Excerpt: ‘Eat the Mouth That Feeds You’

My daughter, for lack of memory, eats me. Sometimes in little bites throughout the day. I don’t even notice it until I feel a dull pain in the ribs and see it is my daughter, chewing on the meat around the small bone. She sucks blood from the veins while she reads one of her books on the couch. When I hear her crunching on the bone to suck the marrow, I pretend not to notice, and I remember to rush back to the kitchen to check on a pot I left on the fire. I am here to feed her, what can I do.

Sometimes my daughter, she is cruel, sometimes she bites into my flesh but not enough to cut far into the skin. And she watches me in her grip. Sometimes I start to pull away, sometimes I cry out and my eyes fill with tears. Sometimes without thinking I will say, “Why do you hurt me? You are so cruel.” But it’s not fair for me to say those things. It is her right. She must take those things. She must take from me what she needs.

It’s because I don’t have answers to her questions. I don’t know what to say, I never have the words or I don’t understand her questions. She asks me things I don’t know how to answer. She accuses me of things that don’t make sense.

She started by eating the letters my mother sent me every month. When she was very young, I’d read them to her with the usual news: “Your sister Adriana is unbearable with her flirting all over the place with the older men. Your brother Octavio is very good at math but fights too much. And your father…well, you know. Remember, if the baby is crying too much, check if her teeth are coming. Give her an onion to chew on.”

My daughter loved to smell the letters and touch the thin, lined paper with her fat palms. Sometimes they smelled of chewing gum, a flat stick folded between the ruled sheets for my daughter. She would lick the paper, still smelling of spearmint, lick the papers with her little tongue and smear the ink. She’d put creased pages into her mouth and let them soak and she’d suck and she’d suck until the ink bled through and stained her tongue. “What are you doing?” I said. Her mouth, it looked like blood but it was ink, the corners of her mouth dripping black saliva. “Drink this,” I said. “Drink this milk. Drink it.”

Even as she got older, she liked the feel of the paper, soft, almost creamy when moistened with saliva, sliding down the throat. I wondered if it could get stuck there, or if she’d papier-mâché her insides eating all that paper. Would it form a delicate cast of all her organs, would the walls make a maze? Or would it spell out beautiful poems or complicated songs, the kind you never want to end? Now I imagine it might look like the inside of a house. I know my daughter’s house will be beautiful one day. Over the years, she has eaten enough pencils and erasers, nibbled on wooden rulers, sipped on ink from the tips of pens, and has chewed on enough paper to create a beautiful blueprint. Her insides will be a beautiful home and she’ll play music I won’t understand but it’ll be like when you play the B side of an album you bought because you heard the popular songs on the radio. I have learned to love those B-side songs best of all. If you listen enough times, you will too.

But my daughter, she also ate fistfuls of dirt. Into her mouth went back wet earth, dirt crumbs, some veiny leaves, and dried mud. She ate sand at the park, ground her teeth on the hard grains until they became fine dust. Once we were visiting my family and my daughter, she was with my sister, the single one. They sat on the lumpy bed looking at old love letters and cards and stuffed animals. They were sitting on the bed. They were eating something. It was clay. They were breaking off shards of a small pot and eating it like very fine chocolate. My sister she said to me, It still tastes like the river, you can remember the river like this, you can remember the waters, sweet like milk, do you remember, sister?•