Scissors
A gnarled red branch bobs over the elastic waistband of his white Hanes, a distended organ bloated against a patch of wiry hair. A large hand holds a tiny hand against this damp thing, drags the little fingers along this piece of intestine falling from the belly of the brother.
Light shifts across the forest floor, across two pairs of sneakers a few feet below. One pair of Converse all-stars, size twelve. One pair of tiny blue sneakers with gold stripes, the same size as the dead maple leaves lying beside them.
A voice cracks and squeaks, then drops to a deeper, foreign tone. What does the voice tell her? She must never mention this to anyone. If she does she'll be put in jail, he'll be put in jail. Mommy and Daddy will hate her, never speak to her again, because this is her fault, this is the worst thing she could ever do, it is HER body that caused this thing to happen. Her dirty little body with a big belly and curly blonde hair. The voice tells her she'd better keep her trap shut. To tell would break up the whole family. To tell would ruin ten lives. The voice says,
"This is our little secret game. This is our little secret."
Our. Secret. Keep. Quiet. Keep. Quiet.
I am five years old. My childhood has ended.
Look at a photograph of this room printed on matte paper, hand-colored with watery ink. Scrape the inner walls of a skull caked with chalk. Dried tempera pigment absorbs the tongue liquid. Every clumsy block of furniture in this room has receded into the walls, has flattened into a loathsome mural daubed into plaster by an amateur. The tiny ceramic sink has become an illusion, various tints of blue against white cinder block. The undersides of my skin have become stucco, abrasive against bone and flesh. I dare not move. I cannot shut my eyes.
I reach up and place a vinyl record on the hi-fi. The soundtrack to Tom Sawyer. I'm wearing my usual outfit; plaid flannel shirt, straw hat with holes bitten into its brim, torn trousers several sizes too large held up by a suspender of frayed denim and safety pins. I am alone, so I am free. Free to sing and dance, hopping about the cluttered play-room in the light of early afternoon. I am Tom, then I become Huck, and plan my flight from suburbia by raft made of sofa cushions. I know every word and belt out the songs along with the movie cast. I spin, barefoot on the dusty carpet, watching the great drowsy trees dip their arms into the Mississippi. I bob my raft, my braids swinging and tapping against my back . . . . then the blue southern skies darken, slam down onto paneled walls and form a ceiling behind the figure of my father smiling down at me. How long has he been filling the doorway, trespassing along the edges of my giddy performance? My face heats up. My arms fall and freeze against my sides, my toes root to the floor. My body fills up to the neck and mouth with wet cement and bile, which harden, locking my tongue against my teeth. He laughs, tells me to continue, to dance, dance! Dance! DANCE! I have been immobilized by shame, a thin little statue in the large room. His face darkens, I feel a hot heavy wind lifting from the dirt and smacking trees against wooden houses. He's shouting now, demanding to know why I will not dance for him. I stare at my dirty rooted feet. If I do not dance immediately he will take my record away until I am willing to obey. I do not move. He yanks the black plastic disk from the turntable and slams his bedroom door behind him. I never see or hear that record again. I am eight years old.
I trace the crevices with my fingers, deciphering the coded messages in the delicate patterns of the cracking plaster. I trace jagged lines that form a filamental lattice in the puddle of urine, in the dull aureole of piss yellow light humming around the ceiling lamp. Here for a moment stark definition crackles through the beige morass. My eyes embrace these etchings, thin and cool, a relief from the ceaseless thud of white the blurred edges the dullness at every turn. The floor begins to slide to the left. Am I giddy with love for this collection of cracks? the floor slides to the right, I hold onto those cracks - they've been so kind to me. I'd weep for joy but there's no water anywhere just a dry heaving. I must clutch the cracks close, every facet of the plaster grip the shallow moldings - yet the ceiling begins to fade, to conform to the monotone, to move swiftly away. the corners of the room recede and recede, leaving miles between them - the walls of this cubicle several days journey from me. The carpet has become an immense monster, a grotesque expanse. One step in any direction would begin an unendurable long trip toward an exit I barely perceive, a tiny sliver of pale wood leaning away from me at the far side of undulating floorboards I cannot trust. My feet themselves I could not touch, my legs have grown so long, stretching and stretching away from me at vertigo speed, the floor dropping below me, falling several stories, disintegrating at a distance. I must hold the floor at least, I must maintain - I leap toward the carpet, hurtle head first - the wooden floorboards speed forward, tilt up and smack my bone skull. No sensation. I lift and drop the skull to the wood several times - no response, no pain. I am a carcass. I slam the meat of my arm and hand against a metal radiator dull hard thud. thud. thud. thud! No reaction no nerve endings all connection severed severed blow upon blow the knuckles to the cinder block no spark. I travel for several hours to the stereo equipment, set the tiny red lights flashing, turn the volume knob all the way to the right, I can barely hear this I barely exist I've faded. I'm watching every bleached fiber disintegrate and curl away from the structure of my skeleton I lose my legs they rubber slack and buckle beneath this hollow frame crashing ribs against the floor to me I clutch the carpet climb the steep carpet to the tiny porcelain sink dull with mold, the chrome pipes matte under dust I crawl across the tangling wall and lift the mirror, pull from its sectioned box a small pair of scissors and hold them to a distant rhythm of bellows sucking and exhaling great gusts of dusty air, fanning a pile of white coals whose flame has long been pressed out. Gray ash powder clouds stir and settle in my lungs, so far from my ears. I must be breathing.
