This feels like a really long shower, the way the water’s moving down my body. Maybe it’s because my eyes are closed. I move my tongue in my mouth and think that hole in my gums is getting bigger. I don’t know how it happened or what it’s for. I’m too high to be able to tell if I’m just high as hell or really falling into another depressive episode. Like getting pulled by an undercurrent and not knowing when I can come up for air. Riding around this morning, I thought I ought to press that pocket knife into my skin some to see how fast the blood would come out. I did take note of that.
And I am fully aware I ain’t even washing, just standing in the water, rinsing off. My sister’s damn pool has so many pine needles and leaves, moss floating at the bottom. That’s where I swam to, tried to see if I could lay down there in it. Rub my belly on it. I figured it would be soft.
“Don’t you get into that water. It’s September,” my sister hollered off the back porch. “You’ll get pneumonia.”
I almost died from double pneumonia when I was in first grade.
But I told her if she don’t want a pool in September then to get her lazy ass up and take it down. Her damn boyfriend won’t do it, that old fucker. He’s old enough to be our damn daddy. When I came in the house that fucker was sitting there looking at Wheel of Fortune.
I looked right in his face when I came in and told him that nasty water felt good.
“I reckon it did,” he said.
Back at my old place it was hard. It was like when you come out of the shower and you’re so cold and you want to be warm and you dig through your drawer for some pants and you pull out his pants, your man’s pants, ’cause you’ve felt him in them before.
’Cause you’ve been riding around looking over to your right wanting to feel his knuckles between your teeth. But you haven’t seen your man in months and you don’t know when you’ll ever see him again.
“Let me see your eyes,” the old fucker says to me from the recliner.
I bend down low enough in front of him that he could yank the towel right off of me there if he wanted to. Strange for a sister to be living with her sister and her sister’s boyfriend but that’s what I’ve been doing. And I knew this fucker was a dick before, but now it’s just more apparent.
He’s a piece of shit. Sister’s tires are slick as anything and she’s got to drive to Hertford County to work back and forth everyday and he won’t give her no money to help her get new tires. That’s something My Man would never do. He always paid for my mama’s meal every time we went up to the café for Sunday lunch. Made me so mad when I found out that old fucker was letting my mama pay for his Sunday lunch.
The old fucker cuts his hair close to his head to hide that he’s balding. With my sister so young and pretty he wants to fit in. But I can see the bald spots looking pale from the TV.
“You’re crazy as hell,” he says.
“That’s right,” I tell him.
He calls my sister from the kitchen.
She comes in cradling a bowl of potatoes she’s steady mashing.
“I told you, just look at her. High as a damn kite,” he says it like I ain’t there.
My hair is dripping wet on my shoulders. Collecting in my collarbones. I’m getting cold.
Old fucker says if I won’t kin he’d take me to Jackson and throw me in jail. He’s a state trooper. He thinks he’s hot shit. He says if he goes in the bathroom again and there’s weed ashes on the counter. He says weed like “weeeeeeeeeeeeed.”
My sister stops him and looks at me like she’s saying “Why” but instead she says, “Go on and put some clothes on. Supper will be ready here presny.” “Presny” is an old word we learned from the old people in our family who raised us.
My sister loves me. But we’re really different. We disagree on things she don’t understand. Like if I got pregnant, she don’t understand how I couldn’t at least carry the baby. See, I couldn’t carry it and have it and give it up for adoption. I’d want to hold it and then I’d want to keep it. So that’s why I’d need an abortion. But Sister thinks that’s wrong.
My sister keeps the bulletins from all the children’s funerals she’s gone too. She keeps them in the side pocket of her car. I never knew that until one time on the way to church I was talking about something I don’t remember now. About life not being fair probably, but that it’s only our one life to live, and she pulled them bulletins out at the stop sign and showed them to me. She works at a daycare. She knows lots of children. She said, “This family has lost an innocent child. They had their whole life ahead of them.”
She also clearly believes in God and she believes in the best in people. When she prays to God she feels better. But not me. Maybe that is part of my problem—I have not gone to the Lord about My Man yet.
