THE HEAVY WEIGHT OF NOTHING by Devin Latham
“The driving force behind all this fecundity is a terrible pressure I also must consider, the pressure of birth and growth, the pressure that splits the bark of trees and shoots out the seeds, that squeezes out the egg and bursts the pupa, that hungers and lusts and drives the creature relentlessly towards its own death.”
– Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
1.
A timber rattler feeds the sweet potatoes. A bloated blue-tailed skink lies under my fiddleback chair on the porch. Jim – the man I live with – says, “there’s something dead,” keeps saying, “there is something dead.” I say, “I can’t smell it.” As a child, Daddy left goats on our farm where they last lay – swollen then sinking masses of wet hair, maggots, and bone. Buzzards painted the gates white, waiting for bodies to die. Looking for the dead thing, I find the fat skink and pick it up by the belly. As I hold it to my nose, the taste of rot coats the back of my throat. “That’s the dead thing,” I tell Jim as I throw the body onto the washed red clay of the yard. I wipe my hands down my shorts, but the smell won’t leave my fingers. The cicadas begin their sex songs from the lining pines and oaks. The humid air sits heavy with two days worth of rain. Between my thighs, I am damp and ache from useless pleasing. This summer is all sex and decay.
2.
As a child, I reached inside does because Daddy said my hands were small, and I felt special for knowing how. I pulled out kids too big to be put inside, ripping bodies open. The birth canal felt like the inside of a hot, wet hose. The muscles sucked, squeezed, and tried to push me out. My fingernails caught in the cobwebbed walls of the birth canal. I reached for hooves, for ears, eye sockets, knees, anything I could find and pulled.
3.
My cat carried a pregnant worm snake onto the front porch. Jim swore it was a baby water moccasin. He said the babies are the most poisonous. He wanted to study the small snake like a project, but I wouldn’t hand her over. My heat bled into the snake, and the snake writhed, falling out of my hand, hating my smell. I picked the snake up over and over, and finally she stayed weaving herself through my fingers and up my wrist. I called my mother and asked her if I could keep the snake, raise her babies, and she said worm snakes were difficult pets. I didn’t want another dead thing. I carried the small, pregnant snake out to the woods, crouched to the ground, and opened my hand. Swollen-bellied, she swam through the leaves to cool soil and was gone.
4.
We need the sex to forget the death. I think we can’t just be animals driven by the instinct to reproduce. But when the sex stops, life stops. The body wonders what’s the point because the point of living is to reproduce. If that statement weren’t true, we wouldn’t be here. We exist and want to disprove our roots, our animal nature. We as a species are forever the child who doesn’t need her parents’ help. A study found that men who have fewer orgasms live shorter lives than men who have up to 100 more orgasms a year. I had hoped we were more complex than that. My mind fights against my body. I want to be more or less complex than I am, but instead I am trapped inside an animal’s body only to feel bitter with guilt. I have two opposing sides: my animal body and my holy mind. My body speaks during the pursuit of orgasm, but my body cools and sleeps, leaving my mind to punish me. The guilt is patient and slow-moving. Monks and nuns live long lives. I believe they overcame the body, made the body live despite itself, and in that, there is something complex and commendable. I am not that complex. I want sex. I am scared of death. I need the back-and-forth rock of comfort. I need the sweat and the spit. I need the ache between my thighs and the heavy-lidded satisfaction. I need the peace of a blank mind and a shuddering body. I need the primal bays of pleasure. I am not that complex. I am simply scared. Then I wash in guilt and wonder if I will ever love anyone, if love is even an emotion we are capable of or a lie we tell ourselves. I think mothers love their children because biology makes them. But love – selfless love – is an instinct we may not have. Love will not keep us alive.
5.
A power pole stands in the right corner of my yard with a light installed by Georgia Power that costs fifteen dollars a month. Under the light sits a ditch filled with briar thickets. A three-legged raccoon and a opossum live in the thicket and at night venture under the light looking for food.
One night while I was out of town, our dog sniffed around the yard, looking for the raccoon, stopping under the light. A snake’s rattles shook, the dog ran, and Jim shot his Glock four times in the dark. Under light Jim saw he killed a timber rattler and nearly blew off the rattlers. He said it was huge, so big it could have eaten my cats. He killed the snake because the snake could have killed our pack of animals, he said. You have to choose a side, I tell myself. But I think there’s something wrong about snake killing, something I can feel in my gut. As an infant, my mother kept a boa constrictor next to my crib. My father sends me pictures of snakes he sees in the woods as he works. We don’t kill snakes. Jim killed the snake, and he planned to skin it. When we first met, we skinned a fox run over in front of Whole Foods and a beaver shot by a neighbor. We decided long ago that if we skinned an animal we could undo some of the disrespect of its death. But after a few too many whiskey drinks, a few miscuts, and a broken rattler, Jim buried the snake next to my sweet potato plants. The timber rattler put up one last fight by smelling like hell for a week. Flies teemed the dirt while I weeded the sweet potatoes. There was something comforting about the smell, something like home. Children can love anything. And I felt it was my duty to smell that snake like I owed it that, like what I do matters, and wrongs can be righted. Jim planted gourd seeds over the body, but they never produced, not even a seedling. Some things can’t be made better or made at all.
6.
