Читать книгу The Book of X - Sarah Rose Etter - Страница 10
ОглавлениеI WAS BORN A KNOT LIKE MY MOTHER and her mother before her. Picture three women with their torsos twisted like thick pieces of rope with a single hitch in the center.
The doctors had the same reaction each birth: They lifted our slick warped bodies into the air and stared, horrified.
All three of us wailed, strange new animals, our lineage gnarled, aching, hardened.
Outside, beyond the bright white lights of the hospital, the machine of the world kept grinding on, a metal mouth baring its teeth, a maw waiting to clench down on us.
“I’M NOT RELIGIOUS, BUT I DAMN WELL prayed,” my mother says, exhaling smoke over the kitchen table. “I rubbed the rosaries raw that you would take after your father.”
My mother’s knot rests against the kitchen table. In my tender moments, I want to reach out and place a hand there.
“But as soon as you crowned, I knew it,” my mother says. “I could feel your knot.”
When my mother tells this story, I take long sips of my lemonade to keep quiet. I know she screamed the whole birth. I brought her the same pain she brought her mother.
“Your father says I went possessed. My eyes rolled back into my head.”
THERE ARE 4,500 DIFFERENT TYPES OF knots. There are 3,800 basic variations of these knots. There are an infinite number of ways to combine these knots and their variations. In this way, knots are like stars.
We could have been complicated: Figure eights, clove hitches, sheet bends, reefs, heaving lines.
But our knots are simple: Overhand. Our abdomens twist in and out just once, our bodies wrapping back into themselves, creating dark caverns, coiled as snakes.
IN OLD BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOS, MY young mother poses next to my grandmother. Both conceal their knots beneath billowing blouses, standing stiffly on a gray lawn, their gray lips strained into gray smiles over gray teeth.
THE ACRES WERE PASSED DOWN TO MY father from his father and his father before him. A small black sign with white paint says The Acres where our land begins.
We have an old white house and a rust-red barn. Our white house is all wooden floors, arched windows, linens to wash. Our barn is where the sleeping machines are kept.
The rest of the town stands a few miles back from us and our land. We are isolated in this way. Some days, only my family can see me, which is my freedom — no new stares, no new disgust.
The Acres are worth money is what my parents say. Here is why: At the edge of our land is the Meat Quarry. There, meat is harvested from the tall walls of a red, fleshy canyon.
MY MOTHER AND I KEEP THE HOME ON weekends. My mother is like weather in that she changes daily. Each day, I make a report of her.
Today, my mother is focused and sharp, training me to clean. Everything must be white, pristine, diamond. Specks of dirt taunt her.
A bucket of lemons rests at my feet. To keep a home, one must have hands and skin of citrus.
“Now, do it how I do it,” she says. “You’re old enough for a knife now.”
I have seen it: Her back hunched over the sink, the brown of her hair glinting in the sunlight, the fat of her upper arms warbling, the sawing, then the halves between her fingers, yellow half-moons in her palms, rubbing lemon over white wall.
I hunch over the silver gut of the sink. I cut the lemons down the center, one by one, arms shivering against the knife, separating the small citrine hearts.
I run the yellow halves over the white walls until they glisten, until the house tangs with the flesh of the fruit, until the juice of the citrus runs into the gutters of my gnawed nail beds then stings.
EACH DAY, MY FATHER AND BROTHER PULL meat from the quarry to sell in town like my father’s father and his father before him. Their bodies disappear over the green grass of The Acres, their figures swallowed by the thin mouth of the long horizon.
I have never seen the Meat Quarry, so I must invent it over and over again in my mind: Giant red walls of flesh marbled with the electric white of fat.
“You’re not meant to be there,” my father says. “Some things, a woman should not see.”
Has my mother seen it? I do not know.
“Does the meat glisten and glitter?”
“Enough. You keep far from there,” my father says. “It’s not safe.”
He drinks his liquor after dinner, eyes going red. My mother’s fury hangs at the edge of the table, growing with each sip he takes.
“Haven’t you had enough?” she asks.
“What does the quarry smell like?” I ask.
“Enough again,” he says sharply. “Both of you, drop it.”
MY MOTHER SITS NEXT TO ME ON WICKER porch furniture. We have finished our cleaning for the day. Now, it is magazine time.
My mother’s magazines are bright portals to new worlds. Women wear fantastic clothing, their faces dazzling up from the pages.
My mother reads me the new tips.
“This season, women need whiter teeth.”
I look at her teeth, their yellowing from years of smoke.
“Another trend is plastic fingernails. Now would you look at these?”
On the page in her lap, a pair of slender hands holds a glass of soda with a straw. The hands have long, bright red nails, shining, luscious, more perfect than anything I have seen before.
I look at her hands, their nails, which are short, unpainted, best for working lemon against wall.
The sun begins its fat drop into the horizon. A thin sadness leaks from my heart for her.
“One day, we’ll have white teeth and red nails, too,” I say.
Then I invent us like that in my mind: Our teeth gleaming, our nails red. I picture us beautiful, unknotted.
LATER, IN MY BEDROOM, I SHED MY clothes and take inventory of my body in the long mirror.
I am thin at the arms and legs, wiry brown hair down to my shoulders. My eyes are brown, flat. My jaw is large, my ears too big.
My breasts are small, and there is a bit of flatness before it begins. Just below my ribs, the skin changes. My knot is strained and stretch-marked, shining and hard.
I used to gasp when I saw it, but now it is my familiar. I have seen my mother’s, too, when she is changing, through the crack in the door. Her breasts sag over her knot. We are different in that way.
The cool air pushes in through the window and runs over that secret skin, a relief in that touch.
AT TIMES, I IMAGINE IT ALL DIFFERENT. Bright visions rush over me, scenes from a golden life in another world.
VISION
Alone, I shed my clothes and take inventory of my body in the long mirror.
I am thin at the arms and legs, brown hair down to my shoulders, bright eyes. I have small breasts, and just below my ribs, my stomach is flat.
