Human Milk for Human Babies

An Arizona Horror Story

She girdeth her loins with strength,

and strengtheneth her arms.

She percieveth that her merchandise is good:

Her candle goeth not out by night.

Megan Douglas glanced over her husband’s shoulder at his credit score; it was 623. The green glow of the Credit Karma app filled her with a sense of impending doom–not fate but doom in the Eddic sense, heavy and sharp with glory, like an ax or a barbell. She pretended not to have noticed, she went to the bedroom and hooked herself up to the pump. The room was dark and silent except the high soft sound of her daughter breathing, and the air above the bassinet smelled like bread and honey. Megan’s nipples squeezed through the plastic flanges until white-blue milk filled the jars. She opened the Facebook app and the algorithm showed her a post from the Southern Arizona chapter of Human Milk for Human Babies. The post followed mommy group conventions with Petrarchan formality: Hello mamas my LO is 4 months old and I’m a slight underproducer. Used to overproduce but my freezer stash is slowly vanishing and I’m about to start to start bc (the depo shot) and scared my supply will tank. LO does bad with formula so we are looking for a donor. She was a preemie and is doing so good now and I just don’t want to lose progress or her to fall off her growth curve. Pics so we don’t get lost. Accompanying the post was a picture of a baby with a green bow on her small round head. The baby had no rolls on her wrist where Megan’s baby had three, and they were the same age. This realization made her milk let down faster. She messaged the poster: I have 900 ounces you can have if you can come down to Sierra Vista.

She felt a strange primal relief upon sending the message. Before motherhood she had never had a job worth doing. She graduated high school in Clarksville Tennessee, took a gap year and a semester of anthropology and since then had been following her husband from base to base westward. Specialist Douglas was a good man, an alright soldier. They married because they loved each other and he wanted out of the barracks. When Covid came he got in a fight with his NCO over the jab. They were at Monterrey then, learning Arabic (Levantine Dialect). After homework every few days she asked him why not and the answer was never the same on any two occasions–sometimes it was mRNA, sometimes sperm counts, the constitution, babies aborted in the sixties whose cells still flourished without number. Anyway he wasn’t saying he wouldn’t get it, just that nobody could make him. He broke into anger, spoke guttural words in his sleep. Afraid of dishonorable discharge he day traded, hired outside lawyers, bought Megan a dress to wear to a sushi bar, took out a loan on some coding boot camp he had no time to complete. The dishonorable discharge never came, probably because of recruiting numbers.

The baby was neither planned nor unplanned. She had offered to find work, but he would not hear it. Our baby needs you. This relieved her but she pictured his own face relieved and bright when the debt was gone. She would not leave the baby but what if she started some sort of business from home. But she remembered at Fort Benning, newlywed and lonely, a pretty early thirties woman named Shannon she considered a friend invited her to a makeup party and flattered her about a lipstick color and said, you can host parties like this, you can do all of this flexibly and make thousands of dollars. Remembering this stung her pride. Maybe she could drive Uber eats when the baby was asleep but every restaurant in town closed at 8pm and beyond the town was only desert for miles. She could not, or refused to, make candles or scrunchies or low content planners–the truth was she could do nothing that anyone really needed. She had no resume and no credit score. She sat in the complex harness of the pump and pictured herself as a strong stupid animal who, lacking thumbs and ingenuity, could only walk forward. Her husband came into the room and kissed her on the head, then stripped and stepped into the bathroom. His calves were lovely from running. She wished she could follow him but instead stared out the window and smelled the sweet rain and petrichor through the glass. The on base duplex they lived in clung to the side of the mountain. Nearby stood huts where the Buffalo Soldiers had slept, stone worn by years of rain. Down across the valley varicose lightning forked the sky over and over. Megan unhooked herself, still swollen but afraid the pump would conduct the charge to her breasts and scorch them off, and carried her yield to the fridge—eleven and a half ounces.