With this dirty pair of pocket shears I've punctured a tender curtain. I've buried blunt metal inside pale fabric, nothing comes through. No sensation. Lines scribble up the air away from me, distracting me, wriggling their feathers and tails without caution. I hunker down into the trench I've entered. It should be excruciating, nearly impossible. Millennia of surviving ancestry should be screaming in my tepid blood but I hear nothing, as always, there's nothing there in the silence of dust aching, each mote floating alone, individual in the void. As I scrutinize the ceiling, the rug should feel coarse against the back of my arm, the nape of my neck - the woolen fibers should burn as they twist into my skin - I feel nothing, as always for weeks now there's nothing. I let the blade stand, in a frozen pirouette, the scrape of the blade to ice silenced, one leg lifted, suspended, glinting. Hours. Hours. Or minutes? Rolling, rolling. heavily rolling, everything thick and viscous in this body. I will sound and echo in the underground passages, I will strike a match in those blue liquid corridors. I must scrape this dull edge against stone until I hear the blood sing crystalline tones. I must infuriate my veins until they burst out in their madness, arrive on the surface to screech their songs of mutiny. Hills of wet sawdust rise, clog my pores, stop up all details, flatten every bright ornament and press, heavy as a wet mattress, against my chest, my weary ribs. I close the other hand upon the plastic rings, draw them together. From far away, from the flat snowbound horizon, comes the tinfoil click as aluminum blades snap together, rending a centimeter open, then a second click, the red furrow has lengthened, a third click, the walls of the tiny ditch draw apart and glow pink against the endless thick white paste pressing against my swollen eyes from every angle. Click. Click. Not deep enough. I couldn't pass through. Too shallow. I dig further down, testing the depth for the elasticity of hot muscle stretched taut along two slender, fragile, parallel bones. Recarve my battle trench, as it fills and floods. I hear through the thick white chalk-filled room a succession of popping sounds, as pomegranate seeds burst and spill, as I lengthen my trench and tense for the next incision. I'm unprepared for the impact of the first explosion, the spray of intense hot light crashing into my retina, the injection of agony lightning through my arm and gripping my stuttering chest, its stuttering heart. Laughter. I hear laughter from the ceiling, from the dusty mirror now blinding clear, from the cinder block bricks of the immediate walls. I must be laughing.
I am a native of the northeastern woodlands. I wear a pair of soft leather moccasins, a loin-cloth, and the juice of tiny purple berries which grow in abundance in the briar thickets. I spit on paint rocks and smear orange designs on my flat, bare chest. I carry a buck knife in a black sheath on my belt, a quiver of arrows strapped to my back, and my left hand grips a beautiful English long-bow painted green. I have a supply of dry oats in the base of my quiver in case I grow hungry later on. I have a long day of archery practice and of stepping quietly along ancient deer paths. In this way I have spent thousands of peaceful hours alone. Today as I break through dense bramble patches and set out upon the first of hundreds of familiar footpaths, I hear voices from the bottom of the ridge. Several neighborhood adolescent boys stare and point up at me from the dirt road. Why? Then I realize they're taunting me, laughing at me, yelling tits, boobs, flat-chest. Then they begin to chant a word I've never heard before. I freeze. They're not wearing shirts either. Two of them are the boys who shove me down and beat on me at the bus stop on weekday mornings. I drop down into the cover of brambles and watch, shaking, suddenly cold. They walk on, laughing. I return to my parents' house, change into jeans and a sweatshirt. I believe I may never be free to bare my chest to the sun or moon again. When I go to school on Monday, I ask my friend Kristine Donellan, what does the word RAPE mean? She laughs at me and says I'm Ignorant. Then she tells me what it means. I am in third grade. I sleep fully dressed for the next fifteen years.
I wanted to be loved by some one who did not love me. That miser. Always hitting me always throwing me into walls and through windows always cutting me with knives and burning me with the sulfur tips of matches. She didn't know how to love me, she couldn't take care of me. I was her big disappointment, her sore tooth, her failed attempt, her temptation to destroy, to draw blood, to make amends with a line of salty puddles blaring red, too much blood to carry to contain. No one ever taught her how to love me. I wanted to be loved by a monster. That monster was myself.
I wanted her I really did need her or I would certainly die a teen suicide statistic. I went to New York City to become a dyke to become an artist to become my fucking self. I drew this baby out bone first then the flesh the sinews the senses. Don't run from this startling child.
ALL WRITING ©RAZOR 1996.
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