I take the Plan B at 8am sharp in the Walgreens’ parking lot. He says he’ll split the cost with me, but we never talk again. I blink, and I’m 15, ravenous, researching male species.
The toll to impregnate their mate.
Of course he drowns his Anas Platyrhynchos lover in an attempt to proliferate her corpse or he’s putting his entire weight on a Chelonioidea so she can’t breach oxygen or he scoops out the genetics of the Anisoptera before him or he is the Dasyurus Viverrinus who ejaculates so violently, for hours, he ends up killing and eating the mother of the offspring he’d have abandoned anyway or he is endangered, the Mirounga Leonina—at risk of fucking his endangered species to death—crushing skulls of mates and progenies.
Survival of the fittest.
I take a frustrated swipe right and have this intrusive re-memory, a play-by-play of a female Ursus Americanus fighting off another male to protect her cubs. They fall, the edge of a cliff. He dies, she lives.
Death follows domestication.
I remember a boy buying me a drink after badgering me, for hours. If I let you buy me a drink, will you leave me alone? He follows me home.
It’s a natural selection.
I’m walking with a partner when, peacocking out his truck window, a male homosapien shouts “I’m going to fuck your bitch.” What can I say? My genus has been asking for it before question marks and vowels and grunts.
And what was she wearing?
A hookup comes on my chest, and he gives me a little slap on the cheek before cleaning off his legacy with a dirty t-shirt. Still, I want him to love me without the object permanence of my body, my bends of skin, my doomed splinter of womanhood.
A failed pedigree.
I push that thought away and think about this: All babies begin female, in that unsafe, unsacred place of a womb. It’s this biological ticking that decides to mutate you, or not. The more a cell differentiates, the more room for error. It’s statistics.
Which came first? The urge or the utensil?
…Since my pheromones like your pheromones, I was thinking we could do the baby-making dance. I love it when you cut slits into my flesh and secrete your DNA into them, or when you do that cute little thing where you stab my abdomen with your battle phallus and fill my insides or when you are so violent with me your species has adapted to evolutionarily prioritize the most aggressive of mates to have the highest chokehold on genetic success.
Baby, it says here they’re studying chimps to grasp at an explanation for violent sexual aggression in men.
I decide right then, I’m a Mantodea, the Praying Mantis, picturing a stomach full of heads.
Photo by Luis Machado on Unsplash
Ericka Russell
Ericka Russell is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. After obtaining her BA at Ohio University, she received her MFA from Western Kentucky University. Ericka now pursues college instruction, photography, and outdooring.
