Bring Girls Home to Meet Mama

by Michael R. Colangelo

I went down to the store on the corner to get Mama some bread on Sunday. It was the only time I had out of the house with myself. Mama spent Sundays in the bathtub filled with milk to her neck. She said that it would help her age properly. Since Papa died, it was the only time that I was allowed to leave the house because she was busy sitting in the tub and we often needed groceries.

So it was inevitable that eventually I met a girl at the market and that we spent the afternoon chatting and even holding hands for a little while. When the sun began to set I realized I had been gone for most of the day. I apologized and said that I had to go right away, but the girl told me that it was okay and asked if she could come too.

It never occurred to me that any girl might like to come by the house, and so I grinned very large and told her that it would be excellent if she could. We hurried through the darkening streets until we reached my house.

Inside, I called to Mama to come and meet our visitor. I heard the milk sloshing about in the tub up the hallway, and while we waited, I showed my new girlfriend around. I was so fond of her that I even went as far as to show her the empty studio loft behind the wall. That was the place that Mama made me drywall over after I was born. I left a space you could crawl through anyway. The jagged charcoal sigils on the walls and the star-shaped symbols on the ceiling were pretty. I read in a magazine that girls were impressed with you if you acted sensitive towards these things.

The bones maybe scared her, but Mama's scintillating rainbow eggshells held her in place. Her mind was paralyzed, forever trying to comprehend the impossible surfaces of the broken eggs.

Then Mama came into the room, dragging her bulk down the hallway and leaving a trail of milky slime in her wake. She murmured approvingly of this new girlfriend of mine and then tasted her frozen body with her feelers. As she did this, she readied the sharp and dripping appendage that protruded from her private parts. This was how Mama made babies with the people that we brought home.

I stared down into Papa's black and hollow eyes and winked at his skull. There was comfort in knowing that the old man would probably approve of me—making Mama so proud.

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