My sister has a full length mirror behind her bedroom door. I like to look at my full self naked there. I’ve got a dark hair growing out of my left nipple and I pull it out. Then I think I want someone to choke me. Or bite my lip until it bleeds. I’d like someone to slap me in the face. It’s good seeing how much you can take. It’ll surprise you. The more it hurts, the better it feels when you’re finally released.
But no man can touch me now. Only My Man.
I’m all hairy everywhere now. No need to shave because I am a nun except when I masturbate and that is like cosmic sex above me. That is when I remember the time like, for example, when we walked into my kitchen and My Man picked me up and then on the counter, then kitchen table, then floor. It was dark and the porch light came in from the window. He picked me up in his arms then and was in me from under so fast. I was in the air, flying like magic.
Last time I masturbated I touched myself to the idea that all my dead family I knew and loved were reunited in heaven. And they weren’t watching me but they were on a big TV being happy together and hugging each other. And I was watching them and I was very happy. It was nice to see them smiling with each other. They missed each other so much when they were alive.
I put on a real skimpy tank top and Soffe shorts Sister used to wear for softball practice, something to show my scars from where I was in the hospital in that freak accident where they fucked me up when they were taking out my appendix, that’s a whole ’nother story but I’ll tell ya this: I laid there for three months and My Man came to kiss me on the forehead and tell the nurses I needed more morphine. They shot it straight into my veins, right into my arms. The fat redheaded nurse shot it in me the fastest and that always felt best, like a band of angels was beating their wings so graceful together at the top of my head, making warm waves come down into my body. I’d wake up to people from church at the end of my bed, praying. Or Daddy shaking his head, saying I was cut open like a hog.
When I was twelve, my cousin gave me a Norton Anthology of American Literature she used in college. That was the first time I saw a poem that didn’t rhyme. That was the first time I read Sylvia Plath. An associates in arts from Halifax Community College don’t get you much nowhere, but I wrote all my papers on Ariel anyways. That’s when I read “Lady Lazarus” and “Fever 103.” All by myself I am a huge camellia, glowing and coming and going, flush on flush. I didn’t know what that meant then but I thought it sounded magnificent. And I felt sad for no reason.
“Take it easy, just don’t worry so much,” Mama said when I was so afraid of the Book of Revelations at night when I was a little girl and would cry and cry. She’d have to hold me until I fell asleep. I just kept thinking about the floor ripping open. Looking outside and seeing fire coming down. Raining fire outside the window.
And that’s one of the things, I think. My Man claimed he was an atheist. He said he didn’t need anyone or anything to pull him out of trouble. He said he just needed himself. How if his legs had just got broken and he was on the road in the middle of the desert, without a phone, if he remembered someone said to dig a hole with your ring finger and spit in it and mix it around five whole times that you’d survive and get out of that desert, he said he wouldn’t do it. On a documentary about the Holocaust I saw one time, the filmmaker asked the old lady survivor if she believed in God and she said, “When you’re drowning you’ll reach for the tiniest straw.” My Man said he won’t gonna reach for nothing.
And then I didn’t tell him I’d been feeling my heart pulling towards another and I laid down with that other one night and I didn’t let him touch me but that other told me how we’re all made of stars and we really do make up the universe and are made of the universe and how powerful and lonely that felt at the same time and how that’s the origin of the species and only then did I remember My Man. I had never heard that before and I was afraid. I went back to My Man and didn’t tell him about it.
I met My Man online. We matched on OKCupid. He misspelled The Picture of Dorian Gray in his profile. I’ve never read it but had enough sense to know how it’s spelled. So I told him. And then he had a good strong name and then he asked for my number and then he was gonna see me for New Year’s Eve but he got in a wreck on the way to see me. I didn’t know to believe him or not. But it was true. He totaled his truck but he made it out without a scratch.
Then we met in real life kinda on a Google Hangout. I could hear his voice and see how it came out of him. He was sitting on his living room sofa showing me all these little vases and samurai swords. His granddaddy had been an international antique dealer. Sacred soap stones from India. It’s like he had them all in a pile sitting next to him on the couch where I couldn’t see. I was waiting for a shrunken head, for him to hold it by the hair and spin it in front of the camera. He kept bringing them up, asking me if I could see them, as if to say, “Look at this, look at this.”
