I wish I could have hot mom status. The kind where my abs, my ass, my legs are all perfectly toned, no cellulite in sight anywhere. The kind that fits so snug into rose pink running tights and a crop top from some athleisurewear boutique. And wouldn’t be used for the actual workout that I’d do every day, without fail, at 5 am. Though they could be.

I’d get my nails done, and they’d stay done for, like, ever.

…

In short, I am dieting again.

…

All of my friends’ mothers died this September. I have nowhere to invite them for lunch. You can’t sit at the tables in Safeway anymore. My bones are burning harder now than before, but in a cold way.

 I text in the mornings, I ask them how was it? Your night. You slept? What about today? Will you sleep in the day, too? All day?

They rarely respond.

…

I once slept for a whole year. But that was almost ten years after mama died. I had no excuse.

By then, I’d almost forgotten how she looked before they incinerated her at the sleazy funeral home in the Valley. No money for a coffin? Prefer urns. Marbled ones, gold-plated ones. My father settled on a wooden box with relief carvings of footprints along a beach. She would have hated it. I could’ve said something.

But I had to do these other things: drink, mostly. Had to pee a lot, too. Had to chase men more than twice my age. Had to flunk out of school, twice. Had to dye my hair red, because it just looked so glossy goth and made me feel like I came from a different geography—somewhere where the air is not so high and thin, somewhere where I am never alone amidst the faded pumice, searching for signs in shards of glass the boys leave behind after their nights out. Bullets, too; oh, I want the shiniest one.

…

Magnesium supplements are helpful for my life. I tell everyone I take them for my muscles, but really—I take them for the laxative effects, hoping that my gut doesn’t have time to lap up all of these carbs. I think it is working. I picture my hips narrowing, just ever so slightly, day by day. My stomach flattening, my cheekbones punching out like a tectonic uplift, high high towards heaven.

…

If I were a hot mom, I’d have three kids by now. And a husband who was mostly ok as a human person with maybe only a slight tinge of questionable moral character, but who admired me. And above all, he’d only visit prostitutes on business trips South. This husband would be well-respected, and he would wear designer suits and cologne every day. He would be the kind that refers to a son like this: “hey buddy,” “right buddy,” “good job buddy,” and a daughter like this: “yes baby.”

…

My kids would be ages 4, 3, and 6 months. I’d have already gotten back in shape, too, by the way, since the last one. Pumping milk from my tits with the sort of confident hunger of a stalking tiger. At the makeup counter, slinky underwear. Hands-free, hot as shit, Instagram income mom.

…

It’s raining hard outside today. I drive around in parking lots during the twenty minutes or so that our office manager refers to as a “mandatory lunch break.” There are no hot moms out and about. Mostly elderly men, dutifully taking advantage of the cheap Safeway gas prices. I realize while my hand aches from squeezing the pump handle too hard: thank god for the Safeway. Where I can get cheap gas and cookies and chips and sodas whenever I want, even if I am dieting. So grateful for the little coffee hut on the side of the road. For radio. For old men in their slouched jeans. For magnesium, which ignites a piercing white through my bowels.

…

Did I mention yet that in another version of the story, I would have these other hot mom friends: Maddy, Melanie, Tanya, Robbie. Fat eyebrowed, fat eye-lashing along their own complement of handsome offspring. We’d sell Rodan and Fields or some shit like that together. High budget birthdays, one-upping each other with the themes. Moana for the girls, Miley Cyrus, unicorn cakes, cases of champagne, tutus. Some drama, to keep things interesting, but no one would go to psych wards ever. No one would be taking trazodone, Seroquel, Ambien, diazepam, clonazepam, Risperdal, lithium, etc.

Instead of that, we’d drive to Starbucks together on Tuesdays at 11 with all us hot moms in a white Escalade, singing out the words to WAP.

Our kids would be cool as shit, and also pretty easy to deal with, knowing deep in the roots of their milk teeth that they were protected by all that hot mom aura.

…

There’d be no teacher-parent “conferences,” “interventions,” desperate searching for a cheap apartment after getting evicted yet again, or enduring the embarrassment of eating sheet cakes for dinner from the food pantry.

Instead, there’d be honor roll, cheerleader squad, Sportz, straight smiles, and most of all, witty banter and Botox.

No eye twitching, no tics, no rotting of the viscera.

…

I drive back to the office. My colleague is walking out to her car in the rain. Beneath her coat and face mask, I can’t read her expression. Her hair begrudgingly reveals its roots as it acquiesces to the weather’s relentless criticisms. Her belly stretches tight the fabric of her thin coat, her legs wobbling and thrusting together in elastic, camouflage-patterned pants.

She recently had both her breasts cut out and her uterus removed. A full renovation. A genetic test had revealed with a high degree of certitude that she would develop an aggressive form of breast cancer if she kept these things for herself any longer.

None of us can keep anything to ourselves ever. But especially our bodies.

…

I wonder where all the sliced-off breasts, the excavated uteri, the flaccid fallopian tubes, the spongy ovaries go to retire. I wonder what they look like after the doctors are done with them, lying in the cold metal pan. Empty of blood, forgotten.

Do they get to go to some medical waste paradise together, or do they have to wait for one another in batches, in waiting rooms, in caves, in the judge’s chambers, wondering when the rest will show?

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Sonya Wohletz is a poet, essayist, and artist whose work has appeared in Latin American Literary Review, Paraselene, Revolute, and others. Her first book, One Row After/Bir Sıra Sonra, was published by First Matter Press in 2022.