Compliancy

No lusting, thrusting, no hot breathed gasps or fingers curled in my hair, just a youngish white presumably CIS straight man telling me he’s been slingin’ IUDs all day everyday since Trump was elected, like this is something funny, like not wanting to be pregnant is an impulsive reaction to a political climate. Which it is and it isn’t, but I’ve been trying my best to trick this sweet body of mine since I was 15 years old, letting fake hormones lie and pretend pregnancy, which is very clever medicine. 15 is young though, so is 16 17 18 so is 23 and I’m just over here with my head on some crinkly fucking paper pulled taut, feet in those goddamn stirrups, this dude staring right into me telling me it probably won’t hurt that much while his penis lays safe and limp between his legs not lit up under these fluorescent lights. And of course it hurts. No pain medications, freezing cold room, an apathy saved especially for womxn. I tell him it hurts and he tells me to relax and I think I might vomit and my vision starts to blur and I hope to pass the fuck out but of course I don’t, not yet, not until it hurts so bad that I’m crying and finally when he says all done he pulls his gloves off finger by finger snap snap snap and walks out of the room and everything goes dark. I wake up to a round kind-faced womxn standing by my shoulder holding a cold washcloth to my forehead asking if I’m okay, if I know where I am, and I can’t talk for some reason but she knows this and touches me lightly and even in this stupor I’m certain the youngish white presumably CIS straight man is in the next room doing this to another womxn, prowling from room to room leaving sad clammy patients in his wake ushering in mother-like womxn to clean up his desperate little messes, coax us into leaving, freeing up that chair so he can keep on slingin’. So I play my part, stumble off that crinkly paper, and surrogate-mom steadies me when I see stars. She leaves the room while I get dressed which feels absurd considering they just inserted a piece of plastic farther into my body than anything else has ever gone but I suppose there isn’t anything intimate about what we did, just a necessary invasion, but while I stumble trying to shove my leg through the tube of these pants I feel something hot and needy drip onto my hand and I realize I’m crying again. I’m terrified to bend too much because everything hurts and getting dressed takes a while. I leave the room expecting round kind-faced womxn to be waiting outside but she’s not so I wander to the check-out desk and the person tells me I can leave so I do and when I step outside there’s a silver subaru waiting for me and I carefully fold myself into it. Earlier this person I love told me he’d pick me up and I said no I’ll walk because I’m a #coolgirl and also things are strained between us but when I walk out and see him I’m grateful for his solid warmth, steady gaze, the way he always smells like tea tree toothpicks. He pulls out chocolate peanut butter gelato, red wine, and a bottle of ibuprofen and I still feel like crying so I mutter a quiet thank you and try not to move my body, think about my body, feel my body. Later I’m in the bathroom scared to pee or shit because I’m almost certain I’ll eject this IUD right into the toilet, ripping my insides the whole way out like a bloody streamer and all this trauma will be for nothing. In these minutes of mustering my bravery I consider the pain I’ll endure to not get pregnant, to not create a perfect distillation of love and life, to not have to look into my child’s eyes while the world burns around them, to not have to answer them when they ask me why the fuck I chose to birth a human when their survival is impossible. I sit on that toilet mourning the babies I’ll never carry, the trimesters I’ll never spend staring at my full belly, a lover’s hand cupping it with smiling lips pressed to my neck, mourning the moments wasted daydreaming my perfect family: sleepy morning cuddles tiny giggles and heads that smell sweet, hopeful voices that call me momma. Mourning that this isn’t a choice, that I have no option but to be a womxn that doesn’t want to birth children, mourning that previous mothers and fathers took this option from me and at age 23 I’m just trying to figure my life out, and I don’t want to be pregnant I just want to have sex and so I have to go through all this bullshit and now here I am cowering in my filthy bathroom afraid to take a piss, but finally I do and when I wash my hands I don’t look in the mirror. I just walk out and slink into my spot on the couch, bottle of red wine half empty on the floor, surrounded by men that I love but feeling far away, feeling alone and angry and sad and wondering why no one told me it would be this bad, wondering why I feel violated when I literally asked for this, why I feel broken when everyone else seems to feel empowered by this, why it makes me depressed that my poor body thinks it’s holding a special little someone when it’s actually just a T-shaped piece of plastic, like watching a crow carry a piece of shiny trash around thinking it’s valuable, gently tucking it into its nest.

Published in Fiction International 2020 Issue 53: Algorithm