Fruiting Body
A Little Fiction for Christmas
In the Christmas spirit of one of my favorite artists Leonora Carrington, who wrote fiction as well as made a prolific amount of art during her 94 years on earth, I thought to share a short story / fiction book idea (can’t bring myself to use the dreaded n-word here) I wrote over the course of a few years. I hope someone gets a little enjoyment out of it during hibernation season.
Have a mystical Christmas.
* * * * * * * * *
It hurts to give birth.
The litter of kids played mercilessly on the Montana summer lawn at baby Jacob’s first birthday party. Some parents drank seltzer, others drank hard seltzer.
Penelope sat on the porch with a table of cake on it wondering if this really is all there is. The gaggle of mothers gaggling over non-gmo juice box calories triggered in Penelope a Vietnam flashback to a Hemingway baby blue baby shower she attended two years ago, in which she had brought for the unborn Hemingway baby boy an old copy of The Sound and the Fury. Penelope had refused to take part in the baby doll dressing games at the baby shower, but had still somehow managed to win the giant plastic baby bottle stuffed with one thousand baby blue M&Ms. It all made her slightly sick, and actually outweighed the fertile sting burning within her primordial ovarian mind, the voice calling all of us to fertilize and birth.
Penelope was beginning to identify as agoraphobic after stealing a chocolate bar from Huckleberry’s organic market the day before. She was stoned, both now and when she had stolen the artisanal cardamomy paleo honey cacao square topped with crushed lavender and rose petals from the upscale grocery store. It was more than five dollars, which she had but didn’t want to pay during this time of emotional crisis (missing her Odysseus). She always wanted more than she could steal, and it made her sick. She felt that artists had every right to steal whatever they needed, so long as they were truly generous and never stole from other people, though she had mostly grown out of shoplifting due to the psychic wound that seemed to persist afterward, regardless of what moral reasoning she applied to it.
Once an older male friend recounted casually that girls just like to steal, after one of his woman friends stole a pair of black cowboy boots from his house. Regardless of whether or not the decision to steal this artisanal chocolate was ideological or biological or both, Penelope was now convinced that at some point on that same day the Bozeman Montana police department would be paying her a visit to take her away. She wondered which Pontius Pilate it was at the health food store who saw and/ or reported her. It didn’t matter now. She would be imprisoned and erased from the world, unable to make a living or go to graduate school or maintain the facade of being a good person to the community she so badly wanted to uplift. They would certainly make an example out of her for breaking the rules, and likely shave and force-feed her while in jail. Then they would lock her in debtor’s prison for taking out the student loans she was currently incapable of paying back. Life would never be the same again. She would be a political prisoner, she saw it all happening. Everyone would hate her. She was profoundly embarrassed and nervous and needed to walk off some of the neurological stress momentum building up in her body, but knew that if she walked literally anywhere right now the cops would already be out looking with a warrant for Penelope’s arrest. She was paralyzed by fear, and could not leave the house. She would just have to wait.
*
He had given her candida, and it was everywhere on him and in the apartment. She couldn’t take it anymore. She was bathing in boric acid to keep it away. Candida albicans is a fungus, what mushrooms are made of. It’s a yeast. It feeds on sugar and uses its host psychologically as a sugar vector to get the yeast more sugar. It takes over your mind. It has sentience. It will follow and devour you. Cancer and AIDS patients have it the worst. It explained why he liked shortbread and chocolate, and his painful psoriasis could have easily been explained with the candida thesis. The whole country was crawling with candida. It has to be omnipresent in a nation where millions of csection babies with already- compromised immunity are being fed nothing but sugar and yeast. It’s the 21st century pellagra. We treat everyone with too many antibiotics which destroy the “good” bacteria meant to keep the yeast down, then the yeast attacks and overtakes the system, which can no longer self-correct. Now there are even more, insidious species of candida than the standard candida albicans, which are primarily treated pharmaceutically with a class of drugs called azoles, which surround the fungi molecules and prevent them from reproducing. The problem is that persistent yeast builds tolerance quickly in response most azole anti-fungals. Most people get recurring yeast infections. In men candida symptoms do not mirror the obvious candida agonies experienced by women, who have vaginas which tell them loudly whenever they are sick through the voice of burning, pain, and often discharge.
