Maybe
She fell in love with darkness
And we were not to know.
Secrets sank in tufted hills marbled to the bone while
Carried off, they said. Be careful. Rapuit.
Another pretty girl who drifted, carried away by gods.
 
But maybe she met his sullen gaze
Moments before Mother slipped between--
Offended by his tragic liminal spaces.
Calling him fragrant, bitter, dull, she plied
Her daughter away.
 
But maybe she sensed what spooled from his touch
And her unexpressed contours were moved.
He--witness to women reframed, coerced, cut down--
Received them with grave and tender care,
And grew wiser, more spacious for each.
 
Maybe he listened and she drew closer,
Slipping between her own bars,
Leaving her paintbrush of spring pastels
For swathes of Eleusian gold, indigo pinwheels,
The dove-gray train of incense curls he offered.
 
And maybe she feasted—both at his table and
In his bed—-in ways Mother would never understand;
Ravenous, chaffed, red-lipped--she lied
About eating only six pomegranate seeds.
Laughing--alone--he awaited her return to color his sheets.
 
Maybe she outgrew the porcelain mask of Kore,
Choosing queen and friend--not mother--
To those crushed by living;
To those exhausted from defending themselves.
Wordless, a softened glance is her only admission
Of freedom that blooms in the dark.

​Bram Stoker Award® finalist, L. E. Daniels is an author/poet and the editor of over 140 titles. Lauren’s novel, Serpent’s Wake: A Tale for the Bitten (IP) is a Notable Work with the Horror Writers Association’s Mental Health Initiative. She edited Aiki Flinthart’s Relics, Wrecks and Ruins (CAT) with Geneve Flynn, winning the 2021 Aurealis Award. With Christa Carmen, Lauren edited the Aurealis finalist, We Are Providence (Weird House) and Monsters in the Mills (IP). Recent publications include “Silk” (Hush, Don’t Wake the Monster, Twisted Wing), "Darkness Repeats" (Monsters in the Mills, IP), and “Hangman’s Coming” (Where the Silent Ones Watch, Hippocampus). Her non-fiction, “Spooned by the Dead” appears in Out of Time: True Paranormal Encounters (Timber Ghost). Her poetry appears in This Way Lies Madness (Flame Tree), Cozy Cosmic and More Cozy Cosmic (Underland), and Under Her Eye and Mother Knows Best (Black Spot Books). Her poem, “Night Terrors” (HWA, Of Horror and Hope) was a 2022 Australasian Shadows Award finalist. She directs Brisbane Writers Workshop.
 
Links:
Website: https://www.brisbanewriters.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LEDanielsAuthor
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lauren_elise_daniels/
Bluesky: ledaniels.bsky.social
 

Bears eat their young sometimes, I tell myself, as my lips, my jaws, close around you. This is my excuse. My way of telling myself these thoughts I’m feeling, this act I am committing, are not exclusive to me. That it is not an atrocity, but a way of the natural world. I hold you in my arms, your back to my chest, and I lower my head, my tongue caressing your crown, my mouth widening, lips stretching over you, engulfing you, bringing you into me once again. You’re afraid, but you believe Mommy when she tells you it’s all going to be alright.

With bears, it’s different. It happens because the mother needs to ensure the survival of the species. A mother bear can make more baby bears, but a cub cannot survive without its mother. Although now that I think of it, I don’t know if that’s a fact or one of those things I’ve just heard. Bears eating their cubs. Like lightning never striking twice in the same spot.

I don’t think it matters, because its veracity cannot alter my path. I hold you tighter. My arms around your torso, holding your arms down. My legs around your waist. Holding you tight. Loving you. Showing you the love with the protection of my body as my mouth spreads over your head, and then your shoulders, as I feel my insides stretching against you. I don’t think I’ll be able to hold you at first, but that maternal instinct kicks in, gag reflex is stifled, higher brain pushed away. Like parents pushing cars off babies.

I’ve seen something like this before; parents play-biting their children’s toes, women nibbling on their spouses. You look so cute I could just eat you up. But what if you really could? What if you had to? What if it was the only choice you had as a desperate mother who wanted more than anything to keep her child safe?

Even though I didn’t realize it when it happened, I made this decision when I saw you fall. The first time I had ever seen my child injured. The tricycle in the middle of the street was a fire axe that hacked through my life. The blood on the concrete the clearest sign I’ve ever had; this world is not a safe place for a thing as precious as you. I brought you inside and I patched you up and I knew then, as you looked up at me with tears in your eyes that there was only one place safe for you. The only place you’d ever been truly safe.

So, I open my mouth.

You struggle against me for a moment, unsure of what’s going on. Just as you were unsure of what exactly what happened when you fell, when you smashed your face against the concrete. I tell you it’s okay, but not aloud, because my mouth is full of you. Your head is sliding past my uvula and I’m holding down my gag reflex because this, protecting my child, is the most important thing I’ve done or ever will do. I tell you in the way of wordless connections between mothers and children, and I know you hear it because you stop fighting. You know inside me is safe.

I can feel you sliding down my throat, expanding me, swelling me, and I’m filled with your heat and the warmth of knowledge that the warm, impenetrable wall of motherhood is protecting you from the cold unforgivingness of this world. I use my hands to fold you in, push you by the legs, the feet, down into my throat, feeling each bit of you pass through into different parts of me in a way that doesn’t make sense and yet makes all the sense in the world.

I swallow.
​
You are out of the world. Surrounded only by me. I looked down and see my belly swollen like a cartoon character after a Thanksgiving meal. Ballooned in a way that should not be possible, but then neither should have been my jaw unhinging. Neither should it be that you are safe in there, in Mommy’s belly, where you began. And yet you are. Where nothing will ever hurt you again.