Souls - VIII

I was sixteen and my daughter destroyed my uterus. In a school system whose sex education program consisted mostly of “abstinence is the only safe sex” I had no idea what was happening at the time. All I really knew was that I sinned with a boy and I stopped bleeding down there for a couple of months. That all seemed fine considering, but then my tummy began to swell. That was not so fine, especially according to my mother.

Sex was forbidden, exciting, and mysterious. Pregnancy was uncomfortable, scary, and depressing. My whole world judged my sixteen year-old self for making decisions she was never taught to understand. To them, “Don't do it, no matter what” was the authoritative view on sexy times. The problem is, my body really wanted to do it no matter what. It was an itch, an itch that was mystified and hidden, which made it all the more compelling.

So when my young belly, still a child’s belly really, started to swell I wasn’t given anything but shame. This was a physical symptom of sin, and everyone assumed it was contagious. The boy who sinned with me slipped into the background, judging me quietly along with someone else. I was alone in this. My mother weeped and asked how I could do this to her, my father mostly ignored me, and my friends…well they just went away.

Then the day came. My little person, the one that I had made inside me, came out as if she was one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. She was my sin, my punishment. And I didn’t care, I loved her.

I named her even though they told me not to, they told me it would only make it harder. My mother demanded I give her away, so I wasn’t supposed to bond with her. I wasn’t even supposed to call her, “her”. I was supposed to call it “it”, but I couldn’t. She was my girl, she was my Mary.

I heard her cry, saw her matted hair as they wrapped her in a blanket. Then she was gone. They took her from the operating room. I was alone again, for a moment my heart was full; now it was not only empty, but torn apart. I weeped as they put me back together again, my lady parts placed back in me like a slimy game of Tetris. I sobbed as they sowed me back up, the gash below my belly button the only proof I had ever been a mother. 

“Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.”

I had sinned against my own body and it had treated me accordingly.

My child, my Mary, had been my punishment and my sacrifice. 

And there he is, the demon of child sacrifice, smiling at me in my motel room. Molech continues to smirk as he pulls out another cigarette and moves to the nightstand. I can’t stop looking at the discarded ember, blackening the carpet.

He grabs the set of keys lying on the nightstand and holds them up between his fingers, 

“Shall we road trip?”