All I know is the girl he’s seeing now lives in Asheboro and that’s where the zoo is. And I bet you a million dollars they’ve already been there. He drives up on a Friday night in that dirty ass stick shift truck I promised him I’d clean for his birthday. Filled with papers and receipts and bags and clothes and towels and camping gear. Listens to cassettes I used to surprise him with all the time, like Hank Williams. Driving up there and taking her out to a good dinner. I seen on Facebook that she’s got pink hair. I hope he doesn’t get so excited talking to her like he would with me, talking so fast he’d have to stop and suck in that little bit of slobber that was about to drip out his mouth. Them nice lips so pretty that I cry. I hope she don’t sound as good as me when they kiss. When she climbs him like a monkey in the kitchen like I used to do. Putting his head under my chin and reaching for the cumin, he’d laugh and say it, “Coming.”
He’d go with me to visit Daddy in the nursing home. Be there to put his hand on my back. Daddy is sick with a disease I don’t wanna mention because I don’t want you to try to relate to me or say your grandma had it. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. And because of this disease Daddy is still dying of, Daddy never knew My Man’s name. But before Daddy forgot how to talk, he said he liked My Man. I sat next to Daddy and he said, “He’d do anything for you, if you asked him.”
And then My Man wakes up in the morning with that Asheboro girl’s head on his chest. And I get so sick thinking about it. And then they go to the zoo and look at the seals swimming in the water. They stop and ask an elderly but energetic couple to take their picture. One of those nice couple pictures you see all the time, where they stand together smiling, his hand on her waist and her hand placed on his stomach, as if she’s holding him back. My Man is so handsome. They tell the nice old lady to take a couple of pictures because they want a seal behind them in it. My Man makes a joke. He’s good with all sorts of people. I hope they don’t get the seal in the picture.
Next thing I know I am half way under my sister’s bed, just laying here with my eyes closed. Maybe I am meditating. It’s nice down here, like being in a coffin.
I heard a story once about getting buried alive. They accidentally buried the man face down and he woke up and clawed and clawed at the coffin. Clawing to hell in a way. And his ghost came to his best friend’s bedside for three nights in a row telling him to come and dig him up. When they finally did and they dug him up and saw how afraid his dead face looked in the eyes, they buried him right side up. And from then on caskets was made with a rounded top to them.
I thought about that story when we were at Aunt Ginny’s wake the other day. And I thought, I’m glad they are burying her right side up so she’ll be looking towards heaven. Or at the Second Coming when she sits up, she’ll just be able to step right on out. She looked so pretty in the casket and I felt bad I never went to visit her more than I did when she got real bad down in the bed. Her hip bone had pushed through her skin. Her legs were stuck in fetal position. But she fit in the casket so I guess they broke them to get her in there right. I didn’t ask.
My sister has all of Daddy’s little model airplanes he built. She’s got them in special shelves in her living room. The old fucker says we could sell them for good money and Sister went behind my back and gave him some to sell. That burned me up so bad. That fucker kept the damn money and bought a new gun for the first day of dove season.
That couple on Chestnut Street got Daddy’s chopping block he was so proud of. That he got when the butcher uptown closed. He loved that damn thing. Mama hated it ’cause it took up so much room in the kitchen. Right there in the middle of the kitchen. That’s where they pinned me down to make me swallow medicine. And that’s where we ate watermelon. Daddy would take our hands and show us, make us feel where the wood had worn down and got deep, where the meat had been cut up the most. We don’t really know the folks who have it. I mean like who all they came from. They got it when the bank took the house after Daddy got sick and we went bankrupt. Don’t know how much Mama sold it for. I bet for not enough.
I smell that Sister’s started frying the pork chops. I push myself out from under the bed and look at myself in the mirror again before I head down the hall. My sister is making what I liked to eat when I was little. Mashed potatoes and then you put some peas in the middle and call it “eggs in a basket.”
I’m opening a can of Le Sueur peas when she says to me, “You know I thought you and that nice looking guy you were always so close to in high school would make a good couple. You and him.”
