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Nesting Dolls 
by Donna J. W. Munro 

The joyous news came on a rainy February Saturday, so early in the morning that the horizon still sparked with stars.

The baby had arrived.

She was seven pounds on the nose, healthy and full of red cheeked wails.

I was so proud. She was my first grandchild. First born daughter born to first born to first born to first born. My daughter had labored and torn to bring her to us and I was as proud as the day I’d birthed her one February morning just thirty two years before.

Time is funny like that. I could still feel the pressure of my daughter at my breast and the warmth of her breath from those years before like it was yesterday, but I couldn’t remember how we’d gotten to this day, her own daughter’s birth, with any clarity.

It was the difference between a perfectly focused photo and a watercolor in a down pour.

“Maya,” my daughter said with a contented whisper as the stitches bit her ragged perineum, pulling her back into a reasonable state for the long, painful healing that would come.

My mother hummed as the needle threaded through the hectic flesh and I puffed out cool breezes to soothe her as she led her still bloody daughter to her nipple. To create a life takes so much sacrifice. Pulling a living doll out of your body if just the beginning. That life is yours to nurture, physical feedings along with spiritual ones.

“Fine girl,” I said, patting the cloth soaked in witch hazel on my daughter’s wounds as my mother put in the last knot. “From you, from me, from Sheila, from Bonnie, from Eunice. Fine strong girls.”

“She looks like me,” my daughter said.

Of course, she did.

Not the eye color or the same skin tone, but the bones. The shell under the paint outside was the same… smaller.

“Nesting dolls,” my mother said then her eyes went vacant as they often did. She rocked there in her wheelchair, staring off into a distant dream again, her part done.

She might not die for years, but that didn’t matter. She’d given her last sacrifice to the line and I saw it there, in my daughter’s eyes. The wisdom she’d need to be a mother. The memories of all the mothers filtered back through me and my mother. All she knew passed down like the shape we all nestled in, one after another.

Her mind was as unmoored as a spent ash drifting on a hot wind.

Buy Maya’s eyes filled with a filtering spark.

Rio’s spark softened into a fierce bonfire ready to burn a path through the world for her baby.

And mine? Mine dimmed.

A fire still but fuel that glowed and collapsed. Maya would grow and I would shrink. Like my mother did. Like Bonnie and Eunice and all the mothers who came before. I knew that I’d be like my mother sooner than later. I knew it was the way. Of women to give blood and breath and skin to their children.

But their memories? Their thoughts?

Why didn’t men have the stitches in the taints burning every time they peed? Why didn’t men have aching, swollen breasts with hot infections blocking up the ducts? Monthlies and mistakes and menopause and pennies between knees.

Bonnie said it was the fault of Eve.

I say that’s bullshit.

Nothing Eve ever did deserved so much hate.

No.

It’s because we are nesting dolls. We are the shells that new live carves into pieces. We give the blood and the milk, we clear the path and protect, and we give our memories in the end. We are mother, daughter again and again, pulling ourselves out of our own mothers, small reproductions. Memories of what comes next.

.

Fiction © Copyright Donna J. W. Munro
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from author Donna J. W. Munro:

Revelation: Poppet Cycle Book One

In a dark future, people with money live in doomed cities and use the recently deceased as
repurposed servants and workers called poppets. Ellie DesLoge is the teen heiress of the
company that makes and distributes poppets–your basic reprogrammed flesh robot complete
with training chips and kill switches. If Ellie does everything her Aunt Cordelia says, she’ll have a
life of wealth and power. If she chooses to be what is planned for her, life will be perfect.
Everything she ever dreamed. But something about her sweet poppet Thom goes against what
Aunt Cordelia and tradition have taught her. Will she choose to believe what everyone knows is
true or will she follow what her heart tells her about Thom? Her choice will change the world.

Available on Amazon!