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
