Emptiness becomes me. Connected with a tube, plastic pipes draw me lower and lower on the silky red, and I slip below the pool. A timer measures out 20 minutes exactly and then switches from drainage to fill. And in 20 more minutes, I am full of blood.
When I go under, I am close to death.
I remember my life like a dream.
There was a time when I was 14 and a boy of 18 made me want to really, fully be with someone for the first time. I pulled down purple panties and he let the tip of his dick come from the top of his shorts.
"Lick me," I said.
And he put his mouth all around the bottom of my cunt.
I was like rubber, never stretched apart.
And he put the tip of his dick in me but he would only ever put the tip.
The next day I found him and asked him why.
He said he thought about in the moment that I was 14. "I can't put it all the way in you and even my saliva, on you, contains DNA. If they catch me, I'll go to jail."
I told him, "How is anybody ever gonna know to check my pussy for your codes? It's a secret I keep between my pants and my bones, and I would never tell on you 'cause I want you to put it all the way in."
I'm thinking of this as the blood drains.
He's like: "I want to put it all the way in, but I'm afraid I'll hurt you."
"But it'll be nice and snug," I say.
"I think it'll be too tight."
And after that we had a couple of bunkbed conversations but he would never be my counsellor again, he was so afraid we'd fuck.
When the blood gets low, the colors follow.
I see red as deep sanguine, white highlights pulse each time my heart beats. It struggles to keep going. And I am on the verge of perpetual moonrise, sunset, tides and eclipse. This is how I wake from dreams, every minute checking my pressure and pulse—and it's always one-third less than I expect it to be. Even if I can maintain. It's got a hole in the bottom of the bag. Bones. My head can only take too much tragedy upon waking: my room was painted, my womb is dry, the old cats that we had to get rid of are doing much better in their new place, baby dogs born with sharp claws dripping out of me onto the carpet. Oxygen levels falling, nuclear war—doesn't anyone have any respect that I'm finishing my experiments, that I won't be able to finish if the world turns to dust? When I look at my tanks the water is climbing, babies stuck between the surface of their lake and the top of the cage, losing ground each second, clawing at the screens with their tiny fingernails.
This is the tide of time, emptying out its sand on a shrinking beach, each season less room for travelers to pass, under each footstep a needle, a gun, a piece of the Tangram, and a brown wig. The needle is to show that 99.999% of the drugs I have taken are pharmaceuticals. The gun is the only symbol of power simplistic Americans understand. The Tangram fragment represents each fetus I have brought up to be a kernel of loving genius before I cut them out of my hole. And the brown wig represents Prince—I don't know why but I thought that Prince would have something to say about this.
Changing purple to red, insisting the older boy put his penis inside me—I had to find new ways to convince them to plop their wads in my trick, mostly it would be employing the wavering willingness of people closer to my age.
Unfolding the scythe.
Removing excess skin from my vulva—paring it down.
Using tongs to go up my blood chute—boom booms in my head—heavy hands pull tight against the handles, and soon I have that silent screaming suffocater in my hands, untangling wires for arms, noticing the teeth—gums barely formed—the thing can hardly cry, only gasp for oxygen in the fetus room.
I put him down on my sheets before crossed legs.
Set the tongs down.
Take a picture. Place it in an album called, "2017-08-09."
Take another picture. He cringes to the flash.
I catch my breath—my heart does this thing where it stops my mind everything goes blank and I die for 1/23rd of a second—it does this now.
I know that someday it will stop forever, and I recreate with the thought of it as a way to calm myself. There will be a moment where I am alive for a few more seconds, I feel my heart stop, and then that's me. Some weird moment where you know you're going to die. And I hope when they find my room they will catalogue and label and reference and analyze every corpse I have created, from their tiny tongues to their tiny vaginas and dicks, DNA analyze those fucks and track down all their boys and ask each one of them: "Were you in this room? Did you know what she was doing with your kids?" And if my boys are true they'll just say there's no way they could ever earn enough money to be the fathers.
And I'll be swirling—swirling down—into a well of blood.
And I'll breathe it, excrete it, clot it, eat it.
Nothing healthier than a breakfast of blood.
Manufacture bodies for this purpose.
Collect them.
Gratify them.
Never let them leave the room.
And if you start to wonder whether this all stands for something, I would like to help you but I can't. They say you make it but that doesn't mean you understand it.
What I can tell you is about my sperm trap (cunt), boys who have been there as part of my breeding program, also the birthing/extraction process, and finally, subdivision of the fetus by means of a Classic Edition Victorinox.