The Children

by Devan Murphy

I am trying to keep the children alive. I am tending to their every need. I am bringing them broth and dolls. They have been dying since the beginning of time. They lie on squat bunks, they are burgundy breathing things. Their chests rise and fall. One child is called DORMOUSE. Without her, I will never be small enough to be private. One child is called CLOISTER. Without her, I will never be happy alone. One child is called YOU AT AN EASTER EGG HUNT, AGE FIVE, AND YOU LOST YOUR FATHER IN THE CROWD, AND YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE ALL ALONE FOREVER, UNTIL YOU SAW HIS GREEN COAT BY THE TREES, AND YOU HAD NEVER BEEN SO HAPPY TO SEE A GREEN COAT. Without her I will never miss my father (but I will miss missing him). One child is called SNOOZE. Without her I will never be able to rest. Another child is called SOMETIMES I THINK YOU THINK I’M REALLY STUPID and looks like my mother crying. I wouldn’t mind so much if this child didn’t exist. Though I don’t want to watch it happen.

The Daughter

by Devan Murphy

I am no leg dangler, but this doesn’t really keep me safe. Though all of me was perched dry on the rock, a shark lunged and grabbed at my calf. Maybe he thought I was a seal, or that I deserved violence. I brought forth my knife from where it was hidden in my bikini and gouged out the shark’s eye, slicing off my own right breast in the process. The shark reeled back and fled. The breast sank. The sheer spandex of my bra floated away on the surf like a jellyfish head. As the breast sifted lazily into the dark fog of the ocean the nipple looked like an eye of its own, gazing into the trenches. The eye of the shark began to sink as well until my family, coming too late to prevent anything, caught it. “We can probably reattach it,” they said. “What about my breast?” I said. “But, the shark’s eye—” they said, “we need to give it back.” Reluctantly, I cut the left breast off to even things out. I cast the left breast into the sea, then I dropped the knife into the sea as well, and it sank fast with its weight, tip down, stabbing both breasts through the nipples—like an arrow through wise matching apples.

Devan Murphy is the author of the chapbook I’m Not I’m Not I’m Not a Baby (Ethel 2024), a collection of prose poems and essays and abstract comics about God and loneliness. Her writing and illustrations have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Electric Literature, Astrolabe, The Cincinnati Review, Anomaly, Tarpaulin Sky, and elsewhere. You can find her online at devmurphy.club or on social media @gytrashh.