The paucity of candida symptoms experienced by men makes them even more insidious as candida vectors. You could see it everywhere you went. You saw it in the bellies and on the tongues of routine beer brewery-goers. You saw it in women who drank cocktails and smoked cigarettes (”drinking alcohol is like pouring lighter fluid on candida,” one expert told my friend). You especially saw it in men who ate a lot of candy. And in the cities, like New York, where heat and humidity and thrive like mice, the fungus was well and very alive. The symptoms ranged from the burning and biological to the viscerally psychological. Lethargy and depression are surefire symptoms of a system wreaked havoc upon by candida. After months of self- treatment, she thought she had killed it off with a large dose of fluconazole, but she knew that if they had sex, he would probably infect her again. Just lying beside him at night was giving her conjunctivitis. She could never be sure if he was safe. It sometimes felt as if her body was rejecting him, her womb a primordial mind organ predicting impending disaster. She seriously considered ordering more fluconazole from Russia (she had bought one pill from a Florida woman off ebay two weeks before), crushing them up, and putting them into the vitamix in the morning while making their post-run smoothie of frozen blueberries, maca, whole milk yogurt, cacao, and sometimes avocado. She knew his fungus was feeding on her. It was alive, and he was a parasite. Every man in New York was a potential candida carrier. She had to find some way to ward them off. The answer was to go back home to Montana, where the air was dry and the dampness was gone.
*
Father Mike sat Penelope and her fiancé down in the Bright Star Cafe for a Lenten lunch that she and Alexei paid for: three identical plates of black beans and cold quinoa, piled atop varied wet lettuces and finished with sesame tamari dressing. Her lower intestines ached with trapped gas just looking at the salads. Because she was neither pregnant nor breastfeeding there was no graceful way to escape the fast from animal products and other temptations, at least in front of their own priest. She understood quite well the principle of laying aside all earthly cares to focus on meditative prayer and love of her neighbor, and how fasting from things like chocolate and phone-world help cultivate a contemplative mystical silence in which one can more easily hear the soft, still voice for God.
Even still, she knew lots more about holistic women’s health and would not deny the bodily needs of a youngish adult female in her prime childbearing years. To acknowledge the uterine call for protein in the form of raw deer liver and elk meat surely was not a necessary condition for succumbing to Satan. Sugar, yes, which fed angry and gluttonous body fungi like candida. But adequate protein and iron in the form of ungulate meat? probably not. She thought the whole point of Orthodoxy’s epistemological leg up from Catholics and Protestants was its insistence of Christ and his mother’s divine holiness as HUMANS who bathed, birth, breastfed, ate, and shit. She remembered the idea of fasting for forty days from milk and meat was to show that the spirit would survive despite these things, but didn’t Orthodoxy teach that the flesh was not inherently sinful and therefore there was no need to flagellate it? She had no idea what was going on theologically. All she knew was that this salad would most likely cause some sort of phytic acid-induced gastrointestinal distress.
Warm-white sunlight poured in from the street upon their table and the large, fruitful rubber plant stacked near the front windows. She and her male partner were about to marry in a traditional Greek (or Romanian if they had to) Orthodox ceremony. The robust, middle-aged priest Father Mike sported a very cool 19th century cowboy moustache that looked like something out of There Will Be Blood. He probably appealed to many of the male converts in this town, historically one of the largest boom cities of the west before its steel operation collapsed and left generations of jobless working-class people with new substance addictions and various cancers from breathing in clouds of heavy metals that never quite left the valley.
He had also spent many hours talking deep theology with Penelope during the process of her formal conversion to the Orthodox church, which she did out of both genuine love for the Universal Christ but also her wish to honor the tradition of the Greek family she was marrying into. He spent hours explaining to her the eastern Christian mystical tradition of time and eternity, and they compared notes from Buddhist and Orthodox schools of thought. This priest assured her that not only were Buddhists not going to hell, but hell isn’t even what most Christians thought it was, insofar as it was for eternity and eternity is the present moment. Alexei and Penelope were looking forward to some theological wisdom on the sacrament of marriage, baked from the wisdom of the ages.
Fr. Mike started off with the statistic that none of the couples he married ever got divorced, and reminded them that money was a primary factor leading to marital separation in America. He encouraged them both to be transparent in their dealings with finances. Penelope waited eagerly for some mystical deep cuts on cosmic union. “Unlike what the Catholics say, marriage is not about producing children,” he began. “And if you are married in an Orthodox ceremony you are by definition married for eternity, even if you divorce.” Wow, she thought, that’s beautiful. “Are you planning to have children if God blesses you with them?” Yes, the young couple replied. “Well then we should talk about the two main factors of divorce that men and women are not typically counseled on: Pregnancy and menopause.”
What the fuck, she thought. “During pregnancy the woman’s body is flooded with estrogen, a very powerful hormone.” “You’re forgetting progesterone, arguably the primary hormone of maintaining a viable pregnancy, especially in the first trimester” she interrupted. “No, it’s just estrogen. This hormone causes women to become extremely emotional and unstable as her body grows the baby. Women become like the incredible hulk with physical strength but also in emotional volatility. When my wife was pregnant with our first child we once got out of church and she was ravenous. I want a CHEESEBURGER... NOW! she screamed at me, I thought she was going to pull both my arms off so we piled into the truck and I drove us as quickly as possible to the closest Burger King. She could hardly wait to pile the burgers into her mouth. When the order arrived and she saw it didn’t come with five extra packets of ketchup she started hysterically crying.”
