Put A Teat In It! by Jennifer Lewis
Winner of the 2020 Los Angeles Review Literary Awards, in the category of flash fiction.
Final Judge: Ellen Meeropol
It tugs at my nipple. Only the first pull is uncomfortable, then it finds its rhythm. I hold the plastic horn against my breast with my forearm so I can use both hands to smoosh my left breast into the other horn. I shrink from the first suck, then feel the release of the swelling under my skin. I’m holding plastic gramophones to my breasts, but no music is coming out, only milky water drips into bottles that are screwed to them.
Put a sock in it! Originates from the gramophone. Put a breast in it! I think as my nipples are being suctioned down their skinny necks. I can see the pink flesh elongating, then contracting. Long plastic tubes connect the gramophones to an electronic box that’s covered with black nylon so it can double as a backpack. It fools no one. Sitting on my nightstand, it echoes like a steam engine from another era. It starts off like Choo-Choo, Choo-Choo, but ten minutes in, it sounds more like Fuck-You, Fuck-You. I listen to it in unison with the suctioning while I wait for the 8-ounce bottles to fill.
When my husband barges in the room all I can say is, “Nooooooooh.”
“I’ve seen it all,” he says lightly as he looks for his keys or his hat. Ordinary things. No you haven’t. You’ve only seen me with one gramophone under my shirt, not shirtless with both teats attached. Get out! I’m the one stuck here. Give me some dignity. I close my eyes. The industrial sound makes me feel like I’m in a factory. I am the factory. I start to leave my body. I’m always leaving my body. I notice that I leave so I tell myself, Come back. Feel animal. Feel mammal. Feel cow.
In 1920, the first mechanical breast pump was modeled after the bovine milking machine and little has changed about it since.
“Seriously, get out of here,” I say.
“I’m not looking,” he says, moving papers around his desk. And I wonder how do you go back to woman after cow? Why is cow so scary? Maybe it’s because you realize: You are something other than you think you are. What else am I that I don’t already know?
“Found them!” He says, running out of the room.
Jennifer Lewis is the editor of Red Light Lit. Her short story, “New Low,” was the winner of the Nomadic Press Bindle Award in 2018. In June 2017, she was the first runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Creative Nonfiction Award for “Holy Communion.” Her fiction has been published in Cosmonaut’s Avenue, ENTROPY, Fourteen Hills Press, The Los Angeles Press, Midnight Breakfast, sPARKLE & bLINK, and X–R-A-Y Lit Mag. She received her MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and teaches at The Writing Salon in San Francisco.
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