The doctor told Kate that her rectum and bladder would soon fall into her vagina like two fleshy wet noodles. The doctor didn’t use these exact words, but that’s the image that Kate had, sitting half-naked on the table with paper covering her prolapsed pelvic organs. Apparently, it was a common postpartum complication. Kate’s body swelled with pregnancy, then the tide went roughly out. “Stage two,” he called it. 

Constipated shits and painful pees were a part of Kate’s everyday mom life. She’d tried to do everything right during pregnancy and during the first six weeks after her daughter, Harriet, was born. She wore icy pads to numb her bleeding vagina. She did pelvic floor exercises and tried to keep herself from pissing her pants when she sneezed—anything to stem the smelly build-up of fluids in her leak-proof underwear. But the pain? The pain never stopped.

Almost a year later, the doctor had her lie back onto the table and fit her feet into the familiar OB-GYN stirrups. The metal was cold on her bare toes. The doctor held up a plastic-looking diaphragm, a pessary, and explained how it could prevent Kate from getting surgery until she was done having kids. Kate had trouble focusing on the doctor’s explanations. She stared at the lubed-up silicon device. It looked like a dildo and a diva cup shacked up together and had a baby. Before inserting it, Dr. Ward leaned over and whispered that some women reported that it stimulated the g-spot during sex. 

With that, the physician folded the pessary like a taco. He pushed it into her vagina and shoved it up by her cervix to act like a doorstop for Kate’s pelvic organs. She was instructed to remove the device once every three months for a seasonal cleaning. The doctor assured her that if Kate was unable to stick her own hand up into her you-know-where, she could make an appointment with  Dr.Ward to clean it. Kate shuddered to think of herself forcing her fingers into the cavernous dark of her vagina where her drooping rectum and bladder hung down beneath her tired uterus. 

If it hadn’t been for the pessary, Kate believed she never would have discovered the first piece of doll furniture. It happened a week after the insertion. She’d been cramping. She rushed to the toilet, doubled over, and reached her hand in, expecting a thick blood clot. She touched something hard and plastic. She yanked, groaning as the object caught painfully on her vulva. 

She pulled out a tiny chair. It was covered in a thick, gelatinous purple-red of bloody menstrual tissue. Glistening lumps stuck to the chair and coated Kate’s sticky fingers. She lifted it up to her eyes to get a better look. It had three rungs in the back and two Quaker-style armrests. It smelt like raw chicken livers.

It fit easily on her palm. The kind of chair that isn’t big enough for regular dollhouses, but fits instead inside expert miniatures: the ones that slacker dads buy to win back their kids, only to leave the intricate kits unfinished in their garages next to their sports car. Kate remembered one from her own childhood, a stately Craftsman that her father promised to build for her but never did.

The worst part was that Kate couldn’t tell anyone about it. How do you say, “Listen, doc, during my period, I removed what I thought was a clot, but turns out, was a chair.” They’d put her back on Prozac. Probably hospitalize her. The doctors would never take any of her postpartum medical problems seriously again—the burning bladder pain, the semi-constant pelvic cramping, her new dependency on Miralax. They’d barely believed her before. 

A week after the chair, Kate’s pelvic pains returned, thundering from her vulva down to her feet. She shuddered as she lifted Harriet out of the bath, almost dropping her on the slick floor. Kate gritted her teeth, ignoring the pain until Harriet was safely dried and tucked into her crib. She closed the door hastily in the bathroom and reached in to check the pessary. Her fingers felt something rectangular. She pulled, screaming, as something scraped the sides of the vaginal canal. She removed a miniature chaise lounge, complete with a plastic pillow and delicate black tassels on the edge of a French-style couch.

Could this be the doctor’s sick joke? Could her husband, a kind and attractive (if average) man, be leading a double-life as a psychopath? Was it delayed onset postpartum psychosis? Was there a difference between madness and a sharp change in hormone levels? WebMD wasn’t clear. Could she be doing this to herself? Like people who eat in their sleep after taking Ambien? Kate kept checking their credit cards, but it was just a sea of late-night Amazon purchases… yogurt melts, Gerber puffs, gas drops, and slim-fasts. No doll furniture.