I run my hands over my belly, skin smooth as a stone from a river.
The cool air pushes in through the window and runs over my skin, a pleasure in that touch.
I DIG THROUGH MY MOTHER’S OLD MAGazines in the attic. I flip through the old trends, admire the smooth women.
Tips are written in bold fonts:
YELLOW IS THE COLOR OF THE SEASON EAT LESS NOW WITH THE ROCK DIET NEW NAILS, NEW TEETH, NEW LIFE
In the stack, I find an old science magazine. My eyes stutter over the cover.
My mother is younger, holding me in her arms. The title says THIRD GIRL BORN KNOTTED.
Inside, there are pictures of my small body slick with blood and then clean, swaddled in white cloth. My knot is at the center of each photo.
Third Girl Born Knotted; Doctors Halt Research
A third infant has been born knotted to a family in the South. This rare genetic abnormality has flummoxed the medical community.
The first woman, Eleanor X, was born a knot in 1947. She gave birth to two sons (unknotted), and a daughter who carried the knot. Her births were not compromised by the knot. In fact, in all three women, the womb is located at the base of the deformity, providing a clear path for birthing.
Her daughter, Deborah X, also delivered one daughter and one son. The daughter, Cassandra X, was born a knot. The son, again, was born unknotted.
This very rare gene resides on the X chromosome. Doctors have determined the knots are largely a cosmetic issue, potentially rendering the women outsiders in society. The impact is largely emotional, rather than physical. Doctors have decided to halt their inquiry into its cause after years of inconclusive research.
I don’t hear the footsteps of my mother.
“You should be cleaning. What are you doing?”
“Just looking at your old magazines.”
But she catches a glimpse. Today, she is vicious. Her brown eyes flash then froth, rabid. She slaps the journal to the ground. Then her palm stings across my cheek in a quick flash of red.
“Some things are private!”
Her body disappears into the blackness of the doorway. The attic goes silent.
Face red, I look at the ground where a single photo has fallen from between the pages of the journal.
It is a picture of us together.
I am swathed in more fabric than usual. My brother clenches an arm around me. My mother wears a flowered dress, her own knot hidden. My father stands off to the side as if he has been sold a bad car. We are all squinting beneath a bright sun that is just out of frame.
WEEKDAYS, I GO TO SCHOOL. I WALK THE mile. The school is green with a pitched roof.
Most days, no one minds me. I stay quiet to keep it that way.
I keep track of the facts, though.
In my classes, I learn about the human body and history and the human brain, deep seas, jungles, islands, and the distant cities beyond our town and the distant planets beyond our world.
◆An octopus has three hearts, nine brains, and blue blood
◆Female lions do 90% of the hunting for their pride
◆The heart of the blue whale is so large that a human could swim through its arteries
◆One square centimeter of skin contains roughly 100 pain sensors
◆The sun will only get brighter before it collapses
WHILE I’M IN SCHOOL, MY FATHER AND my brother work the meat from the quarry with their hands and their shovels. That’s what my brother says.
On Saturdays, my mother and I clean the meat in the big silver sink. On meat cleaning days, watery pink rivers rush off the flesh. The fresh piles of meat rise like bloody castles on the counter.
On Saturdays, we must act very proper because we must take the meat into town. This is a ritual that requires preparation: I clean myself and put on my best dress. I am like the meat in this way.
In the evening, we drive into town, the clean flesh piled in the truck bed.
“Ten gold coins! Twenty gold coins! Thirty gold coins!” bid the men in the town. Their stomachs and guts are large but knotless. They avert their eyes from us or else they stare too long and too hard at our shapes.
I often imagine a man with a body like mine, a man I might marry.
“Do men ever get knots?” I ask.
“Lower your voice. And no. A man has never had a knot. That is a woman’s burden.”
“SOLD!” my father bellows.
The men scoop the clean meat into their own buckets, red and raw, the smell of wet coin in the air.
SOMETIMES, MY FATHER BRINGS UP THE old days.
“My father bought this land for a song. Back then, it was harder to tell which lands would have meat.”
“Nobody thought this land did?” I ask.
“Sure didn’t. Dad knew better though. He could hardly keep the grin off of his face when they were signing the papers. He always told me his gut knew we’d hit it big.”
“How did he find the Meat Quarry?”
“Well, everyone in town thought he was a fool,” my father says. “In the early days, he crawled the land himself, waiting for the feeling in his gut to grow stronger, belly against the soil.”
I move closer to my father. His eyes are not too red yet, the scent of the liquor faint. This is the nicest time to be close.
“It took him two weeks of that. He was on the 13th day when he started to lose faith. But he kept crawling. On the last day, it was raining, and he was out there in the mud, searching.”
“How did he know when he’d found it?”
“He said his gut lit up bright, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Said he’d never felt anything like that before.”
“Like instinct?”
“Like instinct. Your brother has it too, even stronger than I do. But boy, did it save my father’s ass. Everyone in this goddamn town thought he was a joke. Now, we’ve got the best meat on this side of the river.”
LATER, ALONE, I LIE ON MY BELLY IN THE center of my bedroom. My knot presses against the carpet.
I practice my sensing: eyes closed, reaching out with my gut to see where new meat might be on our land.
I wait for the hairs to stand up on the back of my neck. I sense as hard as I can. I feel nothing.
AT SCHOOL, THE OTHER STUDENTS SURround me. Their round faces bobble like bad balloons, screaming.
“LOOK AT HER! LOOK AT THE FREAK!”
Their bodies are lanky, pimpled, letting off new odors. Their voices echo off the metal lockers. Their eyes are all on me: blue, brown, green, gray, each eye making my flesh shiver, everyone an enemy.
“YEAH, LOOK AT ME!” I yell back.
I pull up my dress, bare my weak fangs, my knot bright in the sunlight streaming through the windows, a single eye of flesh daring them all to move, to come closer, to try me.
