Unforfend: unable to avert or prevent something evil
I am a smudge on the map of the Jersey shore.
I am no longer a smudge on a map.
I am here.
It’s still that Friday afternoon in high school when I drive the Plymouth from north to south Jersey, down shore, and pull into the driveway of my family’s summer cottage. Remember? In my white Keds sneakers, I walk the boardwalk to the carnival awash in the taste of Fralinger’s saltwater taffy, peanut brittle, cotton candy. I sit on a wood bench on the boardwalk overlooking the ocean. Yes, that beach. That bench.
I’ve delayed this moment as long as possible. Yet the memory is always with me. Like that feeling when awaiting dusk. A lingering insufficient amount of air before the frenzy of night.
There I am.
Here I am.
I walk down the warped steps and along the wrack. I scuff through seaweed. To my left is the darkness below the boardwalk, deep as unconsciousness, fragile as shells splintered across the sky. To my right waves curl, foaming the shore, a wedge of moonbeam, enticing as sorrow.
Left? Right?
I stand in an ecotone, a transition between safety and danger. Between silence and sound. Beside an ocean that exhales and forgets to breathe.
The knife-thin man, with flint-cold eyes, steps from beneath the boardwalk and grabs my shoulder. He smells of wild pine barrens, of acidic lust.
Left: The choice is no longer mine.
Left: Feet stumble, dizzy and upended, the girl’s body consisting of disjointed parts.
Left: Danger pulses like carnival lights reflecting a knife, reflecting my skin, electric with fear.
Left: Darkness foams whitecaps drowning my eyes shut.
Left: I am wet as ink that never dries . . . smudged hieroglyphics across a blankness of white paper and sand.
Left: His hand pins my long braid as if staking it into eternity.
Left: My heels make small indentations as he pushes my legs apart.
Left: Unzips my soul.
The Ferris wheel spins, unearthly.
A wisp of a soul levitates from a somatic body.
A few weeks later, after the knife-thin man under the boardwalk, I feel—or see—miscarried blood smudge the pink-tiled bathroom in my family’s seemingly pristine house in Glen Rock.
I clean up the blood in the bathroom. I do not turn on the light.
I tug at the knob on the medicine chest. I grasp a bottle of aspirin. The label is red. Is it red? I empty white pills from the red vial into my palm. I turn on the faucet. I put each pill, singly, onto my tongue. I scoop water into my mouth. Pill by pill, I swallow.
I stare at myself in the mirror. Rather than see myself more clearly, my image hardens. I am a girl trapped in glass. Unmoving. Almost featureless.
I sleep.
I imagine myself tumbling inside the atmosphere of time, into the soul of time, drifting in airlessness. Weightless.
I wake up. I don’t know how many hours later.
I wander out of my bedroom into the living room, a room with wall-to-wall gold carpeting. The texture feels cold, cold as metal, under my bare feet. No one is moving. Is anyone home? My Scotch terrier wanders in from the kitchen and presses his damp nose against my ankle. His brindle fur is sculpted in small curls along his spine. He returns to the kitchen. His nails click linoleum. He crunches food.
No cars pass outside on the street. No scent of hydrangeas. No shouts from neighborhood kids. No jingle of bicycle bells. Sun scorches the front lawn. The asphalt on the street appears soft. If I ventured out and stepped off the curb I would sink in tar.
I avoid glancing inside the bathroom. I don’t want to see what I might see.
Instead I return to my bedroom. I feel heavy as if I’m shuffling within another body—that I am two bodies—so not quite me. The sheets are still warm. My head’s indentation remains on the pillow.
The painted eyes of a papier-mâché dragon mask, which my father brought me from Thailand, perched atop my bookcase, stare at me unblinking, uncomprehending.
Is it my brain or is it a memory that sloshes in numbing ice water?
The venetian blinds are closed. Slats of a vitelline-yellow sun ladder the floor. I lack the strength to climb it.