Mommy.

When she thinks of the child, her thoughts spin like a carousel. It only spins for her alone. Finally, she thinks, finally something is happening just for me. It spins and spins, and somewhere her daughter is sitting, entangled in a zoo of lifeless animals, on a plastic horse whose body is pierced by a pole, against which her sweaty, sticky child's hands are rubbing.

What can change overnight? Femininity: today a woman, tomorrow a mother. But that, she thinks, should be one of the immovable things. She knows that she had had nine months to prepare for this.
The pillow in her neck puts too much pressure on her cervical spine. She can feel her back stiffening and knows that she has to change her position if she does not want to be in pain like an old woman later on.

She knows her body well. She understands its signals, just as she did when she was five years old, walking across a footbridge and suddenly felt a stinging pain in her neck. She stopped and for a moment held the wasp between her fingers, before something buzzed close to her ear. She did not cry out, but let the animal fly away and then scratched the swelling sting until it began to bleed. The poisoned blood flowed out of her body, and she pressed her shirt onto the wound. In the evening ice cubes wrapped in a cloth soothed her pain. She was very proud of herself at the time.

She sits up in bed, pulls the covers aside and a cold wave of air hits her feet, hot from sleep. As she stands up, the floor moves further and further away from her, the more upright her spine. No dizziness, no throbbing at the back of her skull, no hint of a migraine.

She reaches the window far too quickly. Is the room not as big as it seemed a moment ago, or have her senses been playing tricks on her?

...

from Verpasst