She flips a pork chop. “He always played that guitar so good. What did he play, that “Hotel California” song at all the home games?”
“Exactly.” I pour the peas in the pot. “That’s basic. The Eagles.”
“He’s moving back soon, you know? From grad school to work on his daddy’s tree farm,” she says. “As pretty as you are. I know he’d love to go out with you. Slim pickings round here.”
This is the first time my Sister has ever talked to me like this, pushing some man on me.
I finally tell her I’m writing a letter to My Man. I haven’t told no one. I’ve taken all summer to do it. I’m afraid to send it. I don’t want it to be the last time I talk to him.
“What all does it say?” She reaches in the cabinet for plates.
“What’s in my heart,” I tell her. “How every time I dream about him I wake up crying.” I can feel myself starting to fall to pieces.
“Maybe it’s better if you let it ride, let it play itself out.” Sister puts the plates on the table and puts her hand on my arm. “He’s already seeing someone else, Sister. I mean it’s been what, like, almost a year?”
And I fall to pieces right there in the kitchen floor. And my sister’s there, picking me up, telling me it’s time for me to be taking care of myself. “We don’t need no man,” she says. She’s wiping my face with a warm dishrag. “We’re strong, Sister,” she says.
And that’s when the old fucker walks in and asks me if I ran off my meds again and if I need money for the damn refill. If I was that tight for money he’d fucking throw me some dollars since I can’t seem to get myself together to get them myself.
So I end up sitting at the table because, like Sister said, we are strong and I do need to eat the favorite meal from my childhood she’s made for me. I need to be healthy so I can carry a child someday, to be a mama someday.
Sister asks the blessing. She thanks God for earlier today when she went to see Daddy and he saw her and was able to say “Baby girl.” She asks God to protect Mama when she’s closing at the liquor store in Rich Square. Mama works three part-time jobs to keep Daddy in that nice home. I’m trying to find a job, you know, but it’s hard ’round here. And Sister asks God to be with me too. That’s it. Just for God to be with me.
And the old fucker says “Amen” real loud like he’d been waiting for it to be over.
Jeopardy comes on and there’s a whole column on the Black Plague. I am good at history.
And when My Man found out the old fucker liked history too, he said, “Look honey, here’s something you can talk to him about. Here’s a way to get to know him a little better. Do it for your sister.”
I thought how wonderful and sweet and caring My Man was to say that and I say to the old fucker, “You wouldn’t think it but I know a lot about the Black Plague.”
The old fucker swallows the damn mouthful he has in and says, “Oh yeah, let’s see who gets the most answers right.”
And I don’t want it to be a competition. I don’t want it to go like that. So I say all I remember from the Black Plague was from where I was in the hospital and as high as I was on straight morphine injections in that port they ran through my arm straight to my heart, that documentary was the only thing I could understand. That when women found out they were sick, they would sew themselves up in their own death sacks made of cloth or burlap or whatever medieval thing was around so they wouldn’t spread the disease to their loved ones. They’d tell their family, “As much as I fight to get out, don’t let me.”
And then I get up and say, “There is a charge for the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge for the beating of my heart, see it still goes and there is a charge.” I’m pointing at my scars on my arms, standing at my sister’s dinner table.
Sister just looks at her plate with big eyes.
The old fucker gets up from the table and says, “Some people just need to get their ass whooped.”
I help my sister clean up. If that old fucker really loved my sister, he’d help her clean up. He’d help her get some tires riding to the next county, raining like it is. If he loved her, he’d give her that ring she wants. But he thinks our family is white trash and I think this because when our daddy was first in the nursing home and Mama didn’t know how to deal and Sister came home and found her so drunk she was throwing up on herself in the bathtub, knowing that everyone around here knows our family needs prayers, that old fucker took advantage of my sister and put her reputation on the line and asked her to move in with him and his fourteen-year-old daughter when my Sister’s twenty-four years younger than him and had never lived on her own. Also I had a nightmare one time that he made her pregnant and then he had to marry her.
