Mary Toft; Or, the Rabbit Queen by Dexter Palmer

Author:Dexter Palmer [Palmer, Dexter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101871935
Goodreads: 43911404
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 2019-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

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Despite the long-held lore of midwives, I was great with child soon enough. (Though I was rarely brought off when in Joshua’s arms: I thank you for your concern.) James, that first child, had my eyes embedded in his father’s face—somehow in a young boy the eyes I despise when they look back at me in a mirror become beautiful. As he grows older, they will soften a face that would otherwise be too hard.

That hard-edged boy hurt, coming out of me—I screamed in awe at myself, that he did not tear me in two as he escaped. Do you know what carrying a child inside you does to your idea of space, of what you own? Even the poorest man takes for granted that he holds clear title to the space inside his skin. Oh, but ask a man about a woman, and he’ll tell you that her body is so very different from his, that it holds empty spaces that stretch and hold mysteries, that measure time with strange and bloody clocks—whose empty spaces are those? Who holds their precious title? Ask a man again, and he’ll argue that the case is not so simple when the sex is switched. The mere pockets of air inside men that erupt in belches and farts are of little account, but the spaces inside women are meant by God for so much more that women’s ownership of them is clearly only ever provisional. Those empty spaces cannot be left unoccupied for no reason—they are intended to be penetrated, colonized, stuffed to bursting. The rule of men: all spaces must be filled. And so Joshua shoves his little prick against me beneath the bedsheets.

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