Milk Blood Heat

by Dantiel W. Moniz

  “I’m on my period,” Billie lied, tossing a glob of cheese into her mouth. It was the quickest way to get her mother to stop, although the pass only ever lasted until the next month.

  “It doesn’t have to mean right now.” Her coy mouth, an irritated flick of her wrist. “It’s prophecy. I haven’t been wrong yet. And you know, if you really wanted to do something for me, that’d be the best birthday present. I’m ready to be a Mimi.” Not Nana or Meemaw and certainly not Grandma. Colette didn’t look old enough to be anyone’s grandmother, she commonly remarked, and she wanted to keep it that way.

  In two Saturdays it would be her fiftieth birthday, and this was the reason Billie had dragged herself up from a late-night stupor to be with her mother. She was acting as the chief party planner, assisted remotely by her younger sister Violet. At thirteen, Billie had asked their mother why she’d named them the way she had. Old-fashioned, a boy and a flower, leaving her children open for schoolyard mockery. Billie Violet, Colette had said, used to ignoring her daughter’s moods, doesn’t that just sound like some kind of special? Like that jazz singer’s name? Billie never asked why her mother squashed the names together, as if she and her sister were one person, instead of two.

  “So, you just always wanted to be a mother?” Billie asked finally, knowing she couldn’t get away from the topic without at least a little discussion.

  “Yes, of course. You’ll come around to it. You’ll see.”

  That easy assurance, almost arrogant. Like the coloring of the pond, Billie couldn’t tell about this either, whether her mother’s view was a slow truth or patriarchy. Was it that simple? Somehow she didn’t think so. Colette had her young and single, and Billie remembered clearly her mother lying on the couch some days after work, the room darkening around her, their apartment always two steps away from tidy. How she kept a hand over her eyes and even in stillness seemed tired, like it took great effort to be in her body. When Billie misbehaved, Colette would say: I put food in your mouth and clothes on your back, as if Billie had come to her mother in spiritual form and begged her to be a parent.

  Billie remembered how once when she was ten, early morning, her mother had gone to run an errand and left her and the infant Violet sleeping in her bed, the baby surrounded by pillows. As far as Billie was aware, neither of them had moved an inch the entire time their mother was gone, except as soon as Colette returned and opened the front door, Violet turned on her side, right off the bed. Violet’s cries came raw and walloping, punching through Billie’s sleep. She remembered her mother, panicked, rushing into the room and grabbing the baby up from the hardwood. The scowl she’d tossed her way. And later, still angry, Colette had leaned down in her face, her voice expansive as heat, and said, utterly calm, I love you, but sometimes I don’t like you at all. She wondered if her mother remembered and where all of this fit into coming around.

  Their server came and they ordered—salmon for Colette, who claimed she was watching her figure, the grease of the cheese still on her lips; a burger for Billie, who was not, but felt more and more pressingly that she should the further away from twenty-five she got. Her mother made so many modifications to her meal that by the end, she had ordered off-menu, so Billie kept hers simple, smiling broadly at their girl as she whisked away their menus, hoping to convey that they were good for the tip; somehow no matter where they went or how they acted, their behavior or appearance, their being, was always under scrutiny.

  Having said her piece, Colette moved on. She said Violet would get into town late Friday night before the party and would crash on Billie’s couch if Billie was willing. This wasn’t a problem. There had never been any real animosity between the sisters, so far in age as they were, no grudges from their childhood. They were half-siblings who never thought of themselves that way; they liked each other, even if they didn’t talk all that often, the two of them comfortable together and apart.

  “I want midnight margaritas! Dancing music! Gold balloons, gold everywhere!” One of her mother’s friends, male and moneyed, was footing the bill, his present. Colette wanted a pecan-studded red velvet cake, a rooftop, White Party prominence. She wanted, in her own words, flash and pizazz, to be seen—attention kindred to that which she’d commanded in her younger days. A mood like the omnipotent buzzing around a honeycomb. “Are you writing this down?”