It wasn’t long before an end table got caught in her vaginal glands. Kate washed the vaginal tissue and thick yellow discharge off in the sink, and buried it in the basket where she kept her organic cotton menstrual pads. Next, was a standing floor lamp. The lamp began pushing its way out of her vagina like a reject tampon while Kate was at work. She bit her lip in the office bathroom. She would die if someone heard her cry out in pain or saw her cleaning the lamp in the sink. Kate tried to shove the piece of furniture back in, her finger pressing down on the plastic lampshade. The lampshade was the exact size of her thumb. She couldn’t keep it in for long. She left the bathroom, awkwardly walking with her knees pushed together, praying that no one noticed. 

Could it be a postpartum complication? On paper, the delivery had been uneventful: some extra bleeding, lots of tears on the outside, but mostly it was forgettable. Forgettable for everyone but Kate, of course. Labor, delivery, the time in the hospital after Harriet was born—these were moments Kate longed to forget. 

Right after birth, as she lay there exposed and open, her placenta was taken out with a skewer and paraded before her like the caracas of a dead animal. Dr. Ward sewed up all the little tears outside of her without extra pain medication. “The shot will hurt worse than the stitches,” he said, cutting into all of the tears of her labia with his uncaring needle. Her sister had warned Kate about doctors doing this. Kate cried out, but it made no difference. Each stitch made her eyes go white with pain, until her body ceased to be hers entirely.

Afterward, the nurses didn’t want to clean her up, behind as they were on their schedule. Kate begged them to help wash away the blood. They handed her a rag and told her to hurry as she scrubbed away the thick brown and red matter that coated her thighs and buttocks. They looked at her body with disgust. One said her breasts were so large she might suffocate her baby. They rushed her out of the delivery room to make room for the next patient. 

Kate’s legs, numb from labor and anesthesia, trembled and shook. “Stop shaking,” the nurses told her. “Calm down, calm your legs down.” But Kate’s hormone-struck body wouldn’t respond. They told her it was her anxiety. “I’m calm,” she said. “She’s calm,” her husband said. Often he would repeat Kate’s words exactly, but out of his man-mouth, they would all hear it differently. 

And then: the exhaustion. When Kate was ten minutes late on a feeding that first night in the hospital, one night nurse threatened to monitor her for neglect. Kate picked up a sleeping Harriet with terror in her heart. She tried to nurse the sleepy babe, but nothing happened. The nurse tied her to machines, speaking sternly to Kate, blaming her for the late arrival of her milk. Machines pumped and whirled, as Kate oozed in bed. They kneaded her stomach like bread to stop the bleeding. Her breasts, too, transformed, swelling and swelling but producing nothing. 

When at last her milk came, it was like a white river sweeping away the nurses and bringing Kate back to herself. What a relief it was to take the baby home, swaddled and wrapped like a gift. Already, Kate was forgetting much of that time. The hectic waking and the cramping, the bleeding and the cracked nipples; the pink onesies and soft newborn hats. How did she get through those first few days? She had shut her eyes tight, and assured herself that soon the worst would be over. Surely, this would be the same. A bad memory, a fluke—people told her all the time, “your body just…changes. You’ll get used to it.”

But the doll furniture continued to appear. The miniature lamp was followed by an antique coffee table with a faux marble inlay. Kate logged on to mommy sites under a fake name to see if this was happening to anyone else. Most told her to go to therapy. A few believed her: An Ohio woman who’d been expelling Victorian miniature dining sets including plastic Oriental China. A lady in Texas who kept finding feathers in her vagina; soft, several inches long, in colors ranging from blue to gray. “It’s like there’s a bird inside of me, trying to get out,” she wrote. On a forum in the middle of the night, they commiserated about hiding their unasked-for treasures behind child-proof locks. More women joined them. Mothers who expelled mouse bones in brown lumps like owl pellets; mothers who leaked hand-written love letters from the 1940s; mothers who peed every time they laughed.

The other mommies understood what it was like—how tired they all were. How hard it was to remember everything. MamaJama’s postpartum periods were so rough she would forget to eat for three days. Then, her hunger would kick in and she’d wolf down a dozen packages of ground beef, uncooked and still inside the clingy plastic wrap. “I’m just so hungry.” She wrote on the forum. Karen, too, struggled with an iron deficiency and the judgment of the daycare moms, who quickly shed their pregnancy pounds like snakes shaking off old skin.

