milkmeat.

            The consciousness is the first of the pains, before the pinching cold table, or the bandaged wound on my leg, or the nipples, chafed to burns. The consciousness sears, like brandings beneath flesh. It makes me feel disturbed; unsound, makes my stomach liquid, hot and viscous. I am between states, imagining reality as a lake I float over. I have a fear of touching the surface; of soaking, sinking, drowning.

            My eyes are open. Dry. I cannot see. When I close them, tears spill down either side of my face. There is relief in the feeling, wet and cool. My eyes were left, exposed, like a car door left ajar in the middle of the night. An accident. Mistakes to be made-up for next time. In the months they were forgotten a film formed of eye goop and ceiling dust and bug shit. They sting when I close them, but it’s not as bad as it was last time.

            I blink a few times before everything clears. I’m positioned on my back, staring at the ceiling. The flickering, humming fluorescent lights are set behind blue glass to remind me of the sky. I remember being pregnant, watching as my swollen belly grew towards artificial sun like a flower, as I lay, waiting.

            It’s different now.

            I sleep for months. I sleep for years.

            There is a nameless machine attached to my breasts. It is clear on top, locked around the base of my chest. The machine has three vaults: drugs, food, milk.

            The drugs and the food go in. The milk comes out.

            I am capital. A machine. A cow. This is a farm. There are seventy-three other woman in the room, all being pumped. The sound is like chugging, with the sloppy echo of an ultrasound. We even look like fetuses, unborn, unconscious, feeding tubes attached like umbilical cords. Our lives are considered with the same weight. It is a technical attribute. Like the life of a plant, or a VCR. I’ve heard more argument for life in yogurt.

            Two men walk in the room- I heard them coming. My heart raps against my chest. I lean my cheek against the chilled table, to see what they’ve come for. It’s not hard to find- one row behind me Ruth, sound asleep, has one breast popped like an overfilled balloon. It hangs suspended in the machine, but the blood and the meat dribbles down her skin, pours over the floor.

            “Jesus.” Says one of them, when he gets close.

            “Yep.” Says the other one, a veteran.

            “How do these milk’ems sleep through shit like this?” Milk’ems. Milk “M”s. From milkmaidens, milkmaids, milkmadders. Nicknames, like summer camp.

             I don’t hear if the other man responds. I hear the sloshing and ringing of mops. It smells like sanitation fluid, and blood. There is a sharp, lingering smell of iron. One of the men, the new one, slows his motion to a halt. He whispers, “How do you know if any of ’em wake up?”

            The old vet chuckles. “You’ll know,” he says. There’s a moment of silence. “When they wake up, they always scream.”

            I was twenty-six once, with auburn hair and what my girlfriend tenderly referred to as “moon tits”. We had a condo, concerned ourselves with low-risk investments, and craft beers, and attending community theater. I was her waitress; she was having dinner with her grandmother. She’d tipped me a twenty with her phone number scrawled on. Over lunch I found her to be a presence; forcefully herself and proud as stone. And she wanted me, so openly. I love her, so deeply.

            I’d never had a girlfriend. Our lives began to run together like cream in water. Inseperable. Indiscernible.

            I’d become unwhole.

            “Have you ever considered surrogacy?” The doctor asked, idly scratching her neck. There was a pause in the room that made everything seem more sterile than it already was. She swiveled around her stool to face me. My raised eyebrows made her laugh. She was about my age, smart, and compassionate, and genuine, the way doctors should be.

            “Mm-mm.” I shook my head, trying to assume her cavalier attitude.

            “Well,” she started. She pulled a thick accordion folder and began shuffling through. “Usually, you have to be pregnant at least once before they’ll allow you to be a surrogate, but” she says, stopping her hand on one of the packets, reconsidering, “wait- you’re gay, right?” I laughed, nodded. She grinned and handed me the document.

            “It’s an anonymous surrogacy program by-gay-couples-for-gay-couples, which also allows female couples the options of using the system as a sort of sperm bank-“

            “And you’re supposed to push this?”

            “No. I’m mostly doing this out of pure envy be-ca-use,” she led the paper away from me and leafed through it, handing it back with her finger pointed to its lower corner, “I had to go through ten years of med school to make this salary, and you’d be getting it in ten months.”

            I stared at it, a heaping number. A white dress. A place near the shores. A bassinet, with our baby, sleeping soundly. I could not find the words.

            “Anyways just consider it. Otherwise you’re good-to-go.” She clicked a pen and marked something. She smiles at me, “Want a sticker on your way out?”

            “Lew, please” I’d insisted, rubbing my palms up and down her thighs in an effort to assuage her.

            “No, baby, absolutely not. You’d never let it go- you tried to keep the neighbor’s fucking cat last week.”

            “It was a stray!”

            “It had a collar.”

