cat ingrid leeches' vulvodynia

But my sister died in the night—It was her gallbladder they said. And the smell of roses disappeared from our town for twenty-five years. And the smell of tire factories, and rotting fish on the shore, and the piles of sulfur, and even the stench of our own sweat, rolled in to take her place. We had become so used to her scent that it had become all-consuming and imperceptible.

The realizations, of course, did not happen overnight. A few weeks after my sister died, we learned we had no idea how to cook. All the fresh water had possessed the fragrance of rose, which in turn infused the delicate flaky morsels of fish that composed our every meal.

There were more dire consequences: we realized the milk we were drinking was often sour, we weren’t attracted to our lovers, and bathing was more complicated than we could have ever imagined.

After my sister died, my mother grew mean. Or maybe she was always mean. What I mean is, she once told me I was lucky that my sister was dead. Now there was a chance that someone on this great green earth could love me. While my sister was alive, I was doomed to have lovers that lusted after something-no someone-more.

*

I am the mother of seven sons, but before I give birth to seven sons, I must conceive seven sons.

This is not an easy task.

With each new lover, my skin cells splinter and fester. And they’re either too lazy, or don’t understand how to put themselves back together.

I am surprised it doesn’t all come apart, my insides spilling on a lover’s phallus. Maybe it will any day now.

It’s strange, I can still remember their insults (intentional or otherwise):

You are a pile of somethin’ worm-eaten,
your vestibule resembles a tax of enflamed tax documents,

the center of your cunt looks like a fat and juicy spider. She’s staring at me,
Etc etc etc.

I can even remember the peculiarities of my lovers’ voices, the way they held their saliva in their mouth (do they let it pool behind their teeth or under their tongue?), but for the life of me, I can’t remember their hair color or how they died years later.

Does it matter? Like almost everyone, they were probably murdered.
And is it strange-
I can’t remember a thing my dead sister said to me. Not a single phrase.
Only one lover, the GEOLOGIST, got it right, Why the lower half of your body is a complex system of underwater caverns and caves.

Essentially, what he was saying is that the flowers growing from my body were the least of my problems.

*

I’ve given birth to seven sons, but each son, the moment after he was born, discovered he had legs to walk on and I was too exhausted to stop him from wandering back inside me. My sons never come out again. But I know they’re alive, because they eat, and I feel it. And they pass waste and grow and play games and I feel all of that too. And everything they produce inside me must also leave my body.

The first time I soiled myself in public. It was on my younger sister’s wedding day (born to replace the dead). I ruined the carpet of the chapel, the hem of the wedding gown-a dress that had been passed down through the generations. My parents were so embarrassed they couldn’t look me in the face. My mother took only one picture. It was of her foot, joints swollen, toes curled in anxiety, a small lake of shit swirling underneath.

*

The GEOLOGIST helped me map my terrain using government-funded stealth-technology. There is a large river inside me. A not-so-impressive mountain range. Several distinct biomes.

If only we could communicate with your seven sons, imagine all of the species we could discover. I forbade it. Then one day the GEOLOGIST was murdered.

There are so many murderers in this world, I wonder when will we run out of the living?

One of my sons is very thoughtful. He sits at the top of a glacier, the source of my river.

Sometimes the river changes direction and exits out of a new hole in my body. This son plucks my favorite species of flower and he fills the water with their petals and stems (he lightly chews on them to bring about their scent) and when I wake up to their fragrance I know that once again the river has changed directions. I must quickly find my new mouth to avoid drowning my community. I have lost several neighbors and cats to this fate.

Tell me, does any other woman in the world have such a gracious child?

I am the mother of seven sons, but before I give birth to seven sons, I must conceive seven sons.

The first time it happened, I was ten years old. I was friends with a girl who had the most beautiful and elongated tailbone in town. Her mother spent many hours of her life peeling away the flesh and carving intricate symbols into the vertebrae, even while her daughter screamed. Every night her voice grew louder and louder until all the dogs in town ran away. And for a while, the murderers ran away too, but later they returned with sharper claws and stronger teeth.

