Incarceration

All her life, she had lived with the sensation of being trapped in this body. Not merely the myriad aches and pains she suffered, despite doctors’ constant reassurance that there was nothing wrong with her, but also the mundane demands of the prison bound her. The body hungered, and she must feed it. The body lusted and demanded satisfaction. The body tired and would sleep whether it was her will or not.

To follow the jailhouse rules evokes more nuanced prisons. If she ate, what should she eat? Would the food liberate her from her from the demands of the stomach, or weigh her down, or knot up her intestines, or simply be so unhealthy as to create further discord with the body? Inadequate sustenance would result in hunger pangs just a few hours later. If she had sex, there would be sweat and other bodily fluids. There might be pleasure, but then again, there might be pain, or lack of satisfaction, and if there were pleasure, that sensation might give rise to other, more debilitation sensations: a desire for more pleasure, a desire for a lover who would surely let her down, other desires she could not name. Besides, there was no easier way to transmit a disease that would further trap her in her body.

If she slept, she would dream.

The dreams might be wonderful, weightless flying dreams in which she escaped the bonds of the body, in which case, she would wake up even more tightly bound, stiff-jointed and shocked into the sharp reality of the morning.

The dreams might be nightmares.

Externally, she had friends, family, colleagues who looked at her and saw nothing unremarkable. No one could imagine that this vivacious and quick-witted woman had been a prisoner from birth in the same shell that liberated others with the power of movement, of choice. Like an animal, she concealed her weakness.

When the Saab plowed into her, she had been consumed with the heaviness in her legs, wondering how she could cross the street at all, how the crowds of pedestrians around her managed to do so without loathing. Preoccupied with forcing her limbs to comply, she did not notice that she had stepped out of the crowd.

“I’m having an out of body experience,” she thought, looking down at the broken frame of a woman beneath her. The Saab sped on, and witnesses were asking each other, “Did you get the license?” and “Is she dead?” They moved slowly, at a great distance from her perspective, waving their cell phones as they repeated the emergency dispatcher’s advice.

There was blood, spilling from the hated cage, pooling in the gutter. “I’m done for,” she thought. But the crowd declared, “She’s alive,” and, “See? She’s breathing,” and, “It’s OK, the ambulance is coming.”

But who cared? At last, freedom! She could fly!

Some part of her remained tethered, shackled, really, to the body, but she wouldn’t let that bother her. The life would fly out of that clay contraption and then, her fantasies realized, emancipation.

The ambulance did arrive, and a trio of snappy and professional young people fussed over her body, slid it onto a stretcher, and deposited it into their vehicle. It was idle curiosity, she told herself, which compelled her to follow, see it play out.

She was never going back. It was just nostalgia, a last glance at a house one had lived in for many years but never particularly cared for.

How graceful and unencumbered she felt hovering near the roof of the emergency vehicle. No longer plagued with discomfort, she needed nothing, wanted nothing. And how weak the foolish mortal frame appeared from here, the awkward limbs bent and broken, the messy fluids leaking from fissures in the meager protective skin.

A bloody handprint on her charcoal gray skirt bothered her, although she no longer needed business suits. And the hair: she could see gravel in the scalp, and worse yet, a few brown strands pulled forward and sort of caught in the eyelashes.

“Fix the hair,” she wanted to say, but she had no tongue, no voice box. Those organs belonged to the prison she had escaped so willingly. “Just tuck it behind the ear,” she wished to tell the paramedic, but the ambulance zoomed on, and the EMTs busied themselves with bandages, blood pressure cuffs. And her blouse had come unbuttoned, too, revealing more than she had ever shown strangers in her life.

It shouldn’t matter; the important thing was being free of the body, but at the same time, she’d always taken pride in presenting a flawless outer façade. No one ever guessed, based on action or appearance, of her pain, and now she lay in a muddled red mess, suit torn asunder, dirt on her head, and an artless lock of hair to complete the dishevelment.

Anyone could see the body’s weakness.

Why should she care, she wondered, as they trundled the body into the hospital, zipped her through doors and down corridors. Good riddance, defiant shell. I don’t need you anymore.

But right up until darkness closed in, she wanted to fix that strand of hair.

The dreams of that darkness were good dreams. She didn’t resume the burden of the unwanted form.

She woke up in that old carapace, no longer flying. Her eyes opened to whiteness, and she smelled clean sheets and disinfected floors. One hand flew to her forehead like a trained bird, but someone had tucked the hair behind her ear. “What a nice hospital,” she thought.

Later, a doctor came in, explaining that she’d broken both her legs, she would be in a cast and couldn’t walk for at least two months.

“I’m stuck in this bed for two months?” she cried, horrified.

“No, no,” he corrected her. “We’ll send you home in a couple of days with a wheelchair.”

“Oh.” She smoothed both hands over her temples, her thumbs sliding back behind her ears to meet behind her scalp. “Do you think they could bring me a comb?”

The Gold Dress

Issa found a beautiful gold dress, with pearl beads and silver thread, on the rack at Salvation Army. Twenty dollars was much too much for a dress, she knew, and it wasn’t in the budget, but she fingered its silky sleeve for so long that her mother added it to the cart when she wasn’t looking, and went without new hose and some other necessities, because Issa had been such a help, never asking for anything, and she deserved nice things. Hannah and Dore had had so many nice things in their childhood, and Issa relatively few.