VISION
I’m the queen now. All the students surround me with their offerings at lunch.
“I’ve brought you an orange,” says a boy with one lazy eye.
“Thank you,” I say. “That’s very kind.”
“I’ve brought you crackers with cheese in the center,” says a girl in a plaid dress.
“Wonderful.”
They come forward one by one, each with a treat. I smooth my own dress down over my flat stomach. The offerings rise up around me, growing like sweet palaces.
IN BED THAT NIGHT, I SLIDE MY HANDS down. I run my fingers over my knot.
I try to tell myself I don’t mind it so much. Under the light of the moon, I picture my teeth growing into big fangs. I widen my mouth, let them catch the breeze. I close my eyes and try to believe, half-girl, half-snake.
THE NEXT MORNING, MY MOTHER SITS at the kitchen table. Her yellow house dress tents over her knot, big as a cheap sun. I spoon cereal into my mouth.
“Will you call the doctor?” I ask. “Will you ask him to unknot me?”
“That’s not how it works,” my mother says, smoking. “And it’s the weekend. They don’t work on weekends.”
“Why don’t you ever try?”
“We’ve been over this. The doctors don’t give a damn about it.”
“They screamed at me again. At school.”
“I used to spit at them when they spat at me,” my mother says.
Then she stares out the window into the long horizon as if in a deep trance, as if staring into another time, as if I were not there, never born.
THAT AFTERNOON, WE’RE IN THE LIVING room. We are cleaning again.
“These curtains are a mess!” my mother says.
She lifts the fabric of the curtains like strange brocade hair.
“And now what is this?”
She pulls one of my father’s bottles from the ground, half-full of liquor.
“Motherfucker,” she whispers. “Motherfucker.”
She slams the bottle on the living room table, then sits down beside me on the couch, so close our knees bang. We face the bottle. Anger shimmers off of her in hot waves. I stay quiet. I know how this goes.
“Now,” she says, “we wait for this motherfucker.”
The sun sets, and the moon rises. We fall asleep on the couch. When the sun rises again, my father still hasn’t come home.
“Time to get ready for school,” my mother says.
She slides the bottle back behind the curtain, a strange magic trick, the evaporated day.
VISION
My father has special places for the bottles: Behind the toilet, in the back of the truck, beneath the pillows of the fancy sofa, beneath the chair in the living room, in the shower, in the trash can.
“You’re hiding them everywhere,” I say. “I found one behind my bed last night.”
“It’s not what you think. Please don’t tell your mother,” he says.
“It is too what I think. What will she say when she finds out?”
“You can’t tell her. You can’t, I’ll stop.”
The world will spin on as it does until you do something to change it. I pull each bottle from its special place. I stack the glass bottles, half-full of clear liquid, on the front lawn, in the sun.
The pile is bigger than the front door, bigger than the truck. I hurl my body at the pile of glass and begin to smash the bottles one by one, shards glinting in the sun like a new future.
AT NIGHT, I LAY MY HEAD IN MY mother’s lap.
“Unknot me,” I sob. “Please make someone fix me.”
“There’s nothing we can do,” she murmurs.
“Kill me then,” I say. “Please.”
My mother exhales smoke, stubs out her cigarette, then puts her cool hand on my forehead, a rare touch.
WHEN THE HOUSE IS SILENT, I SNEAK into my father’s office. This is my favorite place.
The room bursts with him. The shelves are lined with his favorite objects: Paused lava rocks, bleached-white bones, books about meat, empty bottles that catch and refract the light like diamonds.
I sit at his desk in his red leather chair. I spin the chair a few times. I open his desk drawer. The silver key to the Meat Quarry gates glistens against the black liner. I clench my fingers around that cool metal until it aches, then slide the key back into the drawer.
A map of the Meat Quarry lines the office wall behind me. The quarry is mapped like veins of a heart: fat arteries, thin arteries, all connected and winding. Areas with the best meat are marked with a red X.
I run my fingers over the map, trace the arteries, memorizing paths until I hear the front door open. I sneak out, heart in my throat.
EACH DAY AT SCHOOL, I STARE AT BODIES, memorizing their limbs, their smooth lines. The body of Sophia is my favorite.
A PORTRAIT OF SOPHIA: LONG BROWN hair which shimmers where mine is dull, narrow shoulders where mine are gangly, long legs, no knot where I am knotted.
IN THE MORNINGS, SOPHIA WALKS SLOWLY into the classroom as if covered in sleep. Sophia wears a red dress, then a blue dress, then a green dress. In the afternoons, Sophia laughs in the lunchroom, and light bounces off the white of her teeth. Sophia knows a joy I do not know.
I watch Sophia move and I want to move like she does. Some days, Sophia catches me staring and waves. Sometimes, I lift my limp hand and wave back.
I don’t know if my wave tells the truth, which is: I want to move like you do. I want to slice you open with a knife. I want to hide my body inside of yours.
TODAY, MY MOTHER WANTS TO HELP. SHE closes my bedroom door behind her then sits beside me on the bed. The heat of her breath scorches my face.
Close up, her wrinkles are deep canyons. I imagine myself walking through the chasms of her skin.
“We need to do something about your looks,” she says, running a hand through my hair. “Let’s start with the clothes. The magazines say yellow is the color this season.”
She walks to my closet and pulls out an old yellow dress made of lace. I shake my head.
“Put it on! It’s fun to try new looks.”
“I hate this dress. It’s too hot.”
“Just do it!”
I strip off my old blue dress. I slip the yellow fabric over my head. She yanks up the zipper and the bright lace tents around my knot.
“Now these,” she says, wrapping a single strand of pearls around my neck. The pearls are tight, hot, plastic.
She walks me into her bedroom. We are surrounded by her special creams, the ghost of her perfume, facing her big mirror.
“There now,” she says. “Isn’t this just perfect? Shouldn’t we do this every day? Let’s take a picture!”