  Billie pointed to her temple. “Mind like a steel trap,” she said, and her mother speared a hunk of fish at the end of her fork and brandished it in her daughter’s direction. “Yeah, okay. And when I blow out my candles, just know what I’ll be wishing for.”

  Maybe that was part of the problem, Billie reflected as she stuck her key into her apartment door; that this was how it all felt—like someone else had made a wish and sunk a penny down into the deep of her. She tossed the doggie bag of leftover burger onto the counter and tripped into the bedroom, where Liam and the puppy were still snuggled in the covers. She let her body drop onto the sliver of unoccupied bed. She wished she could still fall asleep like a child, like a husband. Liam turned toward her, cowlicky and sleep-soft, reaching for her reflexively, pulling her into his large warmth. The puppy repositioned himself between them.

  “You’re going to be late,” Billie murmured into Liam’s neck.

  “I’m getting up,” he said, making no move to do so. She and Liam saw each other mostly nights and weekends: she was freelance, working from home while he managed the twilight hours at a major shipping warehouse Monday through Friday. He left around two, got back most nights after midnight or later. Most of the time she would wait up for him, and when he came home they ate dinner together or she drowsed with her feet in his lap while he watched shows to unwind. It was far from perfect, but they made it work.

  “You didn’t tell her did you?” Liam asked, and Billie laughed so viciously it panged hard in her sternum, like a fist. “Are you kidding?” she said. “Who do you think I am?”

  Billie liked their marriage, the humor of it that sustained when it was easy, and when it wasn’t. Even when she was dark, Liam really got her. For example, when they’d first got the puppy, a yippy small thing, she’d said, “If the zombie apocalypse ever happens in our lifetime, we’ll have to kill the dog.” And immediately, he’d answered, “Only if we eat him. Waste not, want not.” She loved that about Liam, that she didn’t have to censor herself or worry that he’d think she was bad. Sometimes she despised her husband, but in that way you could only achieve with someone you’d lived with for a long time and deeply loved. She appreciated that they could talk about the hard things. That they could admit the hard things were sometimes funny. However, she hadn’t yet been able to ask him what the zombie policy would be on the baby. That news was still too fresh to joke.

  Three days ago the doctor had put her at six weeks and no one knew except Liam and her best friend, Pia. Maybe the dog. Billie didn’t feel bad about lying to Colette. It would have been too much on top of everything—her mother’s proprietary joy, an unequivocal testament to her own deity. Plus, they didn’t know if they would keep it. Billie tickled under the puppy’s chin until he was rowdy and pouncing and biting the tip of her husband’s ear. “All right, all right,” Liam groaned, rolling over. “I’m up.”

  Once Liam had shit and shaved and brushed his teeth, he came back into the bedroom to talk to her while he pulled on his work pants, buckled his belt.

  “What’ve you got going on today?”

  Billie still lay sprawled across the covers, the puppy wriggling happily into her armpit. “Besides existential dread? I’m working on a piece for Harper’s. Something like Pluto’s demoted planetary status and how it equates to the revocation of female autonomy.”

  “Hmm, sounds super related.” Billie threw a pillow at him and Liam bomb-rushed the bed, landing lightly on top of her. “I’m serious! I could see it. I mean, you know us men. Indian givers, right?”

  “Don’t use that term, whit
e man,” she said, smoothing down his hair. “They deserve much better than y’all.”

  He held up two fingers, Scout’s honor. “It is henceforth stricken,” he promised, then took those same fingers and slipped them under the rim of her jeans, down down until he’d struck the center of her own heat, finding an easy side-to-side rhythm. He was so familiar, so good at it. Billie pushed the dog off the bed and closed her eyes, unbuttoned her jeans to give him more freedom. Lifted her hips. Almost let her conscious self fall away. Then the glimmer of what was newly between them. She pulled his hand up and kissed him in a way that was also a shove, the gentlest of rebukes. “Isn’t this how all the trouble started?”

  She fastened her jeans and followed Liam to the door. “Try not to worry too much,” he said, jamming on his shoes. “Whatever happens, I’m right here with you.” And Billie knew that, and appreciated him saying it, but the cold fact of it was, this was a fear that truly only resided with her—within her— a hitch in waiting, cellular and primal. She thought how much simpler it would have been to be the giver, Y chromosomed, to have lived up to the implication of her name.