I dry and put up the last plate and go and grab my wallet off the damn end table and sling the dollar bills I have at the old fucker on the recliner and say, “Here’s some money for condoms.”
“Some people just need a real good ass whoopin,” he says to my sister in the kitchen. He’s looking at the dollars on his gut.
The night me and My Man had sex on a Civil War battlefield we decided we’d name our daughter after it. It was a battlefield we’d never heard of, with the most pretty name. But I won’t say that name. I don’t want to jinx it. It’s something only me and My Man know.
I’ve been writing about the future daughter we’d have. We always said she’d have my hair and his eyes. I’ve been writing about me and him raising her. Me sitting on the toilet watching him bathe her. Him telling her to hold her head back so the soap doesn’t get in her eyes.
The first time I met My Man in real life, I had to find him in an antique store walking behind armoires and gun cabinets. He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Next time I saw him, I read him a poem I wrote for him. We were sitting in his truck, on top of a bridge, and I told him, “Let me be your shaman.”
A few weeks after we broke up, I won’t sad yet because I have been told that I compartmentalize things and he texted me referring to the shaman line. I texted back what? I didn’t remember what I had told him. And I’m ashamed of that.
I am standing in my sister’s living room and American Ninja Warrior is on. No one can make it past the spider crawl. The old fucker has not picked the dollars off his gut.
I know it makes my sister upset that me and the man she loves don’t get along. I told her at Sunday lunch I am trying to make peace with them being together but it’s very uncomfortable for me. My mama was there and she overheard me and she said her and my sister could have been really rude to My Man after he gave me herpes but they didn’t. “Something you’ll have to live with for the rest of your life and might have effects on your children.”
My sister is saying something to me from the kitchen. I think she’s telling me to stay in. I’m not really paying attention to her because that hole in my mouth is hurting me. It almost always hurts after I eat. Food gets caught in it and I got to dig it out with my tongue or it’ll get to tasting funny in my mouth. I haven’t told Sister about that because that would be another thing she could hold against me. Another reason how I don’t take care of myself. And if I can’t take care of myself, I’ll never be able to raise a family.
My keys are in my hand and I just run out the house. I drive to where all my family is buried. I ain’t been out there in months.
It’s still light out enough for me to see all the corn fields around the cemetery. I think more than any other crop, corn can really change a landscape ’cause it grows so tall. Look over it one day and you can see a house at the edge of the field, look another day and the house is gone. But this corn here looks strange. Just like tall stalks that ain’t been cut down yet. They don’t even have any ears on them. It’s like they never growed. They never got enough rain during the summer. And I feel bad for that farmer.
I pull the weed and my piece out my glovebox. I got the piece because the color green reminded me of all those green glass vases Aunt Ginny had in her sunroom.
I get out the car and go see where Aunt Ginny is buried. The grass on top of her looks like golden brillo pad from where it ain’t growed in with the other grass. But I know it will someday and she won’t always be covered with a brillo pad carpet. And I ain’t even high again yet.
I go sit where Grandaddy is buried. He’s been dead five years now and don’t have a headstone ’cause we can’t afford it. That’s also a bad feeling.
I take a hit and I feel it burn in my throat and when I exhale I feel like ghosts are coming out of me and I know that’s lame and cliché right here at what might be called the emotional initial wound of the story. But almost everyone I know is already dead. Count them with me right here. There’s Granddaddy and Grandma. There’s Uncle Peachy and there’s Aunt Ginny. There’s Great Grandmama. And there’s Mema. And then there’s the ones I never knew in real life but they’re walking in my head. There’s Big Mama and Uncle Perry next to her. There’s baby Stephen who died when he was three months old. There’s Aunt Essie and her brother, my Great Grandaddy who was bow-legged.
At the old home place, I can look at pictures of them when they were young, and look out in the side yard and tell where they were standing. Long before they knew I’d ever be born. And I get Sister’s fancy iPhone and take pictures of them and send them to my phone and I post them to Facebook. But no one knows them like me. They just look at my profile and think, “Oh there she is posting old black and white pics of her family again. I don’t know them but I am going to like the pic anyway because maybe she knew them and maybe she misses them.” And I am sad because no one is gonna know my family’s stories because they were unimportant in the grand scheme of things. They made it through life without killing themselves and that is extraordinary enough for me.
