First she finds a finger, tucked neatly under the pillow, slightly crooked as if in admonishment. The mother stares at it for a long moment before gingerly scooping it up and carrying it over to the shag carpet where the boy lies on his back, shadowboxing the air with all four limbs. It takes her a few tries, but by dangling a demonic plush rattlesnake in the boy’s face, she is able to distract him long enough to reattach it, peeling open his tiny clenched fist. The boy immediately starts wailing, high and thin like a faraway siren.
The mother spends Saturday afternoon digging through the kitchen trash in search of the kneecap thrown skyward when her back was turned. Onion peels look disturbingly like nubby baby flesh, so she spends ten minutes sniffing several flesh-colored scraps. She tosses to the side the ones that make her cry. The boy roots around the garbage, holding up a moldy chunk of cheddar and a receipt for the L’Occitane perfume she’d returned for cash. She pries them from his fingers, accidentally taking his palm clean off. She rinses it with the kneecap in warm soapy water before molding them back onto him, pinching and massaging until the skin lies smooth, kissing the invisible seams until the boy’s uncomplicated grin drips with drool.
The boy falls apart nearly every day. The mother finds toes lined up like ants outside his crib, an elbow playacting as a doorstop before she snatches it up. On Monday evening she leans over to kiss him goodnight, and on Tuesday morning she finds his eyebrow tangled in the ends of her hair. On Wednesday he takes out his eyeball, rolling it around with the blueberries on his high chair. She swears and disinfects it, staring at the eye — so like her own — sightless in the palm of her hand. The boy squeals and gurgles, his uncorrupted happiness marred by the dark, empty socket. She squishes the eye back into his face without much fanfare from either of them. He squirms and blinks both eyes, then smashes a blueberry into his cheek, as if to mimic her.
She doesn’t bother to replace the teeth, though, which she keeps finding curled under furniture like dust bunnies. She thinks the holes they leave behind are reasonably charming, like damp impressions in dirt waiting to be planted. She runs a finger across his fecund gums and decides against re-rooting his incisors — they’ll grow back eventually. The hair from her bun is permanently loose, and crescents of sweat monogram each of her t-shirts. Instead, she gathers up the teeth and keeps them in a silk-lined pouch in her underwear drawer. She forgets they are there.
The mother finds a small, irregularly shaped piece of the boy on a low shelf and absently puts it in her pocket, desperately trying to figure out where it goes. He is the puzzle, she thinks, running her thumb along the chunk’s soft edge. It comes to her — back of the thigh. She fixes him the next morning after falling asleep in his crib, cradling his small, warm body and feeling his hot breath against her nose.
On Friday he loses that, too. His little chest moves and his lips curl but expel no air. The mother returns his breath to him with a quick exhale, having earmarked air within her own lungs for his use long ago. Her chest constricts with a small agony, and she traces the swell of his peachy cheek in a teary trance. He tugs on her ear and lightly punches her breast as he feeds. She takes it as a thank you.
As the boy ages, his voice starts to sound like broken glass. The mother’s eyes lift heavy loads to wake each morning, and she eats several spoonfuls of strawberry yogurt before realizing it has turned. The pieces of the boy she finds are more cryptic — four fingernails from his left hand only, the wrist without hand or arm, those having been fused together by his own inexperienced fingers. She watches him play with vegetable scraps through a haze. She watches him pick up the stem of a bell pepper and put it in his mouth along with his pinky. She fishes one out of his gummy orifice but can’t find the other. She figures it will turn up eventually.
In several months, the boy sits on a rug with another chubby boy in a sea of plastic bricks and rubber balls, their bodies shifting and rolling in uncoordinated jerks. One proffers the other a block with the letters D, H, L, O, R, V decorating its faces in blinding colors. The other rolls his head over, detaching it from his neck with a wet squelch and giggling when it comes to rest against the other’s soft untrod foot. The faces look at each other and squeal in terrorized delight. The sound knifes through the mother’s aching head. She stands, adjusts her stained leggings, and returns the head to its rightful place. The boys continue playing.
The little tongue looks like a flattened worm, slimy and bruise-colored against her palm. The mother thinks she can see milk in the stringy saliva that still clings to the organ. She gently places it in her own mouth — damp, contracting cavern — where it will be warm and safe. She fuses it alongside her own where it wiggles then stills. For a moment’s peace, she whispers with two tongues. The boy sleeps soundlessly in her arms.
2025