Mighty Mercury

I woke up that morning, Spacesuit Day, my thirteenth, with aching teeth and mucus caked in my hair. The sun had yet to rise. As I stirred under the sheets, my genitals felt like sharpened barnacles that scraped my inner thighs. Something stirred within them--hermit crabs, I mused, that had scuttled up my legs as I slept and found new shells for their soft bodies in the nautiloid folds of my scrotum.

I threw off the blankets and ran naked to the radiator to see what the angels had left me as I'd slept. And there it lay: my thirteenth spacesuit.

It was gorgeous, stretched across those hot iron ribs and steaming silently. It had been constructed, I noted, of many tens of diapers taped together, a mass of translucent plastic and damp cotton tailored to cradle each contour of my blossoming form.

 

Next to the spacesuit stood a tube-shaped fuselage that I fondled and began to yodel into, just as I'd been taught in church. As I bleated notes into the moist air I could sense my testes retreating from the heat of the radiator. Tingling, I cupped them to my torso. They bit at my fingers with an eager joy.

I pried open the window. Cold air rushed in.

It was time.

#

Before long I was skimming across the predawn sky. Gasses and perfumes held me gently aloft, as did the dreams of those sleeping below. By the light of a sulfurous bonfire, a few insomniac children wielding tomahawks drummed upon an inverted kiddie pool in a richly manicured backyard. Even from my great height, their heads appeared asymmetrical and half-melted, like a newborn's.

My spacesuit had wrapped itself like a blanket of feathers around my raw skin, and in fact I felt more akin to an aerialist than an astronaut. I was a woman, I imagined, in a lush and ticklish bird costume, straddling a trapeze high above a rapt crowd, my half-erect penis extruded via intestinal pressure through my labia. I couldn't place nor fully fathom this glandular mirage, so I let it flood my bloodstream as I raked the night air with a phantom talon.

Did I mention the moon? It filtered down like a searchlight through ocean water, a cold fire that filled my swelling belly with a billion squirming fish. It mounted me, and I tumbled across the heavens with it.

My spiraled cries began to wake the city.

#

After I'd been joined in flight by a dozen sleepy-eyed and spacesuited brethren--some clad in plumes of tin foil, others twined in chicken wire, one encrusted from head to crotch in a kind of fiberglass meringue--we mated and spent fresh sperm into the ether. So freed, our semen floated like filigree on the fragrant wind. It landed in the form of glittering tinsel on the trees as we fluted past, cawing and cleaning our claws in each other's cloacal leak.

At last, tired and congested with some sort of fibrous and saccharine phlegm, I coughed and spat and warbled my way home, leaving my lovers circling the moon in convulsive orbits. Scorched iron stung my sinuses, and I knew my room was nearby.

I tried to land on the windowsill, but my foot slipped on a slick scab of frost. Winter had come during the night, I realized with alarm, as I clutched desperately at the icy metal of the fire escape. I hung there by numb fingertips, struggling to hoist myself back up to the window, my breath a vomited ghost, when I noticed that my parents' room was lit and the blinds were open.

Inside, my father bent over my mother. He was bruising her nude spine with a ball-peen hammer--one perfect purple contusion per vertebra--as her swollen nipples brushed against the top of a large cake she was icing.

A cake. My cake. Happy Spacesuit Day, it declared in puffy, buttercream letters. Through the membrane of frozen glass between us I heard my mother scream with terror and pride. I screamed along with her.

 

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