  After he was gone, Billie allowed herself a half hour of wallowing, of composing checks and balances, yeses and noes, while she scrolled idly on her phone, but the news was awful and she had work to do. She vomited casually into the toilet, then took the puppy for a short walk around the deranged pond and put him in his crate. She texted Pia: Have to do research. You down to ride? Pia, consistent since their college days, responded within ten minutes: I’m free. Scoop me up. She ended the text with three eggplant emojis, so Billie knew she was serious.

  They bought tickets at the Museum of Science and History, paid a little extra for a four o’clock interactive showing at the planetarium on celestial bodies featuring black holes. It was a quiet time to be there, an adult time, since most kids were sitting at kitchen tables with English workbooks and pre-dinner snacks. Other than a handful of others—some old folks consulting pamphlets and a group of teens with a perpetual look of indifference stretched between them—they practically had the place to themselves. All those whirling lights, hidden compartments, displays of ancient bones. All of the discovery.

  “This girl at work said the best thing about being pregnant was that her boyfriend didn’t want to fuck her because he was scared of hurting the baby, so she got to grow her bush fully out. She hadn’t seen her herself like that, like ever, and said after the itching phase, she really enjoyed it.”

  The blonde woman at the counter, who had not welcomed them when they entered as she’d done for the previous guests, threw them a scandalized look, but Pia only waved.

  “Do you believe that?” Billie asked.

  “What, that she liked it?”

  “That he was scared of hurting the baby.”

  “Not for a second.”

  Billie wondered, if they kept it, if Liam would still want to. He told her all the time that he would want to make love to her even when she was eighty, but she thought that was an easy thing to say when old age never felt like it would happen, not to them, not directly, not yet. Billie still used celebrities’ crow’s feet as a measurement of how much physical time had passed—she was just starting to be able to see age in herself. Maybe the transformations of time and pregnancy on the body were related. If she asked him about sex, Liam would say of course, but once he saw that alien belly, the skin pulled shiny with some other creature’s being, he might change his mind.

  They walked through the exhibits, and Billie was relieved to find them safely distracting: aquatic life, regional birds of prey and the required dinosaurs, a hundred-year history of Jacksonville starting in the 1800s: Cow Ford, the Great Fire of 1901 (though a noticeable skimming of the city’s part in aiding the Confederacy). There was nothing to remind or sway her. No genome projects or working models of the human heart. But Pia must have been waiting for a chance to extrapolate. They’d just ducked inside an oversized circuit board, the wires and glow bouncing off the walls, when she said, “Okay, so let’s chart this thing out.” Each item she ticked off on her fingers like elementary math: Billie and Liam had been married five years; they loved each other; they were in their late twenties; they weren’t broke; they liked other people’s kids; and both their families got along. “It looks good on paper, right? How do you feel? What are you thinking?” She was really asking, not being patronizing or waiting to inject her own opinion, and this made Pia all the lovelier, her dark eyes collecting the generated light, and Billie tiny there, suspended upside down.

  She was thinking a million things, some of which had plagued her even before she’d found out: What if the state floods; we reelect that terrible man; if I’m bad at it; I do it and then decide I don’t want to do it; if I don’t do it and miss it; what if someone shoots me in the grocery store, the movie theater, my own home; what about the revisionist histories taught in schools; what if I’m not self-sacrificing enough; if I’m too self-sacrificing; if me and Liam get divorced, shit happens; what if the kid hates me; if I’m cruel; if I really really love it and lose it; if none of this can be sustained, not our love or our planet? What if, in the end, we just dye the ocean and wish it well?

  For better or worse, she didn’t know if it was responsible to bring new life into this world, but she couldn’t spend all her time agonizing. She had to keep moving, keep breathing, or else she’d cease to exist, so she gave Pia the simplest of answers, what it could all boil down to: “Honestly? What will this baby do to me?”

