The Music Be The Food flash fiction event continues with round two. This time, the song is from a delightful band called Broods. The song is “Freak Of Nature”. Give a listen to the tune and then read the first flash fiction piece, by the fabulous Eden Royce.
The Second Oldest Profession
There is a life growing inside you.
Brand new, full of hope and unknown promise. Created from the madness, mindless thrashing of one night. You remember…well, you don’t remember much except that it was exhilarating—everything at once, falling, rising, hard, soft, fast, slow, grind, pulse, throb. The hum radiated through you for hours, into the next day.
And now this.
This miracle.
It grows because you nourish it. You’re not sure how. The doctors removed your uterus years ago, but nature always finds away. Or creates its own. It brings with it a purpose, a reason to carry on—to get up, to bathe, to breathe—that you didn’t quite have before. It’s comforting, somehow.
Other mothers have said you’ll know when it’s time and you do. Two months, sixteen days, nine hours.
There is pain.
Searing, blue-white, clouding your vision and you gasp at how it cleaves through you. Breathe.
youcandothis. youcandothis. youcandothis.
Naked, you climb in the empty tub and lie back, the cool porcelain easing the heated flares of agony. Hours, or perhaps days, later you finally come apart.
It emerges from the fissure in your belly, scaled and tentacled, its beak-mouth searching, searching. One last grunt of pain as it slips free, already able to crawl. Soon, it finds your weighty breast.
You don’t understand its warbling, but as you cradle its bulk close, nothing else matters. Exhausted, you fall asleep to the music of rhythmic suckling.
Read more from Eden Royce at edenroyce.com.
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