CAT INGRID LEECHES

DADDY

My daughter laughs and points when I pick her up from pre-school bare-breasted.
Her classmates laugh w/ her. She is powerful, that one.
Unlike my sons, she will one day abandon me.
Have you seen the size of these TITS?
How could anyone abandon me??
From afar, they could be mistaken for the geothermal.
And at night, they even glow, but there’s a simple explaining:
Sealed inside is an army of unconquerable suns. If I squeeze my breasts hard enough,
you can see their light shining through the cracks of my nipples.

These suns are sons. My sons to be more specific.
A witch put a curse on me, on us.
She was tired of dealing with my fleshy progeny crusading on her front lawn.
After the curse, I was no longer the warlord I once was, and unfolded into the domestic life quite well. My sons were not as lucky.

My daughter has never met her brothers.
She does not know I was once a fearsome warlord. She wipes her boogers on me without fear of decapitation.

Have you seen the size of these TIT HAIRS?
At home, my daughter draws a picture of my TITS hanging below my belly button. Then she draws a picture of my tits with a head of luscious hair sprouting from the rims, curling below my knees. She is inserting her own desires. My TIT HAIRS look nothing like this, we both know it, she is designing her own adult body.

During the night, she crawls into my bed, and fingers my fatty tissue. She says DADDY, it looks like spiders are stuck in your funnel cake, it looks like they are trying to unzip you. And it’s true, they are exiting the universe of my body, hard & fast.

You probably think, these hairs could cut you, but no, no, no-
See it’s all wrong. The hairs surrounding my nipples are quite soft, I will let you touch them (gentler than that please), if you promise not to tug.

After I bathe, they are as soft as horseshoe crabs.  

I have to braid the TIT HAIRS together, coat them in a special potion (recipe: an ancient lover’s cum- distilled, two fetid lambs’ tails, gelatin, gun powder) to give them any chance against my daughter. She is ravenous for my TITS, and when she suckles, light spills from my sons into her mouth. Later, I have to pick out the yellow gunk that gets stuck b/t her teeth.

In that first phone call, when I told my mother I was no longer a warlord, she instructed me to cut off my breasts and place them in the bathtub.

My sons will die, I said.

You will be a warlord again, she said. You can impregnate entire continents. I could hear her, foaming at the mouth. I knew soon, she would drown it. But I also knew this:

Never again would I give up my stiletto heels or cut off my long hair.

Cat Ingrid Leeches lives and writes in Alabama w/ a cat named Dirtbike. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Redivider, The Collagist, and Passages North.