is hidden today behind a gray sky. There is nothing to obstruct my view of the sky and earth as I look North. The cold desolate ground stretches out till it touches the sky. From my perspective it is unending.
      I follow the walking path past the carcass of the cannibalized crow out of our subdivision and into the older part of town, down through the starter houses with the enormous maple and oak trees and past the railroad tracks. I walk down to the red brick elementary school before I turn back.
      An old couple approaches me. He's hobbling on a cane and she's on his other arm. Their skin is loose and wrinkled and sags like my tired nipples. They stop and look at me and my baby. They coo and ogle uncertain sounds. "Ooooo, what a sweet baby," she says. "Looky there…" she clucks at him. But his eyes are like phlegm even though he says "Ooooo, what a cute baby." She asks if it's a boy or a girl and I just nod. She wants to know how old he is, but I don't remember how long it's been since he was born. I haven't slept for more than an hour straight since before he was born and so I haven't been able to keep track of the days and nights. I tell them he's fourteen days old. It's a good guess. I tell them his name is Silas. Their expressions are unchanging. She holds out a trembling arthritic hand and I know she wants to look at my baby. But in the distance I can see the rotting remains of the crow and I say and I don't want him to be disturbed by the direct sun. The wind might chill him if I take off the blanket so she must understand that it's for the good of my baby. I can't just be showing him off as if he were a material possession or something. I've got to be thinking of his well being because he can't very well take care of himself and no one else could possibly understand what he needs like I can because I'm his mother. His mommy. My body is tuning to his basic needs. So I leave the withered old couple standing on the path which is the brink of the barrenness of autumn and I stroll my baby away quickly without looking back. But I can see them standing there waving their trembling arthritic hands his phlegm eyes gazing in an off direction and their unchanging expressions.
     
***
      Tom is waiting for me in bed. I know what he looks like with the sheet pulled up to his waist and that tuft of chest hair between his pectoral muscles and his erection bulging the white covers. I'd rather stay in here and watch Silas sleep, but I go to Tom while he's still awake.
      "Are you still bleeding?" He asks.
      "Yes."
      "Is something wrong? I mean, did they say to expect bleeding this long."
      "Has it been that long?"
      "Over two weeks."
      "I thought it was fourteen days."
      "No, longer. Eighteen. Don't you think something might be wrong?"
      "No, it's normal when you tear to your asshole."
      "That's sick."
      "But it's real." "Well, you don't have to talk about it like that."
      "I forget all the medical words."
      "Episiotomy."
      "That's only if they cut you. Not if you tear."
      "Can we not talk about it."
      "What should we talk about then, God's love?"
      "Not if you take it up in that tone."
      "Then why after all these years did Amy and Nick have to go through all that just to miscarry their baby."
      "God's ways are higher than our ways," Tom said. He had lost his erection.
      "Right, and our suffering is a result of our choice."
      "Yes, we have free will. God didn't want robots."
      "But isn't Eden preferable to whatever it is you call choice or free will."
      "No, if we had no choice, life would be…life would be ridiculous."
      "So, you're saying it's better to have whatever the hell you call choice than to live in paradise in perfect union with God without suffering or violence?"
      "What I'm saying is that God is love and that he's sovereign and if you'd stop moping around the house all day and get out and do something maybe you could stop talking this nonsense!"
      "Your God is not a mother."
      "You're right. Now leave my God alone."
      . Tom doesn't understand the tear in my vagina. To him the wound is superficial, and should be healed by now. But he's trusting and doesn't look any deeper than the surface of things.
***
      I am the only person on this walking path. Everyone that lives around me has somewhere else to be. They all have something to do. Block after block of houses and all of them empty now. I feel so alone. My sole existence is the maintenance of Silas's existence. He needs me to keep him alive. I wonder why we are born before we are able to care for ourselves. My guess is to bond with our mother. We are born helpless and defenseless. If we didn't have a mother to take care of us we would all die. I look at my baby as he stretches in his sleep. He's incapable of finding food and shelter on his own. He's utterly dependant. He needs me to sustain his existence, and I exist now solely to sustain his.
      It starts to drizzle and I lay a blanket over my baby to keep him dry. I don't mind getting wet, but I want to keep Silas dry. As I follow the path back towards our subdivision along the edge of the city's progress, I see something by the crow's skeleton just off the path in the cornfield. It looks like a small dead animal. The crows are picking it apart. I can see chunks of bright red flesh and I know it must be fresh. As I move closer I can tell it isn't an animal. My muscles tense like I'm pushing a great weight off my body but then I realize the force is inside that I'm pushing out. There's a scalding sensation in my right eye. The crows are mutilating a baby. A defenseless infant being devoured in a cornfield just off the walking path down the street from my house. My throat is closing up and I can't swallow. My right eye burns. I can't help but imagining that the baby is my own. I sprint towards the crows. They don't move as I pounce on a fat one in mid peck. I grab the bird by its neck and bite off its head. I'm crunching its skull. I'm gnashing its soft brain and eyes between my teeth. I'm morning the irrevocable loss of the baby. I rip the bird's body cavity in half and I lick out its heart. I lick out all its organs with my tongue even the undigested chunks of flesh from its stomach. It feels like a live earthworm in my mouth. It's warm and sour. Horribly sour like rancid meat. The other crows have flown away. What's left of the baby lies undignified on the unending earth blending into unending sky.
***
      At dinner I don't want to talk to Tom about the mutilated baby in the cornfield by the side of the walking path or the mother on the baby show who wouldn't give up her dead baby for two days or about Amy and Nick or even about the brainless crow but it is all I can think about and I keep leaping up from the table and dashing upstairs to make sure Silas is still breathing and when I return Tom doesn't say anything but gives me a strange and disapproving look but only in my good eye the one without the popped blood vessel and I want to know is a mother's love and care so strange to him? he has no idea what it's like being a mother it's a 24 hour a day job and with all the tragedy around it seems only a matter of time before it strikes home I don't pretend to understand human suffering or even to credit myself as having tasted suffering what with compared to that poor mother crying and snotting all over her dead baby for two days and that innocent infant who suffered some terrible mauling by a rabid beast no I don't pretend to understand it and the difference between Tom and I is that my soul won't just settle for the way it is it isn't just good enough for me to let God off by saying that's the way it is see I want more and Tom is just content to eat his dinner and watch some TV ejaculate and go to sleep but I expect more because I won't give up the hope that somehow the chaos and the violence is meaningful and that this cold barren unflinching earth blending into unending sky is more than an abortion.

 

Author Bio
Matt is a graduate of Iowa State University, and has taught English at Iowa State University and Ames High School. He lives in Ankeny, Iowa, while working on his Master's thesis and freelance writing.