She woke at midnight leaking and hooked herself up to the pump again. The baby had slept through six hours of thunder, longer than ever in her life. Megan checked for signs of life, when the little chest lifted she opened Facebook and saw that in the late hours of the night a member of Human Milk For Human Babies had been shunned for attempting to sell her milk. This person has been blocked and removed, the admin said. Please let us know if you see ANYONE attempting to sell milk again. This group is for people who want to DONATE breast milk to babies who need it, there are other groups available for those who want to sell!! Below the post were three hundred angry reacts and several dozen hearts and comments of indignation— I don’t know how anyone, much less a mother could charge for breastmilk when there are babies in need and dying! The woman who had been banned looked Hispanic, mid to late twenties, with a Snapchat kitten filter over her face.

Sleep had given Megan’s thoughts a grim clarity. Other groups. She typed sell breast milk into the search bar and selected the group Southern AZ breastmilk: buy, sell, and donate. She read and agreed to the rules, the first among which was not to price shame. She scrolled through the posts–a dollar an ounce seemed to be the going rate. There were selfies of slouching women in their milk stained tops, pictures of full freezers stacked with pearlescent bricks of white and gold. Megan opened her phone calculator and typed 900 times 1.25 and figured it would halfway clear the debt. Everyone was asleep and she was alone with the spirits of the house—the cycling air conditioner and the digital clocks, the storm and the mountain. No moral calculation occurred in her heart, instead scraps of proverbs ticked through her mind in justification– the borrower is a slave to the lender, teach a man to fish and he will fish forever, or something like that. She was about to picture hungry babies in the NICU but she hardened her heart and shut the eye of her mind and reflexively began to argue with no one. If you’re starving and broke you can literally walk into any pediatrician’s office in the country and they give you formula for free. Or get on freaking WIC. Anyway I’ll donate again when the freezer stash is gone, or I can at least, but no one says I have to. You take care of your own. Her milk slowed to a dribble as she typed: 900 ounces available in Sierra Vista, $1.25 per ounce. LO is 4 months old and I overproduce. No medications, everything is from May to July 2021 stored in the deep freezer. Porch pick up or you pay shipping. She unsent the message about the preemie.

In the morning Spc. Douglas kissed his wife and jogged under the sky which had the splotched pastel quality of a woman’s face after she had finished crying. Megan sat on the ground with the baby– the floor of the duplex was a cold institutional tile which she had covered with a baby quilt. She pressed the button on a gyrating polyester cactus which smelled like Chinese factory. The cactus played ten bootlegged seconds of a Kesha song, the baby thrashed her fat thighs and grinned. Megan would not take her phone out while the baby was awake for fear of autism, but while she nursed she opened YouTube and listened to Dave Ramsey berate doctors for spending like they were in congress. You can’t fly to Hawaii to see your dying mother, you’re broke. The way he flung out the second phoneme of broke reminded her of home, of the accent she was already shedding for want of use. More than this she longed for someone to yell at her not abstractly but in the flesh, for the opposition inherent in adult speech, for some blazing archetype to fall short of.

While Dave shouted there came a message from someone named Liz in Marana, north of Tucson. All 900 ounces still available? Work is flexible so I can come down later today. Megan suggested meeting halfway in Benson but Liz said she was meeting a friend in Bisbee anyway. An hour later Megan drove the baby to the main gate with two styrofoam coolers of milk, the sort you rest a brisket in. It was 99 degrees, the promised rain had not arrived. The milk was white gold and some was tinged with colostrum. She pictured it all left in the sun melting, the green mesquite bugs skitting in it, bright like Tiffany lamps, so stupid they were hardly sentient. When she arrived there was a woman standing in the visitor center. She wore olive linen shorts and strapped to her front (Megan knew by sight) was an artipoppe baby carrier with a western fringe which cost $609 dollars. She was probably forty but she looked like she had never suffered. She was so happy to meet Megan, so grateful. She thought Megan’s baby was an angel. She had lurked on the donor pages but felt it was right to pay for this sort of thing. She arranged the milk deftly in coolers of her own, inside the cold Escalade. She wanted to come down once a month if that was alright. An MP was looking suspiciously on, as if he were witnessing a drug deal, so they went ahead and wrapped things up.