LiamMommy89 told Kate that the “other normie moms” were jealous—they got nothing from postpartum pelvic trauma except vaginal tears and Graves’ disease, while Kate got a turn-of-the-century secretary desk she could hold in her hand. Yes, Kate’s periods were rough, and yes, for 72 hours she was overtaken by a despairing rage that started just before the cramping and the stuck-pig bleeding, but she got through it. Because now, she was hoping for a loveseat with carved wooden feet. Something to fill the cabinet over the toilet. 

Kate’s pains birthed a tasteful miniature urn and an antique sewing machine complete with a needle so small it was almost invisible. Menopause was coming for them all, but Kate and the other moms on the forum would be able to claim mementos. Kate already missed when Harriet was new enough to be an extension of her own body. Harriet was growing fast; so fast, like a beautiful weed. She didn’t even look like Kate.

Harriet liked to hide her face behind her hands and pretend to disappear. She only wanted to play peek-a-boo if she was the one hiding. She giggled when Kate pretended to lose her. Feeling around in the air like a blind woman, Kate would call out, “Harriet! Harriet! Oh, please! Munchkin, where are you?” Harriet would shake with laughter and throw up her hands before barreling into Kate for a hug that was at least one part tackle. Harriet was too small and fierce to soak in Kate’s emotions. Kate could be crying, and Harriet would simply keep on playing. The world was easily shut out by pushing her two pudgy hands over her eyes. 

🩸

Kate started getting bold. She posted shots of her miniature furniture posed in little vignettes in her bathroom cabinet beside her hemorrhoid wipes and Slippery Stuff. The women on the forum couldn’t get enough of her snapshots. She crocheted a little blanket for her little chaise. She went in for her three-month pessary cleaning wearing a sly smile, like she was holding a secret. Her pelvis radiated a warm, familiar heat. The pain of something brewing.

Before the pessary cleaning, Dr. Ward had her lie back on the table and stick her legs in the air. He didn’t even smile at her, just waved her down, closer to the edge of the table like a guy at a loading dock helping a truck back in. Kate scooted down towards him on her naked butt, curious about what he would find. Kate was practicing her surprised face. Her alibi. “I have no idea how that got there…” Which was true. She squeezed her fist. In her purse, she was carrying the Quaker chair in a ziplock baggie. She wished she were holding it in her hands.

“Take a deep breath, please. Some women find this uncomfortable. I’m sure you can handle it, though. It’s nothing compared to childbirth, right?” said Dr. Ward. Without further warning, he jerked the pessary out, his gloved fingers scratching the walls of Kate’s vagina. Kate clamped her jaw shut and held in a scream. 

“What is this?” The shock in his voice was gratifying. In the doctor’s gloved hand was a pessary ringed with blood. Stuck through one of the pessary’s holes was the corner post of a dollhouse twin bed frame. “What have you done?”

Kate put her hands over her eyes, blocking out the sight of Dr. Ward’s horrified face. All she could see was the warm dark of her palms. Instantly, she disappeared. Dr. Ward yelled, “Hey! Ma’am? Lady, where are you?”

Kate resisted the urge to giggle. She jumped off the medical table. She fell awkwardly on one knee, still unable to see, but not willing to risk moving her hands from her eyes. She wanted to stay invisible. She couldn’t wait to tell the other women on the forum about this new development.

“Nurse, get in here! The patient has disappeared.”

Kate didn’t bother grabbing her purse or her undies. She marched out naked, eyes covered and completely unseen. Proudly leaving without paying her copay. 

Stuck without an obvious way out, Kate shimmied her way into a supply closet, using one arm to cover both her eyes, just in case. A call was going out on the PA system: “Code Pink. Code Pink.” 