            “But the money, Lew, imagine if we had all that money.”

            We’d argued about it all night, over drinks. Then the next night over dinner. By Thursday it had been forgotten, was resurrected as a joke on Friday night. On Saturday it was alongside other dinner party patters, and mentioned one last time on Sunday morning. By then we laughed softly, and let it slip away with the rest of the week.

            By What God.

            That Monday Lew was laid off.

            The following Tuesday I was inseminated.

            Postpartum. You lose more than a child. Your heart, your guts. You don’t know your way home anymore. You don’t have the nerves to ask.

            “Milkmadders” is a term especially for the new moms here. It was us who went mad. We would knock our heads against the tables, howl and sob, pick at ourselves, our skin, our breasts. Their product.

            At first they couldn’t get the dosage of meds right. In the first week five ended up convulsing, bones rattling over steel tables, the smack of jaws against concrete, teeth cracked. Three went silently, OD’d in their sleep. But then the last two made it the month.

            The drugs were presented to us as an offer. If we thought we could bear the proposed three to nine months of pumping milk, completely conscious, we had the option. After seeing the results the first time around I refused, afraid I would slip away. Others accepted it, for that reason.

            Of the ones who tried to stay awake, none lasted very long. Some made it a few hours, others, the day. I lasted three, before awareness in a room of beating corpses wore me in too hard. I was the last of them to go.

            “It not for the babies.”

            These were the words I woke up to, the first time.

            I was groggy. The lights were off; the workers had left the factory. We weren’t considered alive enough to warrant the privilege. I’d never been in the room, dark.

            It felt safe.

           “Not for the babies,” the girl on my right whispered again.

            I turned to her. Felt my growing hair soft against my cheek. “What’s not for the babies?”

            “Not for the babies,” she agreed, quickly, aggressively, nodding.

            “Hey,” I said, “look at me.”

            She did. Even in the dark, I could tell her eyes were piercing. “What isn’t for the babies? Which babies?”

            “Milk,” she said, shortly. My heart was beating. Please, no.

            “The breastmilk,” I whispered, carefully, as though I were afraid mines were hidden between syllables, “The breastmilk…is not for the sick babies we made?”

            “Babies aren’t sick. Healthy babies make healthy meat.”

            “Meat?” no, no

            “Meat to eat,” she sings. “Scream to sleep.” Her hand rustles in her pants as she laughs. She’s still pregnant, not yet machine nursing. She still has mobility. She slaps a paper she had hidden between her legs against my forearm. It smells of female heat.   “Hold,” she commands. “Hide.” Then she screams.

            Someone comes from behind the swinging doors to change out her medicine. I listen to the rustle, to the soft sounds of her body falling limp over the table. I’m afraid the worker will hear my heartbeat, hard and fast. He walks away.

            I lay awake, mind spinning. She’s crazy, I tell myself. The lights come on the next morning. They make me feel exposed.

            I unravel the twisted paper close to my face- I cannot hold it up to read, or even turn over. It smells brackish, musty, nostalgic. I savor the smell of sex and Woman. O, Lew, my heart cries out.

            Then I read.

            A label.

            Adhesive back, the sticky worn to soft. Torn thin at the bottom.

            Nutrition facts.

            171 calories per serving. 11 grams of fat.

             no.

            “H. Sapiens Breastmilk” it names it, at the top.

            Then:

            $3.99.

            My stomach drops to the floor.

            you fuckers.

Livestock. That’s what we are. Animals. Our milk is a commodity. Women drink it on number-by-day diets, post-workout rituals. Children use it in their chocolate puff cereals, watch how it’s dirtied to brown by the dyes, pour it down the drain. They complain it tastes gamey. They are told it will make them strong. Drink. Me. My milk. Slurp the void left by my stolen kin. Taste the chemical reaction of my fear. Eat my son after you soak him in brine. Pick him to pieces with long sharp forks. Complain how his carcass clogged your garbage disposal.

            I’d tried not to think of it. Which is why I screamed every time I woke up. I had not wanted to know. I wish I had not known. I will never go home. I am losing myself.

            76 minutes in.

            My mind is starting to go stiff, webby, caught in the machine sounds and the women’s slack faces. The tables. Shit buckets. Dust, drifting between currents of light. Settling on the linoleum tile. A miniscule bug, running through a crack. A tile. Dust. Lines. Lights. Tubes. Glass. Walls. Paint. Molding. Floor, again. Stain. Dent. Face. Face. Another face. My hair.

            Auburn like my baby’s. His soft forehead.

            His soft forehead.

            His soft forehead.

            His soft forehead.

            His soft forehead.

            His soft. I steady myself. I suspend the image. I can see it, even with my eyes trained on the floor. I don’t let it sink. I just hold it there. Then it begins to change, as slow and alarming as a creaking door. It touches me.

            I scream.