Surrogate by Erika Eckart
Associate editor Allison Peters on today’s bonus short: There’s softness, comfort in this meditation on “replacement” mothering. Haunted by longing, melancholy, love, this piece weighs the balance between real and imitation, vibrancy, and decay, and the basic need we living beings all share: gentleness—a nurturing layer as tender and honest as what you’re about to read.
Surrogate
Sometimes replacement mothers are needed. Pacifiers were invented to fill this void. At first (and in some places still) they are called dummies because they fool closed-eyed children, convince them a real mother comforts them, cares for them, instead of a nipple-colored plastic nub. Deprived of parents, monkeys picked a simulated foam and terry cloth surrogate (even when blunt spikes poked out from it) over the wire and wood one bearing milk, because, of course, everyone wants something more than food. They nuzzled the imitation mother’s soft surface for hours to make due and those deprived of first a real and then a soft dummy mother thrashed their heads against the sides of the cage. To replace myself for 10 hours a day, simulate my soft body, I diced, boiled and pureed, made hyper-colored yam, berry, carrot ice cubes, set a rotation, in between the plastic bladders of scrambled-egg-colored milk which I squeezed from my body. Then, when teeth pierced your gums, I left you maraschino-cherry-eyed pancakes, halved grapes, crust-less triangles. Mostly you left them uneaten, flies circling, color changing as the moisture evaporated and the morsels turned to foam bricks. But, I piled the fresh on the rotten, making stratified layers: vibrant cantaloupe and pineapple arranged in a smiley face, transition to a murky gray stew spotted with spores of chartreuse, forest, lime. More than food they are tribute, piled up outside your altar, a compost pile of what good mothers do. An incantation, a prayer, a pleading: “Look what I made you.” Sitting there like a dummy, all mother-shaped and rotting.
Erika Eckart is the author of the tyranny of heirlooms, a chapbook of interconnected prose poems (Sundress Publications 2018). Her writing has appeared in Double Room, Agni, Quarter After Eight, Quick Fiction, Nano Fiction, Quiditty, and elsewhere. She is a high school English teacher in Oak Park, Illinois, where she lives with her husband and two children.
