A woman was sent by the school board and when she sat she said:
"Are there any questions you want to ask me?"
I said: "No."
She said: "This is the last time you'll get to ask me questions directly so if there's something you want to know, this is the time."
"I don't want to know anything about you."
"Then let's begin."
I stare at her. She has frizzy hair and a badge that just says: 23456.
She looks around my room: the red walls splattered with blood and stuck with tiny fingernails. The white ceiling. The window. My terrariums, stacked on the dresser, keeping feti in various stages of development.
"A fetus room," she says.
"You've been in them before?"
"Once or twice."
"Were they as good as this one?"
"It depends," says 23456. "You'd have to show me your breeding plan."
So I show her. A gene analysis app on my phone. Samples from the terrariums. Uterine wall swabs.
"Do you have their taxpayer identification numbers?"
"Each one is registered as an LLC."
"Smart. Do you know why I'm here?"
"To psychoanalyze me?"
"No—" (and here she said my name) "I'm here because the commonwealth now requires homeschoolers to submit their students to mental health evaluations six times a month—"
"But my students are dead."
"That is so often the case," she says. "So rare to capture one alive. The technology exists to perform these evaluations postmortem and I guess that's what we'll have to do here."
"My fetuses, though—except the one in my oven—are dry and scaly like seaweed on sushi. Their brains, when possible, were removed with Krazy Straws and set outside the window on a rack much akin to the way one dries fish for feeding to the dogs."
"How did you learn to do that?"
"Internet."
"Isn't that the place where you watch videos of men spitting on a woman's pussy?"
"Well, look," I say. "If you need to spit on a pussy you're doing something wrong."
"Respectfully."
"Can I ask you a question?"
"No. The time for questions is over."
"Where did you get your degree?"
"The time for questions has elapsed."
"Do you even have a degree?"
"Get up on the bed young lady."
"Why?"
"Get up on those pillows. Spread your legs."
"And what if I said no?"
"You can't. It's a state-sponsored initiative. If you don't comply a shark will be assigned to your room phantom helicopters media hacking mandatory narcotics mobile clogging drug-induced medical conditions unknown types of cancer and if we have to we'll drag you to a hole in the ground in Baghdad next to the guy who invented antigravity he's a genius and no one will ever hear from him again."
"Why not keep him around and see if he invents something else? Imagine if Einstein had been disappeared."
"You're a little late to the party, fetus girl. His discovery is worth more than his life. What's important is to make sure these ideas end up in the right hands."
"Do you still need me to get up on the bed?"
"Unless you want to go to jail in Baghdad."
"Ok."
So I pull my pants off and jump up spread eagle so this bitch can see my vajayjay.
"Where's your vagina?"
"It's right there."
"I don't see it."
"Do you see this?"
"I see a salt and vinegar potato chip."
"Well take it out of there!"
23456 removes the chip and places it on her tongue.
"The damning thing," she says, "is this industry prohibition on Mexican Catholics pumping babies out their ass. Anti-birth conditioners on the mind. Nut sack labias in the width. Secretaries of Secretariat. Aberdeen Düsseldorfs. A trip I took to New England, where they let you in the front and whisked you out the back, processing under an internal power plant, and every doctor was a serf."
23456 stripped off her licenses and smoked a bone.
I reached inside the red club pants and massaged by box.
"I understand this fair need," continued 23456, "to genocide the star of your womb. It is born of blackness and chemistry, built inside the selfsame category of groups of groups and genres of categories of naught."
Puff puff puff, pass the bone.
Puff puff, pass, puff puff, pass. Stone.
"This is why you keep a journal," 23456 told me. "You need it like a knight needs a shield. If you're on Brokeback Mountain you write a lotta poetry to a goat. If you're in your fetus room, you record everything you see, all you do, all you know, so that someday south of here in time and the space of face you will show it to the one who survived and hopefully all the little sisters and all the little brothers who survived the guilt will have themselves a halfway playmate for life. It's one thing to light the menorah in your pee panties it's quite another to drink the oil rub it up and down your kitty paw slick licking your fingers sitting out back of a rancher's barbecue standup comedy from the girl with the Wet-Nap stuck in her front butt crack that was me in my first day on the farm. But you want to catch those silver moments with balloons and guns. A gun is power—a suitcase full of money, that's freedom. No other symbols are needed 'cause nothing else matters. It's going out in a hail of bullets—that's been the dream all along and if you can't face it you can't make it and if you can't make if you can't face it that's the cord that ties you from tip to toe riding my bike sock footed and you barge in and say sweet girl ain't you a baby factory ain't your momma had three of you six of you 12 of you can't peel an apple any faster than any single one."