Just like I don’t know how Daddy didn’t kill himself when he knew he was going to lose his mind and end up starving to death because he would forget how to swallow. Mama had to hide the guns in the house. And Daddy somehow was able to go to sleep at night.
Last time I saw him, his feet was swole with fluid from a urinary tract infection and he was barefoot ’cause he’d hid his shoes in another patient’s room. His toenails were longer than I’d ever seen them in my life. His pants were falling off of him and he kept trying to take them off. The calendar in his room had not been turned over to the new month. He’d peed on the blanket on his bed. It smelled in the corner on the floor. The nurse came in and told me and Sister he’d taken a shit right in the middle of the dining room floor earlier in the week. And that he walked the halls at all hours of the night. He wouldn’t lay down to sleep. We brought him candy. We had to show him how to eat it. He said three words. We couldn’t make any of them out. I sat on his bed and looked out the window. I wanted to throw everything I could out of it. Including my body.
I look at pictures of Daddy when he was little on my phone before I go to sleep.
And in my dream world, I’d be leaning against his tombstone right now in this cemetery. I’d feel my backbone ridge into the letters that make up our last name. Then I’d push my shoulder blades out and push them into the stone as hard as I could.
I don’t even know who is gonna pay for his tombstone when he dies either.
I hear some gunshots out back towards town. Folks stole the refrigerator out of the parsonage last week, when the Preacher was visiting the homebound. A girl from Ahoskie shot a man and his son over the weekend. Papers ain’t said why yet. Mama says, “You’ve really got to love this place to stay.”
And I take another hit, pull in deeper now. And I feel all my family out here under me and remember it ain’t my life I’m living, it’s theirs.
There was a time when I couldn’t even get out of bed. I couldn’t even eat or stand up straight. Mama put makeup on my face and when I opened my eyes those people at the end of my bed told me I was a miracle. I could smell all the flowers they brought me, rotting all around me in that tiny little room.
“There is a charge,” the hole in my mouth says. That hit I just took then was real deeper. It’s dark now and the smoke rises up to the moon. This is a good place now. My head doesn’t feel like it’s about to knock against the sky. That’s a reference to a William Carlos Williams poem, about being so filled up with love you don’t know what to do. I could recite it right now, What have I to say to you when we shall meet? Yet—I lie here thinking of you.
If I dug all the way down to Aunt Ginny right now, I could not make myself a baby again in her arms under the earth. I dream of myself as a baby in her coffin arms, in the nook between her ribs and little arm. The baby me in her dead arms. Curls in both our hair.
And Daddy won’t be there to pick me up. If I get back home tonight, he won’t be there reading an auto trader in the living room. And he won’t be there in the morning to give me and Sister bowls of grits, to ask us if the little rats had a dance in our hair last night. To brush the tangles out.
And when we lost the house, me and Sister were cleaning out our bedrooms upstairs and there were so many doll babies we didn’t want to save. “Don’t you want to keep these for your little girls,” Mama said. They told us if we left a mess in the house it didn’t matter. The bank didn’t care. Me and Sister threw our doll babies into the wall. Their heads busted open and we left them like that in the floor.
The last text I sent My Man was thirteen days ago, asking him if he still listened to that Roy Orbison tape I gave him. And how I listen to “In Dreams” now every night over and over because “In dreams I walk with you, in dreams I talk with you.”
But in my dreams My Man looks at me like I’m a stranger. And like I said, I wake up crying.
Because even though when I asked My Man if he wanted me to disappear, he said no. He told me to do what I needed to do. Which was asking about that Roy Orbison tape. And I haven’t heard from him and I know I may never hear from him again.
The green’s floating at the bottom of my sister’s swimming pool like graceful moving jellyfish. I could drown there.
Or in the ocean. Daddy’d take us once a year. Throw us in and say, “This’ll get the ticks and fleas off ya.”
That’s where I came up from the water and spat water in My Man’s face for the first time. Then every shower. Except not the one I took earlier today. He won’t there. I don’t even remember now our last shower. We would wash each other’s hair.
