Work Text:
You’re wearing fabric that drapes over thin hips, limping to the floorboard, and your mom is spitting up empty promises into a porcelain bowl. You stand in the doorway, scratched paint on half rotten wood, away from her prayer. She raises a glass skinned hand and a smile made of bird-bone splits quixotic lips. She says she loves you, that you look so pretty, that she promises to be better.
You look down at yourself and don’t see anything pretty or precious. You’re looking over your own brittle shoulder, looking at your mom’s loose hanging collar, looking at the crusted in dirt between the tiles.
You’re looking at the mirror, thinking, what’s wrong with me?
Your lifeblood is spilling through your lungs in nicotine burn and soaks into the gaps of you. You know. You knew when you watched dark locks of hair fall into white sinks, an art of ink-splattering across paper. You swallow the name, the body, the life that was given to you, and learn to live in split lips and a snarl painted across grimy skin.
You don the finely made dresses and skirts and frills he gives you. It’s a costume, he says. You know this more than you think he does.
The definition of Dad changes, just like bandage has. From bruises and cuts caused by rings on your mom’s face, to an escape you can’t afford, to a chain around your neck and a satisfying lightness that feels like it cleans you.
You sit on a cot, swinging your knees and watching the way the scrapes on them weep. This costume is an ugly swirl of better and worse. Borrowed wings you can feel digging in, becoming yours. But until it belongs to you, the prickle of difference burns on the back of your scalp. A hand steadies your legs, wrapping gauze around knees with tender care. Thanks, you say.
?fall, or was he pushed…
Sobs heave into an achingly soft pillow that won’t be yours soon. You knew you didn’t belong, not in warm hallways of gentle words and messes you don’t clean up. Not with your cracked and bandaged body.
Oh, you realize. I’m going to die.
0:03
It’s almost peaceful, realizing that your struggle has a conclusion, even if it’s ugly and mangled and screaming, boiling in its own skin.
0:02
You tried. You tried with broken fingernails and chipped teeth, with a burn in your blood that you never let expire, you tried with bandaged knuckles and knees and ribs.
0:01
You cradle the fire you feel in the last beat of your heart, gentle with yourself in a way you barely understand how, and you know.
An angel holding hands out in a prayer, one strange to the graces you know, of devotion to filth
Sterile lights, you think of debt, of bruised arms and needles and empty air promises
Streets that are sewn into the hems of your body, dirty brick and smog buried in your skin
Unwinding and rewinding a spool of thread of you, of skin and cells and bursting the seams of thin epithelial tissue, peeling away your iris, ripping you open, breaking and flaying and consuming you, sinking roots into your veins and permeating your tender flesh, burning you from the inside out, blinking back into flesh and blood—
.You remain unavenged
You don’t recognize what the mirror shows you. You never did, but it was a familiar discomfort in the way blood soaked bandages and hair curling around your neck were.
The body is known in the way half evaporated dreams are. It’s not you, but it’s yours.
You should be happy about this, you think. You walk down a street that you know—knew, because it’s distorted and warped and shrunk, but it’s not what has changed—and the eyes that watch you are different. Wary, leery, waiting. The smog that settles in your lungs feels a step left of where it should be.
Who are you, he says.
A fishhook catches on your larynx, pulling and pulling. Bitter ash and vitriol rise out of your throat. Don’t tell me you don’t recognize me? Come on Bruce, aren’t you a detective?
His gaze hardens, and you wonder how you ever imagined him soft.
You leave, an aching hole in your chest.
You don’t fit anymore. You hazily remember you thought yourself wrong before, a piece from the wrong puzzle.
You can’t shove yourself into the blank here now, something about your torn and repaired and frayed edges clipping against the sides of the world you left. The performance you create is the closest thing you can make to art.
You died years ago. You died yesterday morning, when you saw a reflection in the windowpane of the library you spent countless evenings in, smelling old paper and watching the fog from inside. You hadn’t known yet, the answer hiding in prickles of discomfort, while you curled around the smallest window of knowledge you could get, candle-warm glint in your eyes.
You died a week ago, when your beloathed father slit your throat with a stern look. You died choking on warehouse ash and bitter love.
Motes of dust dance through sunlight cast by an open window—a safety risk you can’t bring yourself to close—and you don’t know what to do. A hound barks in the distance, and you lay in your bed.