"The Shrine Inside My Belly" by Ari Cordovero

In the club, everyone’s mouths open at the same time.

The bass drops and words fall out — slick, unclaimed — pooling around my boots. Someone says beautiful mama, and the phrase sticks to my skin, glowing faintly, northern, like a bruise that refuses to thaw.

I press my palm to my stomach, a reflex I don’t notice until I’ve already done it.

Inside me, the baby shifts, slow and buoyant, the way something swims when it isn’t afraid.

My body feels anchored, weighted correctly. Around me, everyone else loosens. They sway and smear at the edges, coming slightly undone, as if the room is quietly unbuttoning them, and I am the only one left fastened.

My belly grows heavier with each glance.

Not bigger — denser.

Eyes blink open everywhere — on faces, on walls, in the dark between bodies.

The polar bear mural along the club’s back wall locks eyes with me and skates past, white and enormous, its breath fogging the air before it slides back into the wall.

Misha fits too easily into the noise. He always has. He kisses me near the cheek — peppermint, cold air — and disappears into the bathroom with a group of men who look like they’ve already forgotten their names.

He doesn’t come back.

Instead, the door exhales white powder that drifts into the room like pollen. It coats people’s shoulders, their lips, the back of their hands. Men begin to lick it from one another’s faces, careful, devotional. Someone offers me some. I blink instead.

A girl in latex finds me. She looks peeled straight out of a bathroom stall — shiny, restless, already sweating.

She presses both hands to my stomach and waits, like she’s knocking on something that might answer.

“Beautiful mama,” she murmurs, dragging the words out, her mouth close to my ear, wet and curious, like she’s trying to learn how I taste.

Her boyfriend leans close and asks what it feels like to fuck a shrine. Then corrects himself, smiling — a pregnant shrine. His girlfriend laughs, and her teeth fall out, clattering across the floor like dice. No one bends to pick them up. People step over them without noticing.

I try to leave.

The crowd presses inward instead, palms flat against my stomach, listening — not to me, but to what’s inside. Their faces are earnest, almost tender. I feel myself turning into a surface, a site, a thing that means something to everyone but me.

I am the only one not dissolving.

By morning, the club has shed itself into a kitchen. Light leaks through the windows like an accusation. Dead moths litter the counter, the sink, the floor around my shoes. I don’t remember seeing them inside, but here they are, delicate bodies folded in on themselves.

Misha sits at the table, pale, blinking.

“I don’t know why I thought doing that was okay,” he says. “I’m embarrassed.”

Steam rises from my mug like a little spirit. I watch it instead of him.

“I felt like I was disappearing right beside you,” I say.

“I didn’t mean to leave you.”

When he speaks, moths flutter against the inside of his mouth. I see their wings for just a moment before they scatter, disappearing into the air between us.

In the window behind him, the glass holds two figures: myself, and a smaller outline stitched to my spine, watching.

When I blink, the moths are gone.

The outline remains.