Penelope and Alexei stopped eating. Now she was starting to sense there was probably something a little weird about the time Father Mike told her why he didn’t like pets. It wasn’t because he grew up on a rural farm in California where animals were only valued as tools and stock, but because members of his Church had testified during confession that they were fucking their cats and dogs. (”My cat likes it, they try and justify to me.”). “Husbands are constantly overwhelmed by their wives’ behavior and crying during pregnancy. They think they won’t have sex for nine months and often, unfortunately, this actually happens. Fifty percent of husbands cheat on their wives while they are pregnant because their wives won’t have sex with them.”1
“That is patently false.” Penelope said. “It’s true.” “That is absolutely not true.” She couldn’t even help herself. She had been attending births with a midwife and there is no way half those husbands were fucking other women while their wives were literally creating new Life inside them. “It’s absolutely true. What a lot of these women don’t even know is that there is so much increased blood flow during pregnancy, especially to the vagina and clitoris that if and when they actually do have sex they experience the best orgasm of their whole lives. Divorce rates are extremely high during and after pregnancy, and only get higher when a woman hits menopause. Men go through hell when their women stop menstruating. The wife’s societal value as young and fertile disappears, but their hormones rage on. They sweat uncontrollably through parish meetings and scream at others for not agreeing with their domineering opinions.”
“Although we blame a man’s midlife crisis on his declining virility I can tell you as a priest who has heard confession from countless men with menopausal wives that this is not the case. I once served a family who was on the verge of divorce. It turns out the wife was trying to have sex with her son’s high school teacher. She could not control herself. She told me about trying to seduce a teenage boy employed at the local McDonald’s. When you’re a young man like that you’re no match for the sweat and pheromones secreted by women like that, you’re absolutely powerless against those hormones. Then she demanded later that her son’s teacher bend her over the desk. Her husband had already packed up and left after hearing all this and this woman begged me to come to their house for spiritual guidance. I walked inside the house and into the living room where she was standing. She fixed her eyes on me in total lust and I had to literally run out of there. She smelled like a wild animal.”
*
As a girl I grew up walking over piles of dead Indians. Everyone in Montana did, and now many local establishments in the college towns decided to “acknowledge” the Salish-Kootenai, Cheyenne, Crow, Blackfeet, and other tribal lands their movie theaters and organic grocery stores were built upon. They did this without actually ever visiting or even seeing the remnants of these “tribal lands” i.e. the reservations, some of which literally resembled war-torn Afghanistan or a leveled Gaza. During the Black Lives Matter protests many sanctimonious Montanans plastered their upscale businesses and homes with ALL LIVES CAN’T MATTER UNTIL BLACK LIVES MATTER signs, forgetting that although of course Black Lives Matter, there were probably a total of five black people living in their state at any given time and no documented cases of police violence against them. Meanwhile countless Native women were constantly kidnapped and murdered on and off the Rez and their children lived without elementary school or running water.
In fact, Native Americans faced more carceral injustices and police violence than any other racial minority, but somehow this fact never really struck the American public enough to protest it in any meaningful way. The people of Bozeman Montana could keep their In This House We Believe lawn signs and still have nice family dinners downtown at McKenzie River Pizza, named after Donald McKenzie, a well-known fur trader and terrorizer of the Nez Perce. Even John Bozeman himself established his namesake trail by violating land treaties with surrounding tribes and working hard to personally wipe them all out. There was a very specific spiritual darkness embedded within the landscape.
Now, on a trip to film some of the hundreds of nuclear bomb stations peppered across the mountain west (which included the Emma Goldman, Womb Envy, Hungry Children, and Be Here Now missile sites), I started to suspect I was Pregnant. My husband and I stayed in Cheyenne Wyoming, a town that shows what happens when you kill all the Indians and build a bunch of Pizza Huts. We were just miles away from the Sand Creek Massacre site, where hundreds of innocent Arapaho and Cheyenne were slaughtered by the U.S. Army in 1864. I remember crying in a college class on Native American treaty law when an old Cheyenne man told us how during the massacre, with great joy, white soldiers cut unborn babies out of their mothers’ bellies, sliced off the genitals of live men and women as trophies for their saddlebags, and literally beat the brains out of countless children and babies.
There was no good food or coffee in Cheyenne, Wyoming’s capital. Pickup trucks slid and crashed on the ice, and a bitter wind blew dogs off the sidewalks. The sheets and towels of our Airbnb stank of literally carcinogenic Tide Laundry Detergent. My allergic eye rash come back. I got heartburn, which never happens, and started sleeping late. In this house an egg was fertilizing inside me. I dreamt I was a tiny Native American girl, hidden in a stable under piles of hay and horseshit; outside the barn I heard a cavalry of white cowboys kill my family.
* * * * * * * * *
The actual statistic of men who cheat on their pregnant wives is approximately 10%.
This is great and the setting is fascinating, I would love to read more!
I'm going to be thinking about so many portions of this story a lot! I thoroughly enjoyed reading.