I BREAK MY DOLL
Published in SAVAGE Journal, issue no. 7 - Territories (Spring 2018). I wrote this piece, rather fittingly, at 1AM the previous December, all at once.
I break my doll. I rip her apart. She is soft, so limp and malleable, and when I squeeze her and she doesn’t squeeze back, it makes me so angry I could scream. So I tear off her arm, and go to help my mother whisk the milk into cream.
It spills over, half-heavy, but still running down the tip of the vat, in thick and glorious drip after drip. When I swipe my finger across and let it run down my palm, when I suck on it and close my eyes, my mother strikes me across the head for shame, for indulgence, she fixes her bonnet and goes back to work. Her face and cheeks are red and her nostrils flare in, waver, and flex out.
Bright red blood blooms from my finger where I bit, stains my hands and marries the milk. I need to get clean again so I lick it off, salty-sweet iron-wine. We live a hard, cruel life, mother reminds me, and that is how it ought to be. I nod, and knead pliable, soft, squeezable dough for the bread. I push my fingers in.
In the slip between sun-up and sun-down, I watch my sister Placidia as the preacher follows her home. Mother is working the field, and she will go to church tonight to pray for us, in vain, she tells me, for we are born wicked and will die wicked. Between the gap in the door shaped like a waxing moon, I watch as Placidia envelopes his mouth with hers, their faces knot together, bargaining each other’s silence. His fingers dig around her waist.
He wrestles her to mother’s bed and I almost chew through my lip in keeping from screaming out. Placidia! Placidia ought to fight back! She could scorch him, burn him, hit him, strike him across the skull and off he’ll tumble, all-limp. When their lips part, I hope she’ll open her maw to eat him, but instead she throws her head back and allows him to suck her blood. Bruises. She wails like a ghost. When her legs part, ungainly, akimbo, he begins to rut her the way a goat would, his kind holy face made rabid, eyes rolling white.
I have heard stories about incubi and succubi. Run, run away to church – and desperately I wash out the spots of blood from mother’s linen after Placidia is gone but I look away from men, the bile around their mouths and in my gut. Coyote, witch-like, cackles in the distance as I remember the fire and muscles in his thighs, her calves, how all I see are spots of blood when I blink. It aches between my legs, and I wonder if the devil can pass from sister to sister in sin. The prairie is wild, and I cannot fathom it.
Hushly rabid I press against the ache, press it like a bruise, my eyes fall back into my skull and I shake, vibrate, walk home with legs weaker for it. I cry, for shame, for indulgence, I have done wrong, and the guilt makes me vomit but I want to do it again again again it growls. It hurts; I flagellate myself with primitive, irresistible, all-consuming fire. I exorcise the demon but he finds his way back in.
One week later Placidia weds her betrothed, the preacher, all eyes downcast. Later climbs atop him like a wolf on a buffalo, and rides him, clumsy, his hands at her hips squeeze her so hard, her flesh like dough, leaving black finger-mark dents in her skin. His face turns blue and he hisses like a steak. I wonder what must it feel like to insert yourself, like a man does, into her, to move an inch in her body and make her groan? Seething.
The sense of power is like strong perfume, the stench of urine and alcohol from the unworthy who sleep in the street seeps in. When she gives birth, the labour is long, the screeching is deadly, an Apache war choir, and the child is born in breach. Feet first. Clutching onto a clot, angry, red and luciferous, born upside-down and cross-shaped, she nearly takes Placidia’s life in revenge. They name her Silence.
Nightmares come about my stomach swelling with child, my skin painful and bulging like a tight burlap sack ready to blow, and from within the babe bashes its fists against my innards, scratching and scraping with infantile nails. Dread for its expulsion consumes me, I fear feeling the child crawl through my stomach, pressing against my walls, cruel and unhuman. When I wake up, I bleed every month for five days. Deep under, bones move like aching leviathans to give way. Mother calls it penance.
Placidia, quietly with child again, has her husband on his knees in front of her. His head moves, and her legs drape over his shoulders. The neat swell of her belly pulses. I wonder if he’s talking to his son (for, she said, it will be a son this time). If I listen very hard, I can hear him tell it sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. So thin, I almost lose it on the wind, smothered by her kettle-whistle whines, a warning. When he looks up, mouth gleaming, he catches my shadow from the corner of his eye before I am gone.
Out, out, onto the prairie in the middle of the night, half-laughing, half-crying, the sky is deep, ocean-blue and the moon is half-full. All the land is black or white. Skin all-crisp and ripe to shed, to move and metamorphose. When I run I feel it, like a knot between my legs. I press my fingers in. Just like making bread, I knead the knot, unravelling it, tearing the skin apart, ripping my maidenhead, plunging deeper, I push one finger, then two, then my fist, like a battering ram at the door of my womb.
I fuck myself to the thought of throwing away my dolls, to the thought of growing horns and a penis, of fucking women with it, soft, doughy, nubile, pluck out my womb pluck out my gut spin them into girdles walk back into town and set the whole village on fire watching Plaicidia the preacher my mother all burn and perish in a cry of glittering blistering scalding hot unforgiving god is cruel and takes them all to Hell
damnation.