Difficult Women

Peter would prefer to have sex every day. Hanna would prefer to never have sex with Peter again, not because she’s frigid but because she finds it difficult to become aroused by a perpetually unemployed man.

I also learned the word dendrochronology—analyzing the patterns of tree rings to know everything that has ever happened to a tree. This is how I love you. I am peeling back my skin, layer by layer, so you will finally know everything inside me.

She tries to walk not too fast and not too slow. She doesn’t want to attract any attention. She pretends she doesn’t hear the whistles and catcalls and lewd comments. Sometimes she forgets and leaves her house in a skirt or a tank top because it’s a warm day and she wants to feel warm air on her bare skin. Before long, she remembers. She keeps her keys in her hand, three of them held between her fingers, like a dull claw. She makes eye contact only when necessary and if a man should catch her eye, she juts her chin forward, makes sure the line of her jaw is strong. When she leaves work or the bar late, she calls a car service and when the car pulls up to her building, she quickly scans the street to make sure it’s safe to walk the short distance from the curb to the door. She once told a boyfriend about these considerations and he said, “You are completely out of your mind.” She told a new friend at work and she said, “Honey, you’re not crazy. You’re a woman.”

There was nothing in that room but the beds and the walls, our bodies and our fear.

My sister was the only place that made any sense.

A man, older like my father, crouched in the opening, staring, a strange smile hanging from his thin lips.

He grabbed me by the straps of my overalls and pulled me into the van.

ation

I Will Follow You

Water, All Its Weight

The Mark of Cai

It is hard to write about happy things when you can never escape the kind of cold that sinks into your bones and stays there

When you touch me, you feel through me, through the ugliness beneath my skin, you make me feel, you hold me together, you push my skin back into its proper place

You are the joy in my life. I am a mess but I will be the joy in yours.