IN THE PHOTOGRAPH, I STAND NEXT TO her mirror in the dress and the pearls. My eyes are red as if I have been crying, as if I want to remove the pearls, the dress, my skin.
OUT UNDER THE BURNING SUN, MY brother digs the red meat up out of the earth, filling silver bucket after silver bucket after silver bucket. I imagine it that way. Then he is showered, clean, in fresh clothes at the dinner table.
“Big day in the quarry today,” he says.
We fork bland cubes of meat into our mouths.
“It takes a gut instinct, son,” my father says. “And you have it. Boy, I wish I had it like you.”
The room falls silent after this rare praise. My mother exhales a plume of smoke. The meat takes on the scent.
AFTER DINNER, I CUT THE FLAT- stomached women out of my mother’s magazines.
They wear bathing suits or dresses cut in at the hip. Slicing the pages gives me peace, silver metal humming through the paper until the women are separated from their scenes.
Inside the dim light of my bedroom closet, I tape their torsos to the wall, floor to ceiling. I call them The Sophias. They are the girls a boy would like to touch.
ONE DAY, SOPHIA SPEAKS. SHE IS WEARING a pink dress, the light from her mouth making her hair and her eyes and her skin brighter.
“Why do you always stare?” she asks. “I hate it.”
“I wish I looked like you,” I blurt.
“No, you don’t,” she says. “It’s all the same no matter how you look.”
The lie makes her a friend.
I BEGIN TO BRING SOPHIA TO THE ACRES each day after school. We spend afternoons exchanging secrets, whispering about boys. We nod into each other’s hair.
“Let me see your knot,” she says one day.
I don’t fight. I stand in the center of the living room and lift my dress up slow as an ache. In the afternoon sun, my knot looks even worse, each stretchmark illuminated.
“Well,” she says flatly. “That’s disgusting. Pull your dress down.”
I sit back on the couch, dying inside, until she puts an arm around me, and whispers in my ear.
“I think I saw Jarred staring at you today.”
JARRED IS TALLER THAN THE OTHERS AT school, lanky bodied. His hair is short, uneven, cut over a kitchen sink. A dirty streak of freckles crosses his nose, cheeks.
Under his skin is an anger that casts a shadow around him.
“Why are you always looking at me?” he asks.
I lift my eyes and stare right into his face.
That’s when I realize it: His left eye is lazy, the pupil unfocused, staring off into another world. His right eye pierces into me like a knife.
I TELL SOPHIA WHAT’S IN MY INSIDES.
“It’s awful inside of me,” I say.
“What’s in there?” she asks.
“I have a pit of badness in my stomach,” I say.
Then we sit in the quiet of the confession.
VISION
Under the fluorescent lights, I am gaping wide. My incision is wide and long, from hip to hip, across my flat belly, right where a woman would grow a baby.
With each breath, black blood gurgles out from the slit. My insides are no longer red. Now, my organs are black, no longer soft, now covered in dark sparkling crystals.
I can’t stop looking at my terrible insides, at how wretched I have become there, how beautiful the rot is.
My wound keeps glittering with each breath, a terrible evening of stars shimmering inside of me.
EACH WEEK, MY MOTHER TAKES ME TO visit the bodies of my grandparents. We walk to the edge of The Acres where there is a cemetery squared by a low white fence.
“It keeps the wolves out,” my mother says.
Crooked white crosses spell out their names in script above the dates of birth and death. We place small offerings on low grassy mounds.
“They’ll love this,” my mother whispers.
The offerings: Flowers, small sugar cookies, rosaries, a small cheap statue of an angel. Against the crosses, the gifts look wrong. They will spoil in the rain, melt down to strange, warped blobs of colored sugar and plastic.
“Now, isn’t this nice?”
My mother sits between the graves and caresses the grass.
“I just miss you so much,” she says to the ground, her sob a fist which clenches the heart in my chest.
I leave her side, wander the edge of the cemetery. My eyes land on a black shape beneath the grass, a rocky mound. I lean down. It is a tiny tombstone, smaller than the crosses.
Stephen X B: Jan 3 D: Jan 5
“Don’t look at that,” my mother hisses. “Get over here, that doesn’t concern you.”
“Who is it? Who is Stephen?”
“Who do you think it is? Use your head.”
A hollow feeling enters my chest and stays there through the drive home, through dinner, until I am in my bed, wrapped in my sheets, still as a body in a grave.
VISION
My father guides the truck over the land through the town to the big cemetery. Here, the strangers are buried. The sun is fat and hot in the blue sky.
“You ready to play our favorite game?” my father asks.
“Yes! Let’s play it!”
He stops the truck and we climb out. The steel black gate lets out a low moan when he unlatches it. We step into the cemetery, long green grass sprouting up between the headstones which jab up out of the ground like strange granite teeth.
“And... GO!” my father shouts.
I work my way through the cemetery, weaving through the graves. I get lost in the names, the small tombstones.
My father is always faster than I am. He starts shouting his numbers. “1913! 1908! 1898!”
I shout mine back once I catch up, heart pounding. “1916! 1884! 1911!”
“1879!” my father yells, and he is the winner.
We climb back into the car. He puts a very sad song on the stereo and hums along as he drives us to the ice cream store, the second part of our ritual.
“I’ll still buy you one,” my father says.
We both buy vanilla. We don’t speak on the drive home, just listen to the very sad song again and again as he navigates us home.
ONE AFTERNOON IS DIFFERENT FROM the rest. Sophia and I are alone in the house, which is quiet. I like the silence like that, a blanket.
“I want to teach you a new game,” Sophia says. “I learned it from Jarred. Let’s go into your bedroom.”
In the dull afternoon light, she climbs into my bed with me.
She slides her knee between my legs.
“This is called rocking horse,” she says. “Jarred loves this game.”
Then she moves her leg until my face flushes and my body trembles, until pink sweetness explodes from between my legs and floods my veins.
AT LUNCH, I CHEW A SANDWICH. JARRED does the same. His eyes catch mine. We lock gazes until he slams his sandwich down on the table.