Megan sat in her Honda Civic and felt the Venmo notification chime $1,125 dollars, it rolled through her arm and resounded in the base of her skull. The coolant in her car flowed slowly and she drove to speed it up. On the long highway west of town the grasses waved hypnotically, they were green and living as they never were at any other time. Megan checked there were no cops around and then searched and clicked the profile: Liz Burlingame, no mutual friends, one group in common. Lanzom hat and pristine millennial teeth, with the baby two months old and already smiling telegenically. Works at: freelancer. She said the word again, what did it even mean? The cold air came in and she shook like an addict. In the eye of her mind she saw the truth, the underlying abundance of things – mint-green grass growing over the copper mines, the deer eating the grass and scattering apple seeds, the desert densely forested sustaining a hundred million people. The underground rivers jolted, exposed again. She called her husband then remembered that he was in class, and waited in the duplex with the baby latched to her breast.

Spc. Douglas was delighted at first, but after a minute he looked sternly at Megan and asked whether there wasn’t something sort of fucked up about selling breastmilk. She has not accounted for this. Her mind leapt and smoldered like dry fuel stacked long ago and lit only now. She asked if he was some kind of communist who thought everything should be given away for free. If even the breast, the organ of kindness, obeys supply and demand–then maybe life just works works like that and if she had to guess there was enough milk in the freezers of Arizona to feed all babies two or three times over so why should she not be paid for spending four hours a day hooked to the pump. He half smiled and grabbed her sort of roughly and whispered you should’ve—but he kissed her deeply and did not finish the sentence. They made love that night for the first time since the baby. Postcoitally they transferred from Venmo to the bank account, then paid off half the balance on the American Express website. They crept back into the bedroom where the baby was sleeping and dreamt of Liz from Marana.

After this Megan accidentally saw herself naked in the mirror which she had not done on purpose since Monterrey. She was beautiful still but looked like a garment that had been dismantled to serve as a pattern. There was the telltale separation of the abs, the skin’s warping, the round heft to the upper arm that only looked like strength. But so what—she was beautiful before and would be again. She stepped on the scale, she weighed 161 pounds. The number filled her with the same sense of doom as the credit score. During the baby’s nap she read about metabolism. Since she nursed she couldn’t stop eating so metabolism was the only way out. She dug past the WebMD articles to the vaporwave tiktoks which proclaimed: thyroid is God. Ninety percent of people do not sprint after the age of thirty, can you? Orange juice and breastmilk are anabolic. The medieval Swede ate four thousand calories a day. When you lift weight the muscle repairs itself and becomes a furnace. Analyze and optimize, nothing is irreversible. The autistic solitude of three years could be penetrated and reversed. She was only twenty three, still pluripotent. Thyroid is God—she tested out the thought and discarded it. She believed in the actual God. She wondered that her daughter had her own little thyroid the size of a bean. When the baby woke Megan lifted her in the air like a dumbbell, and for the first time she giggled. When her husband came home he was grinning, squinting with the eyes like the baby’s, wanting to tell a story.

I saw a weirdo today Megan, he nearly snorted. Sierra Vista, Megan had learned, was full of surreal cameos: the ponytail kilt guy at the Fry’s checkout, the guy who paced around downtown with a Let’s Go Brandon flag as if fulfilling a medieval penance. There was another such character at the Cochise gym and racquet club. He was a fit younger black guy, with eyebrows thick as slugs and greased down with oil, and who stood in the gym the whole morning doing shrugs with fifty pound dumbbells and dancing. But clearly, Spc. Douglas said, whatever he does works. The guys call him Buff Carrell. Megan doubted, but when she searched Buff Carrell on Facebook she found he existed, and his real name was Carrell Buford. His entire page consisted of videos of himself dancing in a basement with a small high window, with a full color image of himself thumbtacked to the wall. Each video garnered between two and five likes. At the beginning Carrell would mutter and babble improvisationally, then announce the song and start a karaoke machine. His taste in music was oddly white (Fade Into You by Mazzy Star, Daughters by John Mayer); his voice tuneless but his movements sharp exact and in fact beautiful. Megan wondered why Buff Carrell was like this, when everyone else recursed through the same five thoughts daily and moved stiffly like they had neurological issues. Buff Carrell was close to the source of things, something was keeping him young.

