Primogeniture

As the stitches stretch wider I see flesh behind them: shiny, pink, seashell-ridged. I go to the doctors with my belly held in my hands, shoes slipping against the rain-wet pavements. They peer inside me with long thin torches and use bigger needles. The stitches start thick as prison bars, but as they stretch they thin to string.
+++++Undressing for the shower, I catch fleeting scents of damp earth from my discarded clothes. It must be from the half-open window; a split in my body would surely smell of nothing but my own self.
+++++I am overripe fruit.
+++++I am shifting tectonic plates.
+++++My flesh cannot be trusted.
+++++I go back to the doctors for more stitches and more assurances: he is tight, he is good, there will be no escape. I fear asking them to take him out, not ready to hear ‘no’. I start to doubt that he wants to come out. Maybe he just wants me to know he is there.
+++++But oh, I know. I know when he grumbles through my sleep, when his nails scratch my flesh, when he reaches his fists through the stitches to grab food out of my hand. Even though the thinner I get, the smaller his prison shrinks; still he grabs, still he throws. The stitches tighten across his flesh, and I see the marks they leave: red lines across his shins and arms, like string around a roasting chicken.
+++++My skin cannot stretch any more, so he grows upwards into my body. I feel his elbows against my spleen, his toes tangled among my intestines, his eyelashes on the inside of my collarbones. My heart still thumps and my lungs still inflate, but space is getting tight.
+++++I sit in my kitchen in a patch of sun and feel my vertebrae against the wooden chair. If I stay silent, maybe he will forget I am there. Maybe I will forget too.
+++++Sometimes I think about snipping the stitches – pop, pop, pop, easy as exhaling. He’d tumble right out, my liver clutched in one bulging fist, my heart still pumping between his teeth. He would choke on me as I turned inside out for him. Just a few snips, and he would be out of me forever.
+++++I sit on my chair, and I stare at the food I cannot eat, and I feel my bones pressing harder. I hold the scissors tight in my fist.
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Kirsty Logan won her first literary contest at the age of 8, and has gone mostly downhill ever since. She has won some awards and things, and is currently working on her first novel, Little Dead Boys. She lives in Glasgow with her girlfriend. Get in touch at kirstylogan.com. Primogeniture was shortlisted for the Campaign For Real Fear contest.