On Halloween, the small college here in town will produce nurses, maids, sailors, police officers all wearing too little clothing, swarming the small, cool streets during the short morning hours, looking to get drunk, high, and anything else that makes the dark a little less scary. I don’t judge them. I am one of them, except that I have too much pride or am too self-conscious to dress up as a cowgirl and parade around the bars with a boy who might put his sweaty arm around me and talk close to my mouth. Instead I will stay in my rented house in a pasture with a man who may or may not love me, who may or may not be thinking of the nurses and the maids. I will drink a bottle of red wine and get horny like them. I will wish and want a lot of things. I will eventually go to bed when I can no longer stay awake, when I am no longer fighting off the night, the loneliness, and the inevitable end of the day like the end of all things, and I will sleep because I have no choice. Because my animal body needs sleep and I am driven and ruled by needs that I did not approve or give permission.
7.
Daddy has a slow, blind temper. Once you tap into it, there’s no limit. When I pushed Daddy, he threw me to the ground and dragged me up the crushed asphalt driveway from the barn to the house by my hair. He dragged me up the wooden porch steps, through the living room past my stepmom playing computer games to help her relax, and dropped me in my bedroom. After he let go of my hair, she hovered close to my face to where I could smell the pit of her stomach, and she said, “Look what you make us do.” Months before, I tackled her to the ground in the goat barn after she pushed me like I pushed Daddy.
Sometimes I am bad; I do bad things to other people; I hurt them. If I admit something, does it make it more true, because it feels as if it does. My reaction when someone hurts me is to hurt that person back. I can feel the heat build and my heart quicken, and I think we forget to mention, to understand that anger feels good. It feels good to release that hot energy inside. I don’t mind a little fighting every now and then, and that’s the problem. I’m a little too used to being handled rough, to getting thrown around, and to the physical pain; I like it a little too much. I used to slam my body into other players’ bodies in softball and welcome the pain, banking on the fact I would hurt them worse than I would hurt myself. I wrestled goats while wearing flip-flops; their hooves cut into the tops of my feet. I carried alfalfa bales until the green hay left raised gashes in my thighs and forearms. Daddy spanked me until I was sixteen. Sometimes Jim spanks me. Sometimes I beg him to, saying, “Please, I don’t want to be bad.”
8.
I lie on the fitted sheet with my knees bent and open. Sweat pools at my creases and soaks into the cotton. I never realize how much I sweat until I’m done. Then I see the wet shapes and realize life is an expulsion of fluid.
I have to trick myself, coax myself towards orgasm. It doesn’t come easily to me. My body craves the wavelike crash, but my mind struggles for control. I think of to‑do lists, what I’ve recently read, conversations I’ve had – anything to distract my mind while my body tightens another notch as my fingers rub and rub and rub. I know it shouldn’t be this hard. I tell myself it’s okay; I tell myself to relax; I tell myself not to feel guilty. My stomach tightens, my legs shake, my breath quickens, heat rushes under my skin; I flush; I sweat. I count: one, two, three, four, each rotation, each movement of my fingerprint, the pad of my pointer finger, the only thing I trust and even I am not reliable. Sometimes, I ask Jim to help me. I tell him he makes it feel better. At first, I think it fascinated him to see a woman touch herself in the way she would in private. But then it became time-consuming and boring. We thought if we did it together maybe I could do it with him, but that never happened, not even after three years. I’d tell myself if I got pregnant with his child then I would be able to and that he would be better, but that didn’t happen either, couldn’t happen – not the child or the better.
I ask him for his fingers. I count. Ask about the weather. Beg him, “Please, talk to me.” Give me something, I think. I listen to his voice. Concentrate on the sounds. Smell his breath, his skin. Look at his teeth, his beard. Close my eyes. Turn my head away from him. I am scared. And finally I come. Violent-like. So forceful it leaves me in a deaf daze. He washes his hands. I start in, asking how much he didn’t like it and not liking myself. Wanting is so good, so pure. Satisfaction is the heavy weight of nothing.
9.
A stream of stained-glass mucus hangs to the dirt. The pink skin stretches to white, making freckles and moles grow to splotches. White skin rips. Hot, thick pools of blood splash the ground. She moans when she pushes – deep, guttural sounds that make me hurt between my legs. She arches her back. She curls her lip. She lies down. Her hooves scrape against the hard clay like she’s running from birth. She throws her head. With each push, her backend rises off the ground. A wet head crowns as the kid’s shoulders break through her cervix – the hardest part. The kid slides out front legs first and drops to the earth christened with amniotic fluid. The pain and the struggle dissipate. Sleepy-eyed, the mother licks her kid clean with sweet, worried bays. Good mothers eat the placenta and chew the umbilical cord, cutting one life into two. The nursing begins, and the new life feeds off the old.
10.
I smell the dead dog before I see him, and for a short moment, I breathe in deep and savor the thick scent. His legs stick out from his ballooned body. I pass the heap of dog riding back to the house I will not live in for much longer, with the man I will not stay with for much longer. The heat breaks with the evening sun. Twilight and fall come on strong. The cool air whips my hair. Pastures hug both sides of the highway. Cows and trees blot the fields. Round bales rest for acres. I close my eyes and breathe deep. I smell my childhood on the goat farm, smell my father, and smell the bitch of nature throwing us towards reproduction, thirsting to break our bodies down. The last sun lights behind my eyes. I weave my fingers through the silk stream of cooling air. I breathe deep and let myself love the sweet decay, let myself accept the end of things.
Devin Latham’s nonfiction appeared in Harpur Palate. “The Heavy Weight of Nothing” is his second publication.