Megan did not post her phone number on the flier, just the price, a brief primer on the anabolic effects of breastmilk, and the email address she had just made: cochisemusclemom@gmail.com. When her husband was home she took the baby to Fry’s and afterwards went into the gym of which she was not a member with sunglasses and a baseball cap on and pinned the flier on the community board right next to the Air Force recruiter’s business card, which read: education, respect, up to $40,000 if you qualify. If she were a man she would join, she would sign with the recruiter and ship out next week. It women were drafted she would still go. Framed on the wall was a female bodybuilder from the 80s, her muscles pronounced but tasteful, her hair a stiff gold helmet, and a sash across her taut stomach which read Cochise Copper Queen. A drunk delight rose up in Megan’s chest. No one was in the gym but a noodly Hispanic teenager so she ventured out with the baby strapped to her chest and loaded a barbell with twenties. She braced her core and tried to feel the leverage in her hamstrings and looked three feet in front of her, down over the baby’s gold hair. When she tried to lift she could not, something tweaked so low in her back it was almost in her pelvis. She shrieked and crawled until she reached a wall to pull up on, the baby squealing the whole time like it was a game. She limped to the car, and it hurt to move her foot from the gas to the break. I picked up the groceries funny, she said to Spc. Douglas. Go take a shower he said, gently but clearly irritated.

Milk and water ran down her body, it hurt worse than labor to lift her leg over the crest of the shower, and she wondered if the injury contained the voice of God. But the Tricare nurse practitioner said that it was just a weak pelvic floor and to do some Pilates for six to eight weeks. Her thyroid, which they checked, was fine. Why then did she ache so horribly. If she wanted, they could put her on Wellbutrin, just until she felt like herself. But then her advertisement on the community board would be false (clean diet, thriving baby, no medications–prenatal only). No, mind over matter. She would walk. At daybreak the streets of Fort Huachuca were covered with strollers. Mist crowded the hills, above the mist were green points on pink stone– lush with rare exotic life, all alike but separate as atolls. On the far end of the base were ponies, which served no military purpose. You could ride them in the forest for $40 a pop, or for $60 you could take a sunset trail ride with your lover (lover appeared in the promotional material). Megan stood leaning on the fence, the baby giggled at the horses. A text buzzed in Megan’s jeans. Heard of this from Jim, sounds crazy but I guess I’ll try it! Prepping for competition in Phoenix and my friend said he got some gainz. Promise I’m no weirdo -Scott. She walked away from the ponies immediately, loaded up a cooler of milk, and drove to the Chili’s parking lot. The man was fridge-wide and had an earnest, almost stupid face and a round midwestern accent. Muscles showed in his arm which lay small and inchoate in everyone else. He was obviously white but his skin was the color of a penny. Megan winced and lifted the cooler, Scott took it from her effortlessly. I have three kids, he boomed. One grandkid. He looked like he was going to say something else but did not. Scott did not know how to use Venmo but he had cash; Megan drove to the Walgreens and shoved it into the USAA kiosk.

So now there was only $300 left on the credit card. Spc. Douglas’ paycheck was coming in a few days, on August fifteenth. They could probably pay it out of that, he could be convinced. Then it would be gone, like a great weight. She remembered the lightness she felt when she stood up for the first time after giving birth. What would she do once all the strength was redirected. Maybe community college but in six months they would move from here. Maybe online. But not anthropology, at least her husband had spared her from that. It turned out travel nurses made ninety thousand dollars. She also wanted another baby, and a sibling for her daughter. Two little girls—would it be possible to nurse them both at once? She would send out glossy Christmas cards not this year but the next, after they had a three to six month emergency fund. Liz was not coming for another three weeks but Megan sat an extra five minutes at the pump to get ahead on the stockpile, satisfied with her own industry and foresight.