My pulse quickens as he walks to my table. He gets close enough to drop his head to mine, his lips near my ear.
“Stop looking at me, you fucking freak,” he whispers. “You’re disgusting.”
He walks back to his seat and sits down. I keep my head down, fill my mouth again with bread.
VISION
I go straight for my father’s tools. I find a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. The tools are heavy and cold in my hand. I trust metal.
In my bedroom, I strip off my clothes. The pliers in my right hand, the screwdriver in my left. I wrap the mouth of the pliers around the first twist of the knot. Ijam the screwdriver into the knot’s crevice.
I pull with all of my might, my teeth grinding against each other. I want the pliers and the screwdriver to splinter me, I want to undo myself. Blood rushes from my knot in thick red streams.
My bedroom door opens, and my mother fills the doorway.
“What are—” she starts. Then she is on me, ripping the tools from my hands.
“What is wrong with you?” she demands.
“I want it gone!” I scream. “I want to be like Sophia!”
My mother puts me into the bath, both of us silent, only the pink water making sound. Soon I’m surrounded by the warm water, eyes closed. Then my mother’s hand is on my cheek.
SOPHIA LIVES CLOSER TO THE SCHOOL. She takes me home one afternoon. At her house, everything is proper.
Her mother is in the den. Her mother is a thin, sharp woman. She is precise as a knife. She says, “No sugar, remember,” and hands us carrots to eat.
At Sophia’s house, there are rules about sugar, screaming, laughing too loud. We go to Sophia’s room, which is pristine and pastel pink. We sit on her bedroom floor. I confess again.
“I feel so sad some days,” I whisper.
Pain has been welling up inside of me: My knot makes me other.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
I run a hand over my stomach. I feel as if I am from another planet.
“I just want someone to take it away,” I say.
Sophia nods. In her eyes, I see a big warmth which expands. She reaches out and touches my hand. My pain becomes a bit smaller. We don’t play rocking horse at Sophia’s house, but there is this.
I WALK WITH MY BROTHER INTO THE Acres. The land stretches all around us. My brother carries his mallet and shovel. He’s meant to test my instinct.
“How do you know where the meat will be?” I ask my brother. “Teach me how to sense.”
“Dunno,” he says. “It’s like I have a magnet in my gut and it pulls me there.”
“Find one then,” I say.
We keep walking until a small hum comes from my brother’s mouth. It sounds like the thrum of metal.
“Here,” he murmurs.
The ground is nothing but sparse dirt. I stomp a foot to be sure. It feels no different than any other land under foot.
“No, no. Don’t do that.”
His breath quickens. He stands strong on a certain spot. His fingers move to the buttons on his shirt and he undoes them one by one. Bare chested, he lifts his mallet into the air above his head and brings it down to the ground.
The earth shakes with the puncture. The mallet leaves a deep dent in the dirt.
“Let’s take a look,” he says.
We bend over the new hole, stare down into the deep dirt.
“See, the dirt gets redder at the bottom. Step back.”
He lifts the mallet again and drops it once more into the same hole, driving deeper this time.
We lean over the hole again, which slowly fills with red liquid. Blood rises up from the meat below to the upper crust of the soil.
“Red never lies,” he says, grinning. “That’s how you know.”
He grabs his shovel and digs. Blood rushes forth with each new slice into the earth. Soon, he is covered in it. My brother keeps digging and digging, down to the meat, a slick machine.
TODAY, MY MOTHER IS FOCUSED ON illusion.
“We must do something about your face,” she says.
I follow her voice into the yellow light of her bathroom.
“Look at you,” she says. “You’re a mess.”
She pulls her makeup from the cabinet. Small pots of color cover the counter alongside sharp silver instruments, black brushes.
“Let’s start with the eyebrows,” she says.
She brings a thin pair of tweezers to my face. She grasps a single hair and pulls. Tears well up in my eyes.
“It hurts!”
“Too bad,” she says. “We can’t have you walking around like this. People talk, you know.”
She keeps going, keeps pulling the hairs from my brows, one by one. Each yank is a small torture. Water streams down my face, which becomes red and blotchy in the mirror.
“Now let’s do the rest,” she says.
Her fingers run over my face, then a brush, then another brush, I am a painting.
“There now,” she says. “Open your eyes.”
I don’t recognize myself. I am another girl from another planet, a warped version of myself.
SOPHIA STARTS TO DO BAD THINGS.
First, she steals lip gloss from the store in town.
“You just put it in your bra,” she says, then she puts it in her bra.
When I try, the lip gloss slides over my braless chest and catches on my knot before it falls to the ground.
SOPHIA IS ALSO SMOKING.
She smokes the butt of a found cigarette on the walk home from school each day, coughing.
“You just purse your lips and inhale,” she says, smoking.
I take a drag and cough like her.
“Nice,” I say, smoking.
SOPHIA HAS ALSO BEEN KISSING THE BOYS. Everyone knows about it.
“Sophia’s a slut,” the girls whisper to me in the hall. “Sophia’s a total hoe.”
She kisses the boys with the plain brown hair by the dumpsters after lunch.
“It’s no big deal,” Sophia says, smoking. “It’s just mouths.”
I think about the smell of rotting lunches in the dumpsters. Then I think about Jarred’s mouth on mine.
◆Two-thirds of people tilt their head toward the right when they kiss
◆The muscle used to pucker the lips is called orbicularis oris
◆The word kiss is derived in part from the Old English cyssan, “to touch with the lips” in respect or reverence
◆No two lip prints are the same
◆In medieval times, it was common to sign the name with an X, then kiss the mark as a display of sincerity
I BEGIN TO TRICK JARRED INTO TOUCHing me. I stand in the middle of the hallway each morning when his bus arrives.
He enters the building in the stream of other bodies, bookbag slung over his shoulder. Morning still crusts his eyes.
I hold my breath until he gets close, closer, closest, then brushes against my arm and I am lit by a million watts.
