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My Flesh |
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by Brigit Kelly Young
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2:49 |
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In August I wasn’t careful and I opened the door to a wrong person.
I told Sara.
Sara said I don’t want to hear about it. Did he touch you? I don’t want to hear about it. Sara sighed. Don’t tell me these kinds of things, said Sara.
Martha said Oh my god, with long drawn out Os, Are you okay, she said, moaning the o again, and then the ay, like a song before consonants in the days of cavemen.
Joy heaved in the smoke from her cigarette through a pale puckered mouth. Mami what were thinking? She shook her head. What on earth were you thinking baby. Joy cried the smoke out. I never let a man into my house. Are you stupid? She tapped her fingernails against her forehead before they waved like flags in my face. Even if my boyfriend wants to bring his new friends over, I say no way! You don’t know what could happen, do you?!? Now you see.
I told her yes, I was stupid.
Adam yelled before he cried. Adam who’d yelled at me for years, and who I pushed once, and who taught me what an orgasm was, and how to work a camera, and told me he loved me at my high school graduation and left me stranded in Tompkins Square Park a year before this day, he yelled at me. And then he cried. He told me he was sorry. Sweetie, I feel so sad, like it happened to me too, Adam said.
Kyle said, Poor baby, just kiss me, and then, over ice cream later, he said, You can tell me if you’re lying. If you just had sex with him, like, consensual, and you don’t want to admit it to me. No I really mean it, it’s okay. Are you lying? Kyle who’d been someone to me for a while.
My Mother said she’d pray.
My Father didn’t speak.
A counselor said that healing takes time.
A doctor said they would look me over right away.
And to myself I said Brigit, you are the tender light of the moon, when they find your fossils the holes that dot your ancient bones like the surface of a sponge will spit out a million webs of light, the light webs catching people like floating flies, whoever holds your bones will have warm sticky hands, your hair will be found in tree sap and turn to amber, and they will piece you together, amber hair, ashy joints and spotty skull, stacked together in an outline of what you once resembled on this August day with a headache and a list of phone numbers and an ache between your legs.
Someday there will be no flesh to speak of, I said.
Brigit Kelly Young lives in NYC. Her fiction can be seen in Skive Magazine and the upcoming edition of Gargoyle Magazine.
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