Kings of the Hollowed-Out
- Sep 21, 2022
- 5 min read
by Kelly Gray
We drag the doe off the road, fold her into the back of our trunk. Ace is whistling as we drive away, hand on her belly. I’m still nervous from before, my own stomach cramping. A seed of doubt is twisting limbs around my organs, squeezing. I breathe out just loud enough to irritate her.
Damn it, Sam. I told you. We don’t need family to make family. Not yours, not mine.
Earlier that morning Ace had cornered me in bathroom #6. I had gone in to splash water on my face, look into the only mirror left in the hotel. Lately, it was always room #6, the two giant beds jammed together, the peeling wallpaper with golden frogs leaping in a succinct pattern. This way frogs, right up the wall. I hadn’t seen frogs in three years and Ace liked the beds pushed together, said we were kings, Kings of the Hollowed-Out Hotel, so that is where we mostly sleep.
Iggy had been trying to give us space to talk, but outside was already too hot. What little paint was left curled as pipes and rain gutters twisted as the sun got on. We had moved into the privacy of the bathroom. Against the aqua tile, Ace’s eyes were spectacular, vivid weapons with long lashes. Cold, even.
I want this, Sam. We are lucky and you know it. Even Iggy doesn’t want to let this go.
Iggy is our midwife. Our drug lord. Our opossum-raising, SCOTUS-POLICE-hating midwife. She’s old and fat and mostly wears tablecloths tied together. She has the moon cycles tattooed across her eyelids, and when she has contraband books, she paints each little moon gold. The last book I traded meat for was Content Warning: Everything, which Ace used to plaster over the last of the mirrors in the hotel. I just can’t stand looking at myself anymore, she explained. I wish I was poetry. Just words and lines and sounds. I helped her apply the flour and water glue in exchange for one mirror I could keep using. This morning I could see Ace over my shoulder in that mirror, her breasts already getting larger, her belligerency implausibly more robust. Like her personality was ready for her to multiply.
Now in the car, it’s tarmac-melting hot out and Ace is still the master of absolutes. She’s taking corners faster than she should, but I don’t say anything, even when the road feels get-stuck-soft. Better to get this doe home quick, on account of the swelling. We’ll have to check her for bleed, check her eyes for clouds. Already we know there are fleas in the edges of her ears, which is good. But no maggots, which is why we allowed ourselves a moment of hope when we found her. That’s all we have been lately, checking for small signs, flashes of future, dragging bodies this way and that.
When we get home, I run inside real quick to use #6’s bathroom. Next to the toilet are white bottles with thick lids screwed on too tight, proofing it from children in an act of irony. One bottle of misoprostol, one bottle of lithium. I piss sitting down, eye level with the instructions for the misoprostol. Sublingual, I heard Iggy say, can’t be traced in your blood. The lithium is the same old same old, no instructions needed at this point.
Back outside I help Ace heave the doe up and over our shoulders, the muzzle against the small of my back. I want to close the eyelids as we launch the body into the mimosa tree in the courtyard. The doe is tight-bellied with engorgement. I pull the rope, run my fingers along the thick arteries and extended nipples.
I turn to Ace who is digging her knife into the neck flesh, tracing the blade down to the center of spread legs. The body wants to spin in the wind. I hold it still. The doe is pregnant. I look at Ace, then back at the doe, still unable to say anything. Doe innards spill out black purple and wild into a bucket between our feet. I can hear Ace’s whistle get stuck in her throat. I know what’s happening before it happens and a washing of relief blows softly against my face.
A pink unformed baby with hooves falls into Ace’s hands. I am standing as still as the doe’s mouth and swollen tongue. Ace starts to cry. The baby looks like a transparent chihuahua, all ears, forehead, and belly. Ace says all things at once. I didn’t know. I don’t want to do it. I can’t be a, I can’t be a. She doesn’t say the word that I don’t even think.
I kneel. I almost tell her that we can make it work. It’s safe now to say something sweet, a bluff to buy me points. Instead, I pick up the knife and use it to cut the umbilical cord. She slides her back down the tree, next to the bucket, cradling the baby thing in her arms. Ace continues to weep. I know her good enough to know it’s her goodbye cry, so I just stand there, looking past the swaying doe, trying to remember the last time I saw a baby anything other than Iggy’s opossums.
Ace always wants to bury things, process things, pull them apart. So, when she’s done crying, we’ll bury it. I will bring her inside the Hollowed-Out Hotel and set her up on the beds pushed together, bring her the bottle. I will wrap Ace in blankets, bring her mimosa tea. I will let her open the bottle on her own and I will go back out to finish the work that we started. I will pull the skin off all the legs, check the spleen, kidney, and liver. I will make good time working on my own in hopes of filling room #9 with salted meats. But for now, I let my silence envelop Ace. She wails into the hot afternoon, her whistle made rough by letting go.
Kelly Gray (she/her/hers) is the author of Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press) and the audio chapbook My Fingers are Whales and Other Stories of Cetology (Moon Child Press). She is the recipient of the Neutrino Short-Short Prize from Passages North and the Creative Sonoma Cohort Grant. Gray’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Northwest Review, Superstition Review, Newfound, Pithead Chapel, Menacing Hedge, Bear Review, Maudlin House, Hobart, and Driftwood Press, among other places. Her short story collection, Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife, is forthcoming from Quarter Press in 2022. You can read more of her work at writekgray.com and follow her meanderings on Instagram @west_of_west.