I want to be warm. I want to hold My Man’s hand. I have to believe one day I’ll be able to show My Man now the tops of the tombstones are silver little fingernails. A field full of half moons.
The last time we argued was about me going to the dentist. He said I needed to go. That he’d pay for it. I said I wouldn’t ’cause as soon as I opened my mouth the dentist would say “You’re a dumbass,” and I’d say, “No I’m just poor.” And I didn’t want to have to say that.
I remember being in Christian camp and the Preacher made us feel like it was us who put Jesus on the cross. My sins of jealousy and not singing enough songs that praised the Lord. In the sweet by and by we will meet at that beautiful shore.
My body belongs to some creator. And I move because of it.
And I was taught every sin I committed was a strike into Jesus’s back, ripping it open. We all watched that movie together in youth group, The Passion of the Christ, laying in the floor of the fellowship hall, for a sleepover. Jesus had to pull himself up with the nails in his wrists, not in the middle of the hands, which is traditionally what art says, and push himself up from that long nail in his ankle in order to take a breath because of the weight of gravity.
Paul wrote, “I rejoice in my suffering.” And later, “For when I am weak, I am strong.”
A hit. A hard one. I cough real bad. My stomach muscles cramp from where I was cut open like a hog. And I’m bending over, holding myself on the ground.
When I look up all the stars twinkle down on me.
My Man is fucking his girl in the truck, in the zoo parking lot and she doesn’t know where to brace her feet to make it best but he doesn’t care. Because he’s not thinking about me right now.
I’d like to be hit even harder.
I bite my wrist as hard as I can and I get back in my car. I check my phone and I’ve got a bunch of missed calls from my sister. She says Daddy’s home called. And Daddy was playing moving his cup all around his plate like he always does now, dropping bread in it. And another resident got upset about it and punched him twice in the face. Sister says Daddy didn’t fight back. He won’t even bruised but they had him on seventy-two hour watch during which they would check on him every thirty minutes. She is on the way to see him. I tell her I love her.
Driving now is floating just above the road and all around me is the flat, flat land. The tall shadows of the woods cut between the fields and sky. I really like the feeling when you’re choking and he holds you down longer than the time before. More and more closer every time to a place I don’t know.
I want to see Daddy’s chopping block. So I drive to that house on Chestnut Street. I will go up and ring the doorbell. If no one comes, I will punch the window next to me and see if I can unlock the door. If no alarm goes off, I will make my way inside.
No lights are on in the house. The chopping block is in the middle of the kitchen floor just like old times. The knives are next to the stove and the one I want to use is good and sharp. I spin the tip into the end of my finger like the movies.
The fridge’s got an untouched, brand new rotisserie chicken. I’m another person in another time with my same blood running through me, standing on the back steps, looking at my great grandma in the backyard holding the chicken above her head, breaking its neck with the flick of her wrist.
I grab the chicken where its neck ends and put it on the chopping block. I stab it, rip it in two. Down into the bottom of the valley in the chopping block. Where Daddy showed me the wood wore down when I was little. Where the butchers cut the meat up the most.
I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound; everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.
I’m being still now, to listen. To see if God will have anything to say.
I hear the steps of a little child coming to me. One I can tuck into bed by reading a book.
Before she goes to sleep tonight, my sister’s saying a special prayer for that little one year old boy down the road who shot himself in the heart with a staple gun.
But the sound is not from a child, it’s a light coming on and that couple coming on either side of me. They’re telling my name to me and they’re telling me it’s okay. “Calm down, now,” they’re saying with calm faces.
The chicken meat sticks to me like slugs. I want to go home and cry in my bed. I want to cry until I am empty.
They have taken away the knife and are on either side of me, leading me out the house. They have soft hands. The woman is stroking my arm. The man gets in a car and the woman stands in front of me. She holds both my shoulders. She says, “Let’s get you home.” She pulls meat out of my hair.
They turn the heat on in the car and it feels so nice. I remember to tell them I’ll fix their window. I don’t know how, but I’ll do it.
And they say “Okay.”
They don’t ask me where I live. Everybody already knows.