On the toilet, a new mother discovers her head is full of cement. She drips red and yellow, squirts herself with water and lidocaine, and feels the wet cement chunks coating her throat and lapping the backs of her eye sockets. In the mirror, her pupils, no longer black, widen in weary shock like translucent pebbles in a fish bowl. Behind them, she sees the grey sludge, churning. When she tips her ears to the left and the right, she feels the cement move, and she rolls her head in enjoyment.
For several weeks, she tries to prevent the cement from setting by rocking in the shower or putting her head between her knees when her husband berates her. When she breastfeeds, she tips her chin up and down. Her baby stares, his unfamiliar face flat with worry. Sometimes, she bends over the baby in the crib until the cement fills her eyes. The mother stares at her baby, her face grey and brackish, until the baby turns his head to the side and loosens his grip on his mother’s thumb, asleep.
At her postpartum doctor’s appointment, she mentions the cement. The doctor smiles, shines a light in the mother’s fish pebble eyes, and asks about breastfeeding.
After a few months, the baby’s face begins to resemble the mother’s. The cement, now set, feels heavier; the mother’s thoughts freeze like mannequins in gunmetal bond. At dinner, her husband smiles and holds her hand, lobbing gentle platitudes, and she feels them break and slide down the surface of her concrete mind, unanswered.
Later, the baby smiles for the first time. The mother feels the scrape of muscle against gravel as she smiles back. Sometimes, she puts her head on the table to rest. When she yells, her thoughts stream thin and barbaric from her mouth, her tongue sluggish with the taste of aluminum. In the mirror, her eyes lack their earlier depth, and she rotates her head with caution, imagining her skull in plaster cast in a medical office, jawless and alone.
The baby, now with seven teeth, takes his first steps towards the mother, dimpled arms outstretched. He smiles with the thin lips of the father and the grey eyes of the mother, and the mother cries with a flat joy.
One morning, the mother picks up a sledgehammer from the toolbox and smashes it on her head. She sprays blood, bone, and iron ore on the mirror and does not clean it up. Bending over to pick pieces from the ground, she enjoys the breeze on the snaked folds of her cortex. She gives one piece to her husband and the other to her son. Her husband stares at her bloody visage as the baby brings the cement to his teeth.
The mother walks out the front door and lays down in the grass. She closes her eyes, irises red with blood.
Her thoughts tiptoe into the grass, trailing chemical dust, faces angled to the light.
Elizabeth Brus has a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Columbia University, and a M.Sc. in Creative Writing (awarded with distinction) from The University of Edinburgh. She also served with The United States Peace Corps in Lesotho from 2005-2007. Until 2021, she was a middle and high school English teacher, but quit during the pandemic to return to her writing. She writes curriculum to pay the bills, and lives with her husband and two small children in Brooklyn. This is her first fiction publication. Twitter: @ElizabethBrus