things we feed each other by Neah Ziana Mendoza

My mother spat me out when realized she couldn’t digest me. Pushed until all traces of fermented beauty and soured anger had been expelled. I think a part of her was relieved when I stubbornly screwed my mouth and refused to suckle on the very body that I came from. 

​It started small, as all things do. She would feed me jaundiced milk formula in pink bottles. Pulpy pea and pureed black beans. Sips of stories of birds with human faces that brought death to crying babies. Soggy bread and milk-soaked crackers. Cloying nightly prayers to the people in the paintings on our altar. Raspberries mashed to look like emboluses and slimy banana disks. Warnings of disembodied hands, hungry for fat infant ankles. This was before my baby teeth had burst like rice grains from the banks of my gums. 

​She later began feeding me pasta, soft like animal entrails smothered in red sauce and small helpings of self-doubt about my scabby legs. Fish with spines like lice-combs and eyes that popped like gummy candies. Legends about moon-faced ladies with animal feet who called men like my father into the forests. Bowls of bone broth frothing with wilting greens, cooked with languishing love and gossip about the kind of women we shouldn’t be. Whatever she fed me, she measured. 

I survived like this until I gorged on what I wanted. 

By the time I turned fifteen, my pallet had expanded to soft, tongue-like seafood boiled in blighting spice leaves and nibbles of straight romance novels stolen from my mother’s shelves. I sucked dribbling white chocolate from my fingers and chicken bones after ripping the pink meat off. Slurped drinkable yogurts, picked at pomegranate seeds, gnawed on toughened jerky. Sometimes my mother still served me berations candied in sweeter, back-handed compliments about the acne scars that peppered my cheeks and dough that molded over my frame. 

​After I left home, I acquired the taste of waxy lipstick from the lips of one-night stands and the briny wetness from between their legs. The salt of sweat mixed with perfume that I lapped from collarbones and the metallicness of ringed fingers. I could now have my fill.

When I visit my mother now, I feed her a daughter she can stomach. One she won’t regurgitate into my lap and tell me to clean up. Spoonfuls of a daughter that doesn’t fuck girls, that won’t get stuck between the gaps of her twisted teeth. I add salt when she tells me that I am not enough, that I could have been more. I add sugar when she says I need a man in my life to fix me, to satiate the hunger all women have. I bite my tongue until it bleeds and my mouth begins to rust. 

​I think perhaps I could leave her here, to waste away and let the ulcer in her stomach eat her from the inside out. 

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Neah Ziana Mendoza is a Belizean writer. Born and raised in Orange Walk Town, she’s found her way back home after earning a BA in Creative Writing from Murray State University. She is a proud, weird, queer girl who writes stories for other weird, queer girls. You can find her work in Waxing & Waning and The Page Gallery Journal.