My mother warned me about the girl, you vanish when you are near her. I can’t even see you and I’m your mother.

One night, the girl with the elongated tailbone and I went to the house of a boy I liked. My friend and the boy disappeared behind a bedroom door, while I remained alone in the kitchen, grimacing and sipping on his daddy’s liquor, a bottle I had explicitly been told not to touch.

She told me later she had to get up several times to pee while they made love. He kept begging her to hold it inside, so he could finish.

But that night, I didn’t know, I didn’t know any of this. I wished a murderer would break into the house and gobble them up. And I cried for having such a terrible thought. Then I cried because I remembered my dead sister’s funeral. When I am sad, I feel all the sadness my body has ever felt at once. When I was younger, I thought this was unique to me. And while I was still crying, the boy returned to the kitchen. He asked what was wrong, and I tried to describe the complexity of feeling multiple sadnesses at once, when all your bad memories decide to be remembered at the same time. The boy stuck his thingie quickly inside me, before I even had time to know if I needed to pee or not (although when I told this story to my friend with the elongated tailbone, I think I told her the urge was unbearable and we cried together over our swollen urethras, holding and stroking them in our hands).

This is how my first son was conceived. But I would hold him high up in my body for years to come.

*

I am the mother of seven sons, but before I give birth to seven sons, I must conceive seven sons...

When I was thirteen, I dared to look upon a man as old as my father, and when he slapped me I didn’t look away. He made his daughters watch as he hit me again, and still I did not look away. How lucky it must be to be a father with no sons and only daughters! When he saw that they did not flinch or shy away from the violence, he kept hitting me until the whole family was vibrating from sexual excitement.

They took me away and locked me away in their basement. The father forced everyone in the family to pee in jars. He kept these jars on long shelves that lined the basement walls. Each jar was labeled with a peculiar series of letters and numbers. Only in his obituary, which I read many years later, did I learn that he was considered a great mind. A man determined to bridge the gap between the sciences and arts by collecting every known shade of yellow that the human body was capable of producing. But I did not know that then. I only wanted death. Every night when the house went dark, the jars seemed to glow. He had lights installed in the shelving. He made sure to display them in a way that made them seem not perverse, but rather a collection artfully arranged. It was hard to look away. One night, I unscrewed the lid off of each jar,

took a sip, then smashed it on the ground. I let their contents fill my body with warmth and light. Soon there was a flood. A wave of urine erased most of the town, including the university where he taught. For a while, their house bobbed along with the fast-moving currents, but then it sank. I do not remember how I survived and the family didn’t—there was no way for me to unlock that basement, but the facts are I did survive and then some.

*

And the third time happened like this: When I was five my mother mistook a coyote for a lost dog (this was before they had all vanished). She coaxed it into the back of her car, where it sat right next to me. Outside the car the coyote was suspicious and lurking, and I could see thousands of years of malice against my species in its eyes. Inside the car it panted like any other dog, although I swear to this day, its tongue was a few centimeters longer than is appropriate for polite company.

A stranger pulled over to tell my mother what she had done (luckily, he was not a murderer). But it was still too late, and I was already pregnant with my third child. At the time, I was only eight years old. If you have learned anything about the world from this story it’s that conception cannot and will not occur in a linear manner.

*

The fourth time, I was lucky enough to have fallen in love. And I bit the tip of my lover’s tongue off, (I think I must have been thinking about the coyote). I was surprised when she impregnated me. She was very proud that she had impregnated me, and I felt betrayed by her pride. Naturally we drifted apart. She died before I ever gave birth. The ferocity of my love for her seems childlike now. I dreamt the wet parts of our eyes would touch. That our eyelashes would fuse together, and I shuddered in my sleep from this simple action.