Inside the closet, Kate removed the hands from her eyes and locked the door. Around her were shelves stacked floor to ceiling with pessaries of all sizes, like a series of silicone donuts waiting patiently to fill the mouths of a thousand failing vaginas. Someone was already banging on the door. She’d been found.. She closed her eyes. She bit her lip the way Harriet did when she was thinking hard. She let her whole face fall into a baby frown. She focused on make-believe. She thought of all the furniture her body had given her. There were gifts but also losses: The way she missed peeing like normal. The sex she used to have with her husband, and the way they would fall asleep next to each other like they had all the time in the world. Her pelvic floor convulsed in pain. Her muscles were stretching and stretching—

🩸

Dr. Ward opened the door. He did not find the disturbed patient inside, but he was certain she’d been there. Not only a hysteric—but a vandal! All the pessaries were gone. In their place were tiny bird bones, and at the center of the floor, an artful miniature Quaker chair. 

He’d never seen a woman disappear as fast as his last patient. She was gone in a split second. On his worst day, he harbored the dark suspicion that psychosis might be catching. Out of the corner of his eye, he sometimes saw things. A woman with scales on her inner thighs shimmering up in a line to her pelvic bone in tiny plates no bigger than pubic hairs. A patient who sprouted thin-skinned wings and jumped, flying like a bat off the roof of her carpool minivan. Whispers, tittering giggles that he could sometimes hear—even though no children were allowed in the office. There were things science couldn’t explain, but then, women were mysterious, hormonal creatures by nature. Twenty-five years he’d been in practice, and all that time the maternal death rate kept climbing and climbing, and the women, they got crazier and crazier.

A wet drop fell on his cheek. Could it be a leak? The fluid was too viscous to be water. He looked up at the darkened ceiling of the supply closet—and there she was. A creature with dark shadows for wings and a terrifying mouth framed by enormous, stretched out lips. She opened her rank maw. He saw rows of sharp teeth made out of, was that doll furniture? He stared in fascination at the creature’s open mouth. Broken table legs, iron lamposts, and pint-sized boards from a miniature white picket fence grew out of bleeding tissue. He ought to have run. 

Every sharp edge of her teeth bit into Dr. Ward as the jaw closed over his head, muffling the sound of his screams.

🩸

She swallowed the doctor, but still she was hungry, and so she swallowed the nurses who came into the supply closet looking for the doctor. She ingested them in their entirety: their scrubs, their sensible sneakers, cellphones, and hair ties. Next, she devoured the lactation consultants and then the technicians with their machines, beeping, beeping, beeping, inside of her. She grew voluminous and powerful. 

Then she ate the clinic furniture, her mouth opening like a dark, primordial cave. First, she swallowed a hospital bed, enjoying the taste of the levers, the round protrusions of the buttons and the succulent railings. She consumed the ugly chairs in the waiting room, the laminate coffee tables and magazines, the desks and cubicles, the carts of urine samples and the sonogram machines. Then, she went on—feasting upon the entire neighboring hospital where she’d delivered Harriet.

All of it compressed in her giant uterus body—her vast muscles as strong as the very forces of the Earth; like continental plates coming together to form mountains, she pressed the people and objects in her maw, transforming them into miniatures and squeezing them out of the ravenous tunnel of her body.

How small it all became inside of her. A once two-hundred-pound hospital bed now became the length of an arm. How cute and precious the tiny medical carts and nursing stations became. The glaring fluorescent lights of the delivery ward were now shining pinpricks, twinkling like sequins. The whole hospital was a dollhouse. The people inside her screamed, but now their noises were sweet and a little like birdsong. How they chirped at each other with tiny hands and tiny mouths.

Kate invited her daughter into this new sprawling dollhouse. Harriet liked the dollhouse floors— white and gray tiles that formed a checkered pattern. Inside the dolly hospital, the colors were all neutrals, but the outside of the dollhouse was red, redder than paint, glistening and pulsing like a living thing.

Kate’s pain hadn’t disappeared, but now it had form and focus. The walls of the dollhouse were her pain; her daughter was her pain; the little furniture and the little people were her pain; she had rooms of pain, populated with tiny hospital blankets of pain, thin as tissues. In her motherhood, she was monstrous but manifold. Her failing organs had left space for this entire nascent world.

In miniature, Dr. Ward had a body that was stiff but pliable. He was instantly her daughter’s favorite. She stroked his hair with her thick baby fingers. Harriet liked the sounds he made. She flung him into the medical bed and propped up his legs, taking extra pleasure in the way his small body bent. Harriet told him, “there, there, get better, Mister dolly,” and together they played make-believe.