Parturition Hole

Her mother was neither small nor medium-size, neither too small nor too big. She had a cleft-palate, not a harelip or rabbits’, but a lip that seemed to cut upwards and to one side. She stitched and tatted, basting together cushions and cover slips, some blue and red, others red and blue. She kept a brown bunny in a hutch behind the house beside the aqueduct across from the Waymart near the Sears where she lived with a man named Slocomb. She knew the man in the hat but not the shamble leg man, nor the legless man or the harridan. She thought his name was Clams, not alms, and liked shellfish with roasted peppers and laetrile chutney. No: she likes clams Alfredo in a mustard sauce and green brown green lentils diced and minced and chopped into tiny bitable morels. Mushrooms Alfredo and scallions green olive green. She spent her honeymoon at Nolan Falls backcombing lice out of her hair. The bed she shared with her bent-cocked husband was overrun with nits and lice, cuvees of them. She swam in the sheets swaddled like a calf in its mother’s tripe, stomach to belly, her husband’s cock swiping a bead across the small of her back, finding purchase between the perineum of her ass-bone. They made the beast with two backs, her parturition hole moist with spittle and clove oil, her husband’s cock bent into her like a Bowie knife, eyes staring blankly at a wet spot on the ceiling tile.