When I first had my period, I was ashamed. I hid the blood-soaked rags underneath my mattress and what sprouted was a very strange mammal of a tree. The bark was covered in fur, and its branches sprouted hair, fingernails, sometimes claws. I nicknamed the tree “My Lioness.” She was fierce and soft. She grew straight through my chest, the roof of our house, then turned towards

the sea. My father cut her down, but he left behind a single shred of fur-covered bark in my body. From this grew an embryo.

This happened when I was only four years of age.

*

One of my sons, chewed off his hands while he was in the process of being born. And in that way, he created another son.

One time I masturbated.

One time I saved a baby bird.

One time that baby bird died in a bowl I placed on the kitchen table. I forgot about it, but the cat didn’t.

I am nearly in my eighth decade, but I look much older. I like to write in very public spaces. I know you are just as likely to be murdered in plain sight, but it makes me feel safer. Somehow having witnesses to my murder makes it seem not as bad.

My eyes are borrowed from an even older body. They are disintegrating faster than the rest of me. I cannot afford new ones.

Imagine seeing a small woman (from faraway I am often mistaken for a child) type in very large letters:

ONE TIME I MASTURBATED
ONE TIME I SAVED A BABY BIRD

What would you think?

I cannot be the only person on this earth who gets a tingle on the back of her neck from spying on strangers. But what would you think if you saw these phrases right next to one another? What would a baby bird come to mean in this case? I would assume it was code or antiquated slang. I would think the

old woman in front of me was talking about a scrotum or the head of a penis or perhaps snidely remarking on the underdeveloped-but-already-gently-sagging breast of her granddaughter.

But no, what I meant is what I meant: I saved a baby bird. I was so proud of myself (except in the instance, which occurs half of the time, where the baby bird eventually dies, in the other cases, the baby bird is eternal). I usually kill things. For instance, I accidentally killed my parents. But I really did save the baby bird, even before it dies, if it dies, I saved it from a previous death that hunted it and delivered it to a new one. And at least this one occurred in the privacy of an air-conditioned home.

But it was the pride in saving the baby bird that doomed me and got me pregnant.

The rest of the children were fathered under normal circumstance, that is, I am an adult woman who knows better, yet even in my seventies, I still refused to use condoms.

I cannot wait to father a collection of children, who will be detached from the recesses of my body. One time I fathered a complete set of dining room furniture, but this is not the same thing. The flowers run in the blood, and I believe they want it this way. I am envious of the sexually-deviant professor and his bouquet of daughters. Even if they are all dead.

If only I could stop having sex.
my labia are swollen and painful and still I have sex and I don’t know why.
And my gynecologist insists on plucking the hyacinth and crocus stems growing from my perineum and yet it does nothing, nothing, it does nothing. But the flowers look nice next to the examining table. Except, for when I visit the doctor, my body is allowed to grow wild.

If I don’t have sex, I feel the holes in my body shrinking. And I’m afraid that the seven sons inside me will suffocate.

I am tired of finding their defecations smeared on my thighs, and sometimes I want them to die, but not like that.

When I stop having sex my pimples disappear and then the pores themselves. Strangers tell me how beautiful I am. Next my anus evaporates. One of my lovers told me that it looked just like the condensation of water on an air conditioning unit. The height of femininity.

My labia are swollen and painful and still I have sex,
and I don’t know why.

It is written that the person who first discovered magic was Zoroaster, king of the Bactrians. Like me, he was perpetually pregnant and found himself incapable of fathering a child. There is a story that he released a feral horde of birds inside his body to drag his children out into the world, to prove that he had an heir. But they chose to let the birds peck out their eyes rather than join their parent in his kingdom.

I do not know if there is a connection between the magic and the pregnancies, the lost children, and the desire to father a child-it is a nice thought. Like me, it is written, that Zoroaster had fragile skin. The skin between his legs often tore in new and exciting ways. While riding into battle a hole opened up in his flesh. Two hundred men and their horses disappeared from the face of the earth. Zoroaster returned, alone, naked, and on foot.