I carried my suffering in a stroller because it couldn’t move independently, and it got tired in the afternoon and needed me. When it whined, we sat on a bench and watched the trains go by. When it was hungry, I opened my shirt and warmed it with my skin as it milked me. Didn’t matter there was a creeper beneath the willow tree looking over as I sang to it. I was thinking of the day it would jettison itself like a cosmonaut, and I held it, cherishing this moment of dependence. A train roared by and startled my suffering awake. It bit my nipple, following the train with its eyes. I am told there will sometimes be blood in the milk. People who don’t have suffering of their own tell me what a pretty pattern the blood makes. Cooing, they offer to hold my suffering for a while, but not in the world we live in. I dream of planting a chip beneath its skin for the inevitable day that someone says, it has your eyes, and I look away for a second and it’s gone.
is a writer, English teacher, and intermittent bookmaker. Her writing has appeared in NANO Fiction and CutBank, and in the anthologies, The Conduct of Bees in the Buckwheat Season (Factory Hollow Press) and Invisible Ear Four.
