Making a Baby Is Like Catching Fish

People usually trickle into the village market long before the birds start their half-startled calls. Dogs pick through shadows and wander back to their self-claimed hovels. The bitches trot through the streets; several litters have weaned their tits so long they hover and dance above the dust, each step making the teats quiver. Some walk with their brood next to them, a tumbling swarm of warm puppy fur that follow their swinging breakfast.

A long row of boards, propped by cinder blocks or bits of stone, lines both sides of the market like a gauntlet, the stalls arranged in their own food demographic. First the fruit, then the fish and finally the meat, propped on damp, blood worn boards. He stops in front of the first vegetable stall.
          “How much?” He picks up the bok choy, feeling the firm groove of while stalk and feathery green leaf. She mumbles something, sizing up the tall, thin man before her.
        “Too expensive”, he says putting it down, knowing she will then shake her head, pick it up and thrust it again at him, telling him to name his price.

He feels at a loss, like a child told to prepare a meal. Buying food is his wife’s job, but she could not get out of bed this morning for the nausea wracking her body as their baby violently splits from cell into cells into cells. Mei Ah had smiled while he put the bucket next to the flat, bamboo mat bed, happy to be sick with child again. 

This was the third try, the third attempt to incubate life inside her without letting it slip out in a wave of cramps, blood and lumps of baby. The doctor said something about hostile environment, unstable uterine walls. Their parents told her she should lie still after love making to ensure implantation. Like trapping a mass of cells is as easy as catching fish.

The ground is wet from the red, blue and green plastic buckets filled with last night’s catch. Each basin traps different aquatic delicacies—urchins inch along on their black needles, blue dart fish nibble at each other, sting rays hover at the bottom, tails poking from the rims, shrimp flail legs over each other, their heads up like race horses. 

Tubes of air filters snake into the water, providing oxygen for sucking gills. White foam bubbles at the edges of the basin and the fish sit below, eyeing him from below the slick, opaque shield. 

Occasionally one will escape, jumping over the edge in a spray of hoary water to gasp and flop with unblinking eyes till the owner leaps up to re-catch it.

Everything smells of dirt, water and salt. Mei Ah would know which vendor to talk to, the one who would give an honest price. Now she huddles at home, creeping from room to room like her bones are made of hollow glass.

He walks towards the pig heads hanging on wire hooks, the ones with tongues rolling from their mouths like white swollen worms. Flies lick at their open, still eyes. Three cow hearts are lined next to each other, white tissue clinging to the muscle walls like cobwebs, strings of veins just visible between each groove of muscle.   

        “I need ribs.”
        “Hoof? Tail? Cheap price today. Only here. Not like that son of a bitch next to me. He’ll rob you blind.”
        “Sure.”
And as the owner crushes ribs with the cleaver, he backs away to avoid the blood, skin, and bone residue on the block which sprays up with each chop. Looking at the skinned rabbits, naked and ivory white, the ducks hanging by their plucked necks on red strings, he wonders why he is not a vegetarian like his wife. Familiarity breeds hunger.
But he does remember the first time he felt the sting of regret for taking a tiny life. It was a morning like this one, the same dirt and dust, the same yelling between stalls covered in raw food. Pig, cow and dog blood tainted the air with a metallic twang, one he could taste at the back of his throat when he breathed in. He was here to buy sparrows—six of them.
        “Here! Buy! I’ll clean them for you!” The woman motioned towards him, her hand covered with dried blood. Small feathers stuck like flags to the back of her fingers.
        “Skin them for me, will you? I don’t want to have to do that later.”
        “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” She had already turned and had picked up the scales and bundle of plastic bags. Brown crust had gathered under and around her nails.

A wire cage, rusted and woven from pools of metal, sat beside her foot. Inside huddled the mass of dusty brown feathers, wings and blinking eyes. Her hand dove in, searched for a warm body and brought it up. The tiny thing did not struggle; merely shivered. The woman thrust her thumb between the neck and chest, piercing through with her nail, pulling skin and feathers off in one swift stroke. 

Throwing the inside-out coat of blood, down and hide with the pile, she jammed her middle finger through the chest cavity, grabbed the still beating heart and pulled it out. Putting the naked, slippery bird into a plastic bag, she tossed the heart in, too, weighing the whole thing before giving it to him.

The heart kept beating until he reached the bus stop.

As the butcher hands him the ribs wrapped in brown paper, watery blood dripping from the corner, he feels a wave of regret for the birds. Their hearts, smaller than his pinkie nail, could not have been bigger than his still-growing child, the one struggling to huddle in the dark coop of his wife’s womb.