  The planetarium seats reclined all the way back so that each occupant had an expansive view of the ceiling, and at 4 pm exactly, the lamps went out and the room transformed into the nebulous black of the universe—their own solar system and thousands upon thousands of stars blinking awake, many for which, amazingly, overwhelmingly, there still were not names. In that dark and intermittent light, Billie was a seed, a blip of yearning in the deep pocket of the galaxy, small in the most comforting of ways. The ubiquitous male voice-over gave a brief tour of each of the eight planets, poor Pluto, the asteroid belt, before moving beyond, to the closest black hole, three-thousand light-years away from the Earth. They learned specific terms: space-time, event horizon, ideal black bodies—that last made both women independently chuckle—all used to interpret a mass so large that even light could not escape it. Once an object dropped inside, it was essentially lost to any external observation. However, it seemed to Billie that in this instance “lost to observation” was not mutually exclusive with “gone.” She leaned over and whispered into Pia’s ear, “Do you think a black hole is a portal?”

  And Pia, after only a moment, replied, “Life’s a circle, you know? You can’t go anywhere someone else wasn’t first.”

  “So what have we got so far for the diva’s big day?” While still on the line, Billie texted her sister all of the details, sent her pictures—the rooftops she’d scouted, the plastic gold-rimmed flutes—and Violet volunteered her opinions, what she agreed with and, citing her “relevant youth” (Billie inferred this as style), what she thought could be improved. She said her midterms were murder and she was dating this guy, and she still hadn’t found a suitable gift for Colette. The sisters prepared for Violet’s arrival, hashed out the last particularities that would need to be attended to the day of the party—Billie would pick up the cake from the shop in the mall and her sister would decorate the venue. “And please, honestly, y’all are so old, but if you and Liam get any ideas to bump and grind while I’m there, just give me a heads-up.”

  Billie could hear the exaggerated shiver in Violet’s voice and she asked her sister if she had any real perception of age, if her sister knew of the theory of time accumulation, which illustrated that the more one acquired, the faster it seemed to pass. Billie asked these things snootily, as if she had not just recently learned them herself. “Not yet,” Violet said, laughing, and they got off the phone.

  Billie told Li
am what her sister had said when he came home that night and he laughed to himself as he called the puppy and leashed him. “She does know we’ve had sex all over that couch, right?”

  Billie assumed not—it was her understanding that people tried to imagine as little as possible about other people’s lives unless it suited them.

  While writing her article, she took breaks from researching intersectional feminism and the baby moons of Pluto to Google water shading and its effects on aquatic plants and animals. Most sites claimed the color was food grade, and therefore safe for the animals and for the human consumption of those animals; that it prevented the spread of certain undesirable algae and the poaching of valuable spawning game by predator birds—a win for everyone. But Billie wasn’t fooled; she knew that, worldwide, money was the cult over all things, no goodness or sin excluded. She was witnessing, in her news feeds and with her own eyes, how much a life was worth. Late at night, while waiting for Liam, Billie searched random things: “how many years FL underwater” and “when will the sun go out”; intergenerational trauma and its biological effects; an article in the Florida Times where they interviewed the grand dragon of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan about his renewed recruitment efforts while sipping sweet tea in his home; how to make homemade, organic pizza rolls; why the term cocksucker bestowed disrespect only on the person performing the action but not the possessor of the cock.

  Certain of her own complicity, Billie got into the habit of picking up stray litter in the parking lot. Every day she checked for dead carp.

  In the last slice of Friday, Billie picked Violet up from the airport. Her sister’s body was springy, new-formed and golden in her crop top, the boyfriend-cut jeans. She’d fastened silver cuffs to her baby locs and wore rings—jade and onyx and amethyst—on each of her fingers. Violet, somehow, was taller than Billie and more confident than she’d been at twenty. The entire ride home they didn’t speak of themselves, and instead cranked the radio loud and scream-sang early Kanye, Maroon 5, and Avril Lavigne, the era of pop that coincided with the short stint they had occupied Colette’s house together as minors. The sky ahead of the road was streaked purple and felt a little like driving into nothing, made them feel immaterial and a little spooky, like maybe “self” was a myth.