What Does This Button Do?

Each of us is born a portion. A copy of copies. Cellular division on a macro scale. Hodge podge made flesh.

We are born connected, dialed in to our mothers. Tethered. Then the link is severed and we are broken, even as we’re made whole. Apart. Individual.

It’s the first scar. The first wound. So universal as to be forgotten, thought a natural part of bodies, not the injury it is.

Jeremy inspects his belly button with one probing finger. His body has many holes, the nostrils, the ears, the mouth with its vaulting teeth like erupting volcanoes. None of them are as exciting or alluring as the belly button.

It has no purpose. It doesn’t smell or hear, eat or breathe. It’s just there, like a cavern leading to an existence taken from him before he knew what he was losing.

He presses deeper, expecting to find an answer to a question he can’t verbalize. All he finds is a radiating tingle, like a shock through his middle. It’s as if the makers of his body lined this place with electric fencing.

He backs his finger out and finds a ball of dark gray lint.

A moment of panic as he looks at the stuffed dinosaur to his left. It’s arm ripped off by the family dog. There, it’s stuffing protrudes like gelatinous ivory blood. It’s growing thin, hollowed out by the loss of its stuffing. Will that happen to Jeremy, too?

He crams the opening with modeling clay until it’s filled, plugging the hole, until his middle is round and smooth.

For a time, Jeremy feels better. There had been a hole in him, a lack he couldn’t define, something lost and forgotten. And now he had filled it.

With clay.

It was good enough, for a time.

That night, Jeremy had dark dreams. He had dreams of emptiness and heaviness, of loneliness and fear. He dreamt his belly button was growing larger. It started small, barely large enough for a pencil eraser, but it grew. It grew until he could fit his whole hand inside, until there was nothing between his rib cage and his legs except a hole lined with paper-thin skin.

His stuffing was falling away. There were monsters in the dark, great flying beasts with tar-black wings. Jeremy was empty and open, anything could get inside.

He woke with a scream. He was in his room. There were no monsters. No creatures coming to crawl inside him. He inspected his middle and found his belly button just where he’d left it.

His center hadn’t fallen away, it will still there, just as it had always been. His belly button was filled with clay which had gone hard in the hours since he’d stuffed it inside.

Jeremy reached for the stone-hard clay but couldn’t find a way to grip it. He’d pressed it too smoothly to his skin. He squeezed at his stomach and used a fingernail, overdue for a trim, to get beneath an edge.

He pulled but it wouldn’t budge. He felt that strange electricity inside him again. The clay was stuck. Whatever was hiding behind that first of doors, now he’ll never know. He’s locked himself out. Jeremy claws at the clay. He slides a fingernail around its edge, hoping to break whatever seal is holding it in place.

He gets beneath it with two fingers and pulls. It sticks to something deep inside him but he keeps pulling. He feels a root, a central ripcord, wriggle free. The clay cracks like a broken sidewalk tile, and something sprouts from its middle.

Jeremy screams. He wants his mother. He needs her here. She would know what to do, and even if she didn’t, he would feel safe. The sprout grows larger and the clay shatters, falling away at last in a dozen dark-blue shards.

The sprout is his belly button. A fleshy nub like the beginnings of a sapling. It’s no longer a hole. The hole is filled and now it’s growing. It gets larger, sticking out, stretching on as if reaching out to… something.

It keeps growing, it’s out by inches now, a finger of its own reaching into his world to discover what’s there. Before long he’ll be gone. He knows it. Every thread from which he is built will be reconstituted into the structure growing from his middle.

Before long, he’ll be all belly button. He screams again.

And this time his mother hears. She’s at the door, her hand on the switch. She flicks the light. Jeremy is out of bed. He runs to hear, his arms wide. He’s drawn to her like light to a black hole, like water down a drain, at the mercy of forces he can’t see or understand, but feels and must obey.

She rocks him in her arms and strokes his hair. She kisses his forehead and wipes his tears until his breathing calms and he ceases to shudder.

“What’s the matter, sweet one?”

“My button.” Jeremy points to his middle and the mutated horror growing there, and is surprised to find its gone back to normal. There is no sprouting, no sinking, no expansion or change of any kind.

His mother inspects the spot and flicks away a few remaining flecks of dried clay.

“Let me tell you about buttons, my love.”

And she did. She told him about the rope that bound them together, the very real connection from her heart to his. She told him how he had once been inside her, come from her, and now he was here. Himself.

She told him how when he had been born, he’d taken a part of her heart with him and it would always be there. Inside. Tapping a drum beat that says ‘I love you.’ She told him his belly button was the door through which she filled him with every bit of her love, and now it was sealed to keep it all inside.

She showed him hers and told of how it connected to her mother, and her grandmother, and her mother’s grandmother, backward through time forever. Each of them linked in an unending rope back to the first of all people.

Then she kissed him on the stomach, gently. He giggled, and he knew that she was right. He could feel it in that moment, the connection they’d once had. They still had. He felt himself drawn back, surrounded with the love of a thousand mothers through the distance of time.

His button was no longer a hole, a curious anomaly, or a security risk. It was proof of a mother’s love. And of a child’s. It still felt funny when he poked it. And that, he thought, was okay.