Judgment Day

When Pewit was a child, his parents told her about the wild Scissortail monster who would decide what her afterlife would be. Pewit had been poring over the Roman heroes of her mother’s heritage and the Greek monsters of his father’s. Pewit imagined himself away from her parents, in the world of these myths, where things were always and never what they seemed. Pewit’s parents saw the way he believed everything was possible and made up a new monster, one that Pewit had not already read about, one that Pewit might think still existed, one that had not yet been conquered by a myth and a hero. They told Pewit about its barbed-wire limbs and its chalk-white nipples. Pewit lived in fear of the Scissortail Beast for a long time, imagined the way it would divide him, the way the Scissortail, with a few quick cuts, could make Pewit one thing, rather than another. How the Scissortail could take away Pewit’s bothness. Pewit was tired of only being something when compared to another. Pewit wanted to be the same thing no matter what she was standing next to. Pewit wanted to untitle himself. One afternoon Pewit found a duck in the barn tangled in some unwound fencing wire, dead from fright or exhaustion. On the wall above the duck was a drawing of the Scissortail, just as Pewit had imagined it—its arms raised menacingly. The image of the Scissortail lorded over this trapped dead duck. Pewit was not afraid, though. Pewit had known someone had been crawling into his imagination for weeks now. She looked behind her to see if that person was watching her. Pewit knew if he thought his own thoughts, he would come out fine. Pewit didn’t have it figured out but liked it that way. Pewit had been snagging on herself. He had confusions that were more certain than he would admit. Pewit was not one or the other. Pewit would not die and go to just one place. Pewit knew she would be everywhere at once and that the white noise of feeling every sensation at one time would make it feel like she was nowhere at all, and that would feel like home. Pewit pitied the Scissortail for its one-sidedness. The Scissortail had been an invention to make Pewit behave. To show how well he knew what was the right thing to do, Pewit reached his small arms carefully into the barbed wire and extracted the duck, cautious not to puncture its unfeeling body but scarring himself. Pewit brought it into her mother to prepare for dinner. Then Pewit walked calmly to the bathroom, lined up the antiseptic, the band-aids and his arms, and did the careful work of making sure every bit of herself remained intact.