Melanie Thon - First, Body - Stories

I turn you into a thief. It’s necessary. You’ll think of that forever, the sheet you had to steal to get out of the motel. You’ll remember your bare legs in the truck, the cold vinyl through thin cloth, the white half-moon hanging in the morning sky, face down.

Days now and hundreds of miles since I left you. You wear your orange vest, carry your oiled gun. You follow tracks in snow. I follow Clare to the road. She wants me to find her, to feel what she feels, to do everything she’s done.

When you see the doe at last, you think of me. You’re alone with me — there’s no one you can tell about the girl on the road, her sore tongue in your mouth. Never , you said, no and no , but you twitched under her, blinded by the flickering in your skull. No one will understand. You thought her hands would turn you inside out, but you held on. There’s no one you can tell about the wallet she opened, the cash and pictures, the pants she stole.

Careful, baby .

I’ve got your life now — your little girl smiling in my hand, dressed in her white fairy costume, waving her sparkling fairy wand; I hold your sad wife in her striped bathing suit. If I could feel, her chubby knees would break my heart. I’ve got you in my pocket — your driver’s license, my proof. I’m in your pants. I belt them tight. I keep your coins in my boots for good luck. I wear your hat, earflaps down. I bought a silver knife with your forty-three dollars. I carved your name in a cross on my thigh.

Yesterday I found a dump of jack-o’-lanterns in the ditch, the smashed faces of all the men I used to know. They grinned to show me the stones in their broken mouths. They’ve taken themselves apart. I’m looking for their unstuffed clothes, hoping they didn’t empty their pockets before their skulls flamed out.

It’s dark. Clare pulls me toward the gully. She wants me to run down between the black trees and twisting vines. She wants me to feel my way — she wants me to crawl.

Morning again, I saw a deer, only the head and legs, bits of hide, a smear of blood, five crows taking flight, wings hissing as they rose. Someone’s accident butchered here, the stunned meat taken home. Before you fell asleep, I said, Anyone can kill .

She’s in your sights. Nobody understands your fear, how you feel my hands even now, reaching for your wrists, slipping under your clothes. So many ways to do it, brutal or graceful, silent as the blood in my sister’s veins or full of shattered light and sound. Kick to the shoulder, blast of the gun — she staggers, wounded, not killed all at once. There’s snow on the ground, gold leaves going brown. There’s light in the last trembling leaves but the sun is gone. You follow her trail, dark puddles spreading in snow, black into white, her blood.

You remember a farmer straddling his own sheep. Will it be like this ? The knife, one slit, precise. Pain is just a feeling like any other feeling . She never struggled. He reached inside, grabbed something, squeezed hard. I can’t tell you what it was .

She won’t drop in time, won’t give up. When you put your hands in front of you, you almost feel her there: hair, flesh, breath, blood. She wants only what you want: to survive one minute more.

What would you do if you found her now, if her ragged breathing stopped? Too far to drag her back to the truck; you’d have to open her in the sudden dark, pull her steaming entrails into the snow.

I wait for the next ride. Clare wants me to follow in her tracks, to find her before she falls, to touch her, to wash her blood clean in this snow, to put it back in her veins, to make her whole.

You walk in a circle. You wonder if you’re lost. The doe’s following you now, but at a distance. She’s trying to forgive you. If she could speak, she might tell you the way home. She might say, You can climb inside me, wear my body like a coat .

You can’t explain this to anyone. Never, no . You need me. I’m the only one alive who knows your fear, who understands how dangerous we are to each other in these woods, on this road.

I’m your worst fear.

But not the worst thing that can happen.

I lived in your house half the night. I’m the broken window in your little boy’s bedroom. I’m the flooded tiles in the bathroom where the water flowed and flowed.

I’m the tattoo in the hollow of Emile’s pelvis, five butterflies spreading blue wings to rise out of his scar.

I’m dark hands slipping through all your pale woman underthings; dirty fingers fondling a strand of pearls, your throat, a white bird carved of stone. I’m the body you feel wearing your fox coat.

Clare said, Take the jewelry; it’s yours .

My heart’s in my hands: what I touch, I love; what I love, I own.

Snow that night and nobody seemed surprised, so I figured it must be winter. Later I remembered it was Christmas, or it had been, the day before. I was with Emile, who wanted to be Emilia. We’d started downtown, Boston. Now it was Jamaica Plain, three miles south. Home for the holidays , Emile said, some private joke. He’d been working the block around the Greyhound Station all night, wearing nothing but a white scarf and black turtleneck, tight jeans. Man wants to see before he buys , Emile said. He meant the ones in long cars, cruising, looking for fragile boys with female faces.

Emile was sixteen, he thought.

Getting old.

He’d made sixty-four dollars, three tricks with cash, plus some pills — a bonus for good work, blues and greens, he didn’t know what. Nobody’d offered to take him home, which is all he wanted: a warm bed, some sleep, eggs in the morning, the smell of butter, hunks of bread torn off the loaf.

Crashing, both of us, ragged from days of speed and crack, no substitute for the smooth high of pure cocaine but all we could afford. Now, enough cash between us at last. I had another twenty-five from the man who said he was in the circus once, who called himself the Jungle Creep — on top of me he made that sound. Before he unlocked the door, he said, Are you a real girl ? I looked at his plates — New Jersey; that’s why he didn’t know the lines, didn’t know that the boys as girls stay away from the Zone unless they want their faces crushed. He wanted me to prove it first. Some bad luck once, I guess. I said, It’s fucking freezing. I’m real. Open the frigging door or go .

Now it was too late to score, too cold, nobody on the street but Emile and me, the wind, so we walked, we kept walking. I had a green parka, somebody else’s wallet in the pocket — I couldn’t remember who or where, the coat stolen weeks ago and still mine, a miracle out here. We shared, trading it off. I loved Emile. I mean, it hurt my skin to see his cold.

Emile had a plan. It had to be Jamaica Plain, home — enough hands as dark as mine, enough faces as brown as Emile’s — not like Brookline, where we’d have to turn ourselves inside out. Jamaica Plain, where there were pretty painted houses next to shacks, where the sound of bursting glass wouldn’t be that loud.

Listen, we needed to sleep, to eat, that’s all. So thirsty even my veins felt dry, flattened out. Hungry somewhere in my head, but my stomach shrunken to a knot so small I thought it might be gone. I remembered the man, maybe last week, before the snow, leaning against the statue of starved horses, twisted metal at the edge of the Common. He had a knife, long enough for gutting fish. Dressed in camouflage but not hiding. He stared at his thumb, licked it clean, and cut deep to watch the bright blood bubble out. He stuck it in his mouth to drink, hungry, and I swore I’d never get that low. But nights later I dreamed him beside me. Raw and dizzy, I woke, offering my whole hand, begging him to cut it off.