The Tiny Mens in Your Boobs 

When you turn 28 or 29 or 30 or maybe even when you turn 25, a strange and mysterious feeling will come over you. Inside of this feeling, you will imagine the tiny mens inside the tiny factories in the innermost insideness of your boobs have awoken from their long night of sleep.

The tiny mens do not have wives and do not have homes, but have only ever been sleeping on the tiny hard floors of the tiny factories. But now, the tiny mens rise from their sleeps and grab their even tinier lunch pails packed with tiny sandwiches made of hard salami and hard cheese and punch their tiny time cards. And once they get to their tiny coal furnaces, they begin shoveling with their very tiny shovels, and eventually the small cogs begin to turn. And while you do not feel the small cogs are actually producing milk, you feel they are producing the idea of milk, or perhaps producing milk steam from the tiny smokestacks of the tiny factory. In the innermost insideness of your boobs, the faintest clouds of milk begin to occlude the sky, the boobs sky. This is a weather of which I speak. This is an entire system.

            And you can feel the bottoms of the very tiny shoes as they move there inside you, inside the factory. It is similar to the furry feeling on the roof of your mouth when a kitten licks your finger, only the furry feeling is on the inside of your boobs.

            This strange feeling will arise when in the presence of babies or kittens or commercials for fresh-scented detergent. Sometimes it might even occur when you are looking at a particularly adorable cupcake. And it will be against everything you have always been, against your cussing and your middle fingers and too many drinks, against short skirts and impractical shoes, against never once in your life imagining your own goddamn wedding, and not even because you were antagonistic about the idea of “girls imagining their own goddamn weddings,” but because, honestly, it just never occurred to you to imagine your goddamn wedding. You were busy imagining cocktails and cities and very expensive hats.

Let’s be honest: you were busy imagining hot dudes with dicks.

But now, the tiny mens in your boobs make the tiny steams. They stir vats full of hormone concoctions with wooden paddles. And at 28 or 29 or 30, and sometimes even at 25, you know you could nurse just about anything with a pinkness. You could stick your boobs in just about anyone’s mouth. It’s so very distracting. It’s so very strange. And the whiteness of the blank paper in front of you shines particularly white now. The whiteness of the blank computer screen is so very white without even a hint of pink. Where are the cute jellybeans and the skin of the crocus buds pushed up through the marrow of spring dirt? Where are my goddamn kitties doing their goddamn cute kitty things?

And the tiny mens. They will not stop with the shoveling and the coal and the furnaces. Their skins tan in the furnace fires and they haul in more sacks of powdered hormones to dump in the vats, to make the milk steam, and these mens. Oh, these vile mens!

In some other place further still inside of you, down where babies get made, an entire skyscraper of very tiny mens in very tiny suits sit in rows and rows and rows at tiny typewriters writing their tiny, tiny books. And you want to be able to think about the tiny mens writing the tiny books as you once did. You want it to conjure that feeling, the burn, the animus. (You awaken in the mornings now with the word animus in your head and it hovers there at your shoulder as you move through the days.) You want the animus of the clicking, of the incessant clicking, but sometimes now you cannot hear it. The sky grows and grows and grows beautiful and the clouds now are so very white and tinged with pink and, look out there, there is so much space out there. There is everything. And the tiny books, they are so very tiny.

You rise into the sky of milk clouds and orbiting kittens that meow like clocks and occasionally blobs of jello with giant and lovely eyes fly by too, and that’s when you see you were wrong: the clouds are not milk clouds at all. They are clouds of cotton candy, and they are delicious.

Rachel Yoder is the author of Nightbitch and a founding editor of draft: the journal of process. She grew up on a Mennonite commune in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Ohio and now lives in Iowa City.

“The Tiny Mens in Your Boobs” was originally published in Bat City Review Issue 9.