The Apple Doesn’t Fall

Alicia Gee

Mine slid out of my pussy like an oyster, soft and pungent, Rowan said I would know because when I pinched it, my fingers wouldn’t touch, it wouldn’t dissolve like blood but would hold, like gum or an egg white, through the pulses of my body, I wanted to claim it as proof, an excess of pleasure, the dregs of a night when he led me dripping from the shower to fuck on my tired duvet, it was some kind of sea monster, a fig split open on the ground, I wanted to pour it from one cup to another, tease out the yolk, suspend it in a mason jar and watch the blood flake off and settle, until all that was left was a distortion in the water, a thickening.

          Mum said the doctor wanted to make it clear that he didn’t “hand out abortions left, right, and center,” her husband told her that he wasn’t going to change any diapers, she took time off work, flew to Australia from Blenheim, days later she went hiking with friends and began to bleed, she never could sit still, despite the curette that had trawled her insides, she didn’t lie on a fainting couch with her hand on her forehead, didn’t ask for grapes and ginger ale, didn’t revel in her fresh solitude, mine came in a box of pills like a little lunchable, he stood in the doorway while I moaned, while I pressed my wet forehead to the seat of the kitchen stool, shitting and puking in syncopation, he drew me a bath and filled it with florid Epsom salts, lavender and some kind of citrus, I thought—what a funny way to get to know me.

          Dad crossed the border, into Washington state with a woman who shared my mum’s name, he didn’t know if it was his, I like knowing that his girlfriend was fucking who she pleased, that it didn’t stop him from sitting behind that steering wheel, they came back the same night, I wonder what they told the border guard or if he even asked, maybe he assumed they were down to buy cigarettes, apricots, maybe everyone was in town for abortions, the tourism industry of Washington in the seventies, my pills came from India, I couldn’t find them in town, I was turned away again and again, every damned doctor averted her eyes, I wanted them to see me, I wanted to enjoy the choice, I wanted to enjoy what my body would not do.

          Once it slid out of my pussy like a lump of cum or a baby finger, once I could let go of the puke-flecked litter bucket and peel my cheek from the stool, I lay in the hot water until I pruned, my cramps softened in the heat, like a current inside me, an echo of my own pulse, my pulse alone, I watched cartoons and smoked weed until I giggled again, suddenly touched by the way he had stood frozen in the frame of the bathroom door, holding his phone on the edge of a 911 call, he rolled his eyes and held my feet, poured me cranberry juice and seltzer, I still have the heating pad he bought me, rolled into the ottoman at the foot of my bed, it makes me think of his big hands, his red tattoo, what I loved inside of me, what I wouldn’t keep.

Alicia Gee is an MFA candidate at the University of Idaho. She has been published in the Malahat Review and the Southern Literary Festival Anthology.