“Why are you always in my way?” he hisses.
But I still radiate from it, the contact of our skins. The light of it makes me want.
MY BODY IS A LAND UNDISCOVERED, MY heart beneath the skin wanting to be found and touched.
Between my legs, nothing has happened since rocking horse. Some nights, I slide a pillow there and rock again, thinking of Jarred.
TODAY, MY MOTHER IS FOCUSED ON SELF-improvement.
“Take off your clothes,” she says.
We stand in her bedroom.
“I don’t want to.”
“It’s time to look at ourselves with honesty,” she says.
My mother has been going into town. She’s been spending more money. Her fingernails are made of plastic now. Her teeth gleam whiter than snow.
“Your teeth are so white,” I say.
“It’s a new technique from the dentist in town,” she says. “He is a hunk.”
She yanks my dress over my head, then runs her hands over my body, fake plastic nails brushing my shoulders, my arms, my hips, then thighs.
“We need to slim you down,” she says.
VISION
I am the queen of the cake room.
There are dozens of round cakes on silver steel tables. Pastel frosting flowers dot their edges and tops. I am starving, My hand sweats around a fork.
I step toward them, mouth full of drool.
The first cake is round, white with pink flowers. I sink the fork into it and pull out a big hunk. In my mouth, the sugar dissolves against my tongue. I’m fast to fork another piece between my lips, the sugar smearing across my cheeks.
I eat and I eat and I eat, the cake filling my stomach. There are cakes everywhere and no one can stop me, not my mother, not my father. I eat, and I eat, and I eat, the sugar rushes through my veins. There are cakes everywhere, and when I’m done with this cake, I can eat another and another and another and no one can stop me.
MY MOTHER HANDS ME A BROWN PAPER bag with a single rock inside.
“This is the latest diet,” she says. “Suck on this at lunch. The dirt and meat particles have calories that burn fat in them. I read about it in a magazine.”
IN THE CROWDED LUNCHROOM, PLASTIC chairs scrape the floor. The mouths of my classmates open and sandwiches slide in. Jarred eats a peach, the long strings hang from his lips, the deep color of the pit in the blood of the fruit.
I hunger for a peach, a cake, a meat.
I feed myself the future instead: Slender, cheekbones sharp, mouth pursed, thin thighs, thin arms.
I slide the rock into my mouth.
“I WON’T GO OUT INTO THE QUARRY today,” my father says at the breakfast table.
His face is strange and gray. A sour smell fevers off of his body.
“What’s wrong?” my mother asks, exhaling smoke. “Too much again last night?”
A silence comes down on the table. We wait for a fight like this most days. Some days a fight comes, some days it doesn’t. Today, it passes by.
“You’re on your own today,” he says to my brother. “Go to the side lands and look for a new harvest.”
My brother nods. My mother exhales smoke, eyes sharp on my father, dissecting.
“I’m going to see Sophia today,” I say.
“Fine,” she says. “Get out of our hair.”
AFTER BREAKFAST, I SLIP INTO MY father’s office. I slide the gate key from his desk drawer. The metal is hot in my hand, my secret lights a fire in my veins, it thrums in my body, my knot humming.
“Goodbye,” I shout on my way out the door.
I cross the fields, heart racing. All of the sky big and blue as ever, and I am free in the world. The meat is on the air already, the red wounds of the quarry in the distance. Rings of sweat begin beneath my arms.
A latticed black gate rises up before me, the entrance to the quarry. Through the slits in the gate, I can see glimpses of the meat. I slip the key from my pocket and into the mouth of the lock.
The gate swings open with a long, low creak. The path is shallow at the start, with low red rocky walls on either side.
A small set of tracks lines the ground. Metal carts sit silent and empty. I follow the tracks deeper into the quarry. The earth around me gets redder with each step, the scent of meat filling my nose and mouth.
The red rocks gradually morph, the stench growing stronger, almost choking. Slick wet spirals of meat surround me, rising above my head in high walls, thin veins of white fat running through the redness.
The meat glistens like a rare gem, a beautiful hypnosis. Chunks have been removed from the walls here, places where my brother and father tore the meat from the earth to eat and sell.
I run my fingers over the slickness, get red up to the wrists, lick the blood from my fingers.
I move closer, press my body against the meat, press my mouth against the wall, let the blood soak into my face.
THEY’VE TAKEN ALL THE BOYS AWAY. IT IS time for sexual education.
I sit next to Sophia. We dart eyes at each other until the teacher walks in.
A diagram is on the wall, and it shows the female body, the muscles drawn in beautiful gray lines.
“Today,” the teacher says, “we’re going to learn about sex.”
Nervous laughter pecks up out of our throats. Sophia makes a gagging face at me.
“Now, this is what the inside of your body looks like,” the teacher says. “These organs here? They are how you become pregnant after intercourse.”
Another burst of laughter comes forward.
“Calm down, now calm down,” the teacher says. “We have to get through a lot today. Be mature here.”
The teacher glances over at me.
“Oh, oh, I should say,” the teacher says. “You’re something else altogether. I’m not sure how your body works. Maybe just ignore this.”
My throat closes up. I stare down at my desk. Sophia reaches over and pinches me. I look up.
“Fucking shithead,” she mouths at me.
“Now, when you have sex with a man, his sperm will travel up the vagina to the uterus then to the cervix,” the teacher continues. “If the ovary has created an egg and it is nearby, the sperm can swim to it and enter it. This is called fertilization, and we do not want it to happen. I simply cannot stress this enough.”
◆The uterus is roughly the shape and size of a small pear
◆In Ancient Greece, the uterus was believed to be an organ which wandered around the body, causing all emotional and physical female problems
◆Uterus didelphys is a rare condition which causes women to be born with two uteruses
◆One in 4,500 women are born without a uterus
◆The uterus is the only organ that can create an entire other organ; during pregnancy, the placenta is grown inside the uterus
WE ARE ALL PILED INTO THE TRUCK. MY mother sits up front next to my father, smoking. My brother stares out the window from the seat beside me as we cross the land.
