A Supreme Proposal
By Katie Avagliano
I’m not saying cannibalism is the only option. If we’re talking animalistic magnetism—the old horizontal tango-—there are other ways to dispose of the sperm vehicles. Sure, arachnids control their own widowhood, and half of all Chinese mantises have copulations that end in the death of the male. In response, though, the male has adapted by becoming even more opportunistic in its coupling, i.e. sneaky and surprising. Perhaps hanging the threat of execution over the proceedings isn’t enough to combat bad behavior.
Powerful men seem only to look to the animal kingdom when it is convenient for explaining things like “boys will be boys.” They claim the alpha male cannot be expected to keep it in his pants when presented with the young, the fertile.
But if a man yearns to be a snarling pack animal, I will be a kangaroo. I’ll take you out in one kick. Plus, the kangaroo has two vaginas and the ability to suspend its own pregnancy. I could stop a growing fetus at its blastocyst stage. Kangaroos do this when they’re waiting for warmer weather, waiting for the rain to come, waiting to feel safe once again.
I’m not saying that, post-coitus, our only options involve my eating your innards or embryonic stasis. I’m saying it’s important for you to know that, if this door closes, I will one hundred percent open the fire exit, the one with the blaring alarm that no one remembers the code to turn off. I’m saying that, if you close this door that’s been open since my mother’s mother was getting it on, then you better be prepared for pretty grisly consequences.
Because in the end I’m no kangaroo, all downy hairs and fawny eyelashes; I’m not even a praying mantis, eating the male who dared try to get it on with me. If we do the boom-chick-a-boom-boom and, god forbid, one of your little swimmers catches on—and we live in this dystopian reality where the powers that be say the choices afforded to animals in the Outback don’t exist under our Star Bangled Banner—in that scenario, we aren’t humans or mammals or even terrestrial creatures.
We are anglerfish (like the one in Finding Nemo with the light on its head) and you are the scrappy, sperm-wielding parasite I have to support with my own food, my own beating heart. In exchange for this supposed legacy, you are nothing more than a growth on my side. It took decades for scientists to even find the male anglerfish, overlooking the unremarkable blip on the female’s body as just some other ornament picked up on her trans-oceanic travels.
And perhaps you’re okay with leeching, unwanted, shedding entire parts of yourself. Male anglerfish, once they burrow into the soft flesh of a female host, lose fins, eyes, organs. In the pursuit of fatherhood they give up everything they are, become a worm on the side of a glowing queen of the deep.
What I’m saying is, if you want to rewind us down to our base parts, then we should introduce some risk. If you try to make me nothing more than the ovaries I carry, then I will become sharp teeth, strong maw. In the end, there are still too many of us naked primates on this soft green earth. It is only good and just to root out the source of the problem.
Spiders cannibalize on the flip of a coin, so how about heads I win, tails you lose? Would you walk into my parlor?
Katie Avagliano (she/her) teaches college writing in the Pine Barrens of South Jersey. She earned her MFA at American University and her writing has appeared in Lunchbox, Bethesda Magazine, and elsewhere.
Photo credit: Angler fish image by Helder da Rocha via a Creative Commons license.
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