While she sat there a text appeared from Maybe: Jason—hey with a semicolon winky face. Then six minutes later: so do you do fetish stuff. Megan ignored it and looked at Facebook. There was a screencap from r/breakingmom. My husband bought a get well card for a girl at work but forgot my birthday. She is thin and interesting and I just want to fucking cry. On Marketplace a Montessori play kitchen for two hundred dollars, with a felt wedge of brie and a felt ribeye. Photos of some blonde girl from high school who was a realtor now. An anonymous post in a moms group that read Mamas I married my husband young age 20 and I think it was a huge mistake, and went on for several paragraphs in this dull and desperate fashion. All the comments said to leave. Megan rubbed her eyes. She replied sure to Jason and then a minute later I don’t do pics or other stuff but I don’t mind selling my milk for any purposes, that’s your business. I’d like to nurse from you said Jason. Bet you would babe Megan replied, then arranged the time and price, six bags of milk for $300.

All this for the mere fiction of a lactating woman, no verification whatsoever. What if she were ugly, what if she were a man—what would Jason do then. Megan pictured the unknown Jason drinking her milk while he touched himself. She panicked and grabbed the gallon of grocery store milk from the fridge and poured it into a cup, then swished it around in her mouth like she was judging a wine. Too familiar and clinical, obviously a scam. Later she drove down to the organic co-op on Fry Boulevard. Twenty dollar beef shanks sat in the freezer, blood-brown muscle circling marrow icebergs. In the adjacent cooler were gallons of raw milk, the owner said it was from a special farm where the cows ate prickly pear. She took it home (a ten dollar investment) and poured it into the same cup. It tasted sweet, grassy, probiotic—but not like breastmilk, and Jason would probably know. She relented and grabbed six of the last ten Lansinoh bags from the freezer.

On the drive north they stopped Megan at the border patrol checkpoint and rifled through the coolers. What’s this, asked a handsome man with a Texan drawl. Breastmilk. I mean regular milk. Milk for babies. The man drew out a little paper swab to test the milk, stuck it in a machine, squinted at the Tennessee license with her old weight and old name, and let her through. Mist piled around the rain-rotted saguaros. Near Whetstone the sky began to warp like tinfoil, the vistas shrunk and rain fell until Megan couldn’t see the car in front of her and began to drive on blind faith. The baby who had been happily cooing in the back began to gurgle and shriek. A needle of pain shot through Megan’s eyes. She pulled over into the gravel ditch, reached back and unbuckled the small girl. She pulled down her tank top and offered her breast to the baby, who bobbed her head and shrieked instead of latching. She squeezed her own nipple and nothing came out.

Megan thought of notifying Jason but her battery was dying so instead she texted Spc. Douglas babe come help. The words appeared in red message could not be delivered. She only had one bar out here. Megan texted repeatedly into the void until her phone died from the effort of buffering. She plugged it in but it would not charge. She turned on AM radio, listened to mariachi and a Calvinist pastor droning on about Paul’s conversion. Megan reached back and took one of the bags from the cooler, then turned on the heat and held it in front of the vent until it melted to a cool slush. There was a bottle somewhere in this car, or had been at some point. She reached under her seat and found it. A dark mold had overgrown it like a terrarium. Megan unscrewed the bottle and held it out the window into the rain. Dozens of times she let it fill and emptied it out, until she judged it clean. The baby’s onesie, which said so loved in embroidered pink cursive, was soaked through with rain. The poor thing shivered at the chill of the milk and fell into a light sleep. Megan sat staring forward for forty five minutes until a tapping came at the window. It was Spc. Douglas in his fatigues. How did he find her. He did not look into Megan’s eyes, only removed the jacket with his name and rank and draped it over the baby. He stood examining the coolers, the state of the car, apparent hail damage on the roof. Megan examined him back, noticed a band aid with a green triceratops in the crook of his arm. That power line on Fry went down again, he said, and I think your freezer was out for a good couple hours. I’m sorry, she whispered, without saying what for. It’s alright, he said. This is probably the last rain of the year anyways.