“River day,” she hums. “Are you excited for river day?”
Dread takes root in my gut and grows.
“I don’t feel good,” I say. “I think I’m getting sick.”
The tar of my anxiety spreads through my veins.
“Can we just have a nice day?” my mother snaps.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
The river is crowded with the faces of people from town. I see Jarred across the water.
We strip to our swimsuits. Then my mother and I stand next to the river. I can feel the eyes of everyone around us on our knots, on my knot. I flush with shame.
“We came here to swim,” my mother says, voice like metal.
My mother pulls my hands from my stomach. We move to the water.
“Isn’t this nice?” my mother says, but there’s no joy to it.
I dive beneath the water. I go deep, then even deeper. I try to go deep enough to drown the knot.
VISION
The sign at the entrance says: THIGH RIVER PARK. NO TRESPASSING, but Sophia tugs my hand and pulls me in.
We walk down a long path until we reach giant dark rocks.
“We’re going to have to climb a little,” she says.
She starts to make her way up the rock. I watch her maneuver, then follow her motions. I can hear water in the distance.
“There it is,” Sophia says when we reach the top of the rock.
I stare out over the landscape: Rocks and trees surround a river. But the river is the color of many skins. My mind tries to force the hues into logic but cannot.
“The river is full of them today,” Sophia says.
As soon as she says it, all of my cells light up with horror-shock, a split second before I start gagging.
The river is full of thighs, pushing along like fish, huge as bass, moving downstream. The thighs bump up against each other, create awkward waves, a strange flood of lone limbs in water, a tide of skin tones rushing by.
“What the fuck?” I ask.
“They’re here,” Sophia says, pointing.
Boys stand on the rocks across the water, dozens of boys. They wear boxers, their bare chests reflecting the color of the river. Everything is flesh against rock.
I can make out some of their faces. I recognize some of them from school. I make out Jarred’s face in the crowd.
Sophia strips off her shorts and t-shirt, unhooks her bra then removes more, her nude body puckering in the cold air.
“Cassie,” Sophia whispers through teeth. “Take your clothes off.”
I have never been naked in front of boys before.
“Do not fuck this up, prude,” Sophia hisses.
The boys howl my name. Jarred says nothing, just stares at me dumbly.
I jerk my legs out of my shorts and stretch my elbows through my t-shirt as I slide it off. I’m normal like Sophia, I have a smooth, flat belly, no knot.
In the river air, my naked body shakes. I go blue like her. When she climbs down the rocks and into the water, I do that too.
The water wraps itself around me, cold, sends shiver shocks through me.
I watch Sophia splay out on her back and float with the thighs.
Her breasts surface up above the water.
I lie back on the water like her. I tilt my head up.
The tide of thighs slides against me, moving past. The thighs touch me, caress me heavily, dozens of them. The feeling of the wet skin is new. The slick slithering makes me dizzy.
I close my eyes and forget the sky. I forget the boys.
A thigh glides past my neck, over my arm, away. Another thigh passes over my calves and down to my toes. Thighs skim my stomach and hips, constantly.
More thighs push their way to new places on my back, brushing parts of my skin that I can never reach, sending electricity from my chest down to the place between my legs.
The mouths on the rock make louder sounds, noises bigger than the river tones, shake me out of myself.
I open my eyes. The boys are clustered on the rocks closest to me, now stripped too.
Their hands are moving against themselves.
The river does not stop. The thighs keep brushing all over me. We keep floating. I keep floating. On the rocks, all of the hands keep moving, all of the eyes on me.
THE MOON IS BIGGER THAN ANY NIGHT before. A wildness in the light keeps me awake.
There’s a knock on my window, then it slides open. Sophia’s face slides into view.
“Cassieeeeee,” she calls softly. “You awake?”
“Yes.”
She dangles a silver key in my direction.
“Get up. Come on, come on. Let’s go for a ride.”
I sneak down the stairs and out of the house, into the night air. Then I follow her to my father’s red tractor which looms metallic on the lawn.
Sophia climbs up onto the tractor and gestures for me to follow. Her breath is sour on the night air. She slides a bottle from inside of her jacket and passes it to me.
“You have some catching up to do,” she says.
I want to be wild, forget the knot, forget the earth. I chug, and it goes like knives down my throat, then numbs me good.
“Atta girl,” she says.
She turns my father’s tractor on, the quick roar of the engine, then steers us across the land. The wind runs through our hair.
She hands me the bottle again, and I swig longer and deeper. The numbness builds in my veins, as if the knot has been erased from me. I laugh up at the sky.
“Let’s ring the barn!” she yells.
She accelerates, and the seat bounces beneath us, I put my hands in the air, let out a yell.
We circle the red barn at a high speed, Sophia making the tractor turn tighter and tighter. We lean with the machine, we kick up dust around the wheels when we hit the curve.
“WOOOO HOOOOO,” she shouts.
The scenery is moving rapidly around me now: The moon, the red wood of the barn, the crisp night sky, the dirt on the ground.
“Slow dow—” I start.
“FUCK,” she yells as the tractor takes the next turn too tight, the wheels spinning out beneath us.
We smash through the side of the red barn. The tractor wheels spin out on some hay, then come to a stop. I lift my head, pulse pounding, shaken.
The hole in the barn wall is like a giant mouth. Through its jagged teeth, I can see the moon, the stars, the whole world.
THE SUN HITS OUR FACES THROUGH THE smashed barn wall. My mouth is a mound of sand, tongue dry, stuck to the backs of my furred teeth.
Sophia is beside me, snoring.
I let my elbow find her gut and sink it in.
“Get up, get up, get up,” I say.
The air gets a few degrees colder. A shadow falls over us: My mother.
“WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK NOW?” she screams. “What have you done!? LOOK AT WHAT YOU HAVE DONE!”
Sophia starts laughing.
“And you, what are you doing here?” she asks.
