Читать книгу Anatomic - Adam Dickinson - Страница 22

galactic acidFor the first two years of my life, my mother’s vaginal flora lived inmy stomach. Consigned to the edge of their star system, they ateeverything I ate, fermenting chains of starch into acids that fed thehigh-energy demands of trying to erect an antenna. The flora flexedfor deep space, convinced they weren’t alone. They transmitted theircontractions and hoped to reach aliens before the terrible facsimilesof the 1970s: humans drawn without sex organs and burdened bymessages whose content had become instructions for reading. Setamidst this mucosa, a gram-stained parabolic reflector waited forword from newcomers. We’re a lot alike, my mother and I. Ourdisdain for underachieving campsites and the way we signal for helpby maintaining a slight underbite during awkward conversations. Hervagina made me cosmopolitan. A dialectic crowned in the forest, itsmany antlers have since come to crowd my self-possession with spentvelvet. I watch my mother favour her disintegrating hips. The smallparty that le her for the new world founded a settlement on a moonshe still tracks without looking. Its tidal pull on the pit of her stomachmakes her pause at the zenith of a phone call: ‘What is it?’––Lactobacillus acidophilus