“Just having fun for once,” she says.
“FUN?” my mother screams, pulling the bottle from the hay. “You’re going home right fucking now, Sophia. And you?”
She turns to me.
“Get to your fucking room.”
I bound across the field and up the stairs, into my room, where I lock the door. I climb into my bed, head pounding, dizzy.
◆Late Stone Age jugs suggest that intentionally fermented drinks existed during the Neolithic period
◆Alcohol is a depressant which in low doses causes euphoria
◆In higher doses, alcohol causes stupor, unconsciousness, or death
I SPEND DAYS WITH THE LEMONS, RUBbing the walls. I am not allowed on the phone. The hours ache by.
A WEEK LATER, MY MOTHER IS STRANGELY happy. The fight has worn off of her. We are going shopping.
“Are you ready?” my mother calls, singsong.
I am rotten today, nastiness in my body. My knot feels thicker, more prominent. My mother does not notice. We drive to town.
“What a beautiful day!” she hums.
Mania is a trap. Trees whip past. I count the dead deer on the side of the road.
“What are you thinking about?” she asks.
The bloody ribs of the deer reach up out of their bodies to the sun.
“The ribs of the deer look like fingers,” I say.
“Could we try for just a minute not to be disgusting? We’re trying to have a nice day and get you a dress.”
“Yes,” I murmur. “Nice day.”
The store is rich and glowing. The lights are thin ribs electric above us. We walk over pristine linoleum floors, the racks of clothing around us pushing in.
“This would be nice!” she says. “How about this one? Oh, let’s try this.”
She fills her hands with lilac satin, yellow taffeta, a sickening green velvet.
“Won’t these be nice?” she asks.
“I don’t like those. I like black and red.”
“Well, we need to try new things, so we’re going to try new things,” she says.
In the changing room, the dresses hang behind me like limp bodies.
“Hurry up,” my mother calls.
I put on the yellow dress, too tight against my body, a cage. I look sallow, a tumor.
“I don’t want to show you this one,” I call.
“Stop fucking around,” she hisses. “Get out here right now.”
I stop fucking around and walk into the dull blare of the lights. A set of three giant mirrors triples my wrong shape, the horrid color, over and over again, infinitely. My mother lets out a sigh.
“This is all wrong. Take it off.”
I put on the next dress: An aching lilac satin that strains against me. I step out of the dressing room, teeth bared.
“Is this it?” I bellow. “COULD THIS BE THE ONE?”
“Don’t be goddamn ridiculous,” my mother hisses. “It looks terrible. Get it off!”
I picture her mouth with duct tape over it, the sky widening with calmness above my head in the bright new silence.
VISION
I stand on our front porch, barefoot, the white house muted behind me. My mother is cleaning inside again, but the scent hasn’t reached me yet.
The sky is stormy green, the shade of terror or mold. The wind riles itself up around me, pushing at my skin and hair.
In the secret part of my heart, I think about Jarred, looking at that sky. I only want to whisper into his ear, to feel the curl of his fine hair near my lips.
The wind rolls harder. Inside, the radio chatters warnings. Pressure builds, waiting to drench down thick on the land.
Suddenly, a red dress appears in the sky, a bright slash against the dark gray clouds. I watch as it falls, getting larger as it draws closer to the earth, then drifts onto the grass, empty and thin, collapsing into a pool of fabric.
The sky fills with other dresses in different colors: Blue satin gowns drip down alongside black strapless numbers. Old green chiffon twirls around black and white polka dot dresses until they go weak on the grass.
The sky is a mess of hues and textures, clouds building with the promise of more cloth to come. Tulles and silks and polyesters fall past my face, skirts and bodices billowing.
Each gown lands with a soft thussssh when its fabric collapses against the ground.
I walk through the gown rain until I get to the red dress. I kneel down to the scarlet fabric, running my fingers over it.
The dresses begin to fall faster, the closets of a million women pouring down over me.
Still-glittering prom gowns and wrinkled dark grey sheaths brush against my arms. A heat builds in my belly and below it.
The hues and textures keep falling, combining, coming, puddling. I hear the screen door open.
“You better get your ass inside,” my mother screams from the porch.
“I’ll be in soon,” I call. “Just a minute.”
A beige dress brushes past my face. The touch is so light my chest swells with the want to weep.
Jarred, I whisper.
I cannot stop myself. I collapse on the red dress, stretch my body over the slippery fabric, the new touch. I look up at the sky.
The dresses stack up around me, pile down, make weight on top of me. Scents rise up from the threads to greet me, smells of flea markets and old perfume and hidden sweat.
A yellow fabric falls over my nose and mouth like a hand over the face, taking my air. I go dizzy from the lack of oxygen, my eyes close against the fabric, the weight of it like Jarred’s body pressing against me.
LOW SOUNDS OF GRUNTING AND panting through my open window wake me in the night.
I follow the sound across the field to the deep red door of the barn.
I crack the door, and I press my eye against the peeling red wood.
Inside, my father is shirtless, covered in blood, bottle by his side. Piles of meat surround him. He shoves a handful of the red into his mouth. His eyes glint with some level of madness.
A small gasp escapes my mouth, and my father’s eyes flash up. He’s at the door in an instant.
“Well, look what we have here,” he slurs. Small flecks of meat land on my cheeks when he speaks. “Spying for your mother, huh?”
“No, I just heard...”
He yanks me into the barn, shutting the door behind us.
“You’re going to help me,” he says.
“What’s going to go—”
“Drink up,” he says, handing me the bottle.
I take a swig. It burns clear down the throat.
“This is all gonna go bad soon,” he says again.
He sinks his hand deep into the meat and pulls out a clump.
“Get started,” he says, handing me the meat.
My throat tightens, but I force my lips open and slide it into my mouth.
I picture snakes in the wild, consuming men whole. I picture women swallowing swords, great sharks consuming millions of fish at once. The meat slides down my tight throat, begins to work through my knot.