She wore her dress to school, because, as her mother pointed out, where else would she wear it? They didn’t go to church, or parties. They didn’t have extended family gatherings. She didn’t wear it to impress anyone. She just liked to feel pretty once in a while. Even poor girls from broken families living in tiny apartments could feel pretty, some days.

“Did Jenny’s mom give you that?” Susan had asked first thing, even before the bell rang.

Issa didn’t understand. Jenny was the most popular girl in the fifth grade, and Issa was only a regular third-grader. She shrugged, and kept shrugging at the whispers all morning.

“Oh, my god!” someone screamed in the lunch line. “You really are wearing my dress! That is too funny.”

Jenny stood right behind her, glamorous in skinny jeans and a sequined T-shirt.

“My mom bought me this dress,” Issa said, her mouth small and quiet.

“Yeah, after my mom gave it to charity!” There was laughter, sharp and cutting. "It cost two hundred dollars new. What did you pay? Twenty-five cents?"

“There’s nothing wrong with being poor,” a fourth grade boy said. Issa smiled up at him. He looked strong.

“Nothing at all,” said Jenny. “Especially when people deserve to be poor. Like, say someone’s dad was a liar and a thief and stole everyone’s money. Then a person deserves to be poor. There’s nothing wrong with Issa wearing my old dress after her dad took practically everyone’s retirement fun and ran away to the Bahamas. I think someone who takes an old lady’s whole savings probably should wear second-hand clothes, especially when that old lady lost her house and everything and had to move in with her son.”

Issa gulped. Her father had done something wrong. Hannah and Dore had made that clear, but her father was long gone. Issa and her mom had moved on. She smoothed the beautiful gold dress over her hips and picked up her tray.

“You get free lunch, don’t you?” Jenny said. “I guess my family bought that for you, too. ‘Cause we pay taxes. Unlike your dad.”

“Maybe we should take her dress back,” a girl said. “To repay you.”

Jenny laughed. “Who wants it now?”

Issa was already halfway to the door, blinking through the wet curtain over her eyes. The fourth grade boy stopped her. “It’s a pretty dress, Issa,” he said. “It looks way prettier on you than it did on Jenny. I once saw her punch a first-grader when she was wearing that dress.”

“I don’t even know my father,” Issa wailed.

Creative Constipation

Her mind felt packed tight with rough edges, ideas of ceramic, brick, and stone. Heavy with unexpressed meaning, she dragged her thoughts across blank expanses, leaving nothing in her wake. Clean, white expanses unsullied by the stain of construction and creation sat like pristine accusations where dumping would be not only permitted, but encouraged.

Push, she told herself. Squeeze it out. Defile the virgin landscape. Unburden yourself.

But for all her effort, the page remained unchanged, as empty as if her head were as cavernous and resonant with unused space as anyone else’s. As if she were ordinary. As if the weight of unexpressed concepts did not bloat her skull.

She took a penknife, cut, bled out one letter, another, and another, and another.

Pierced

Her little sister possessed something that she lacked. The girl couldn’t say, quite, what that thing was, but obviously, her sister was more acceptable. Her sister didn’t mind wearing dresses. Her sister didn’t prefer playing with boys.

Her sister did the things their parents expected her to do.

The girl didn’t do certain things because she didn’t like them. She hated how dresses looked, she hated how they felt compared to jeans, and more to the point, she hated being told to act like a lady. Wearing dresses meant you weren’t to run, jump, shout, fidget, or climb trees. Why would anyone choose to wear a dress, given the attendant restrictions? The little girl accepted the limitation of being a girl; that didn’t mean she must become a lady. It didn’t indicate any compulsory girliness. She was a case in point. If she had been meant to be a certain way—for instance, feminine—wouldn’t she just naturally feel, behave, embrace that label? And not being feminine, didn’t that mean that she wasn’t all the other things they thought she should be, and shouldn’t try to fake it?

Why would they force her to pretend to be something she so clearly wasn’t? They told her lying was wrong, and then they told her to lie to them.

When her sister came home from first grade insisting that she needed pierced ears, the girl wasn’t surprised. Of course her sister would want pierced ears. They were ladylike.

Her little sister got her ears pierced and proclaimed herself pleased with the results. Their parents asked the girl several times if she didn’t want her ears pierced too. The girl was emphatic that she didn’t. It didn’t even have anything to do with not feeling like a girl. Primarily, she despised needles in any form. So she really couldn’t see the point of having instruments of torture applied to her head in order to become more of something she wasn’t in the first place.

Her little sister had her pierced ears for a few months, long enough that she could take out the gold piercing earrings and wear whatever kind of earrings that she wanted. Their parents kept asking the girl if she didn’t really want pierced ears. The girl kept telling her parents she really didn’t want pierced ears. She didn’t care for jewelry, and she didn’t need one more thing to clean. She was, overall, scared of the process. She was not interested in suffering for beauty.

Her parents decided she would get her ears pierced.

She resisted, argued, complained, screamed. She tried logic and she tried volume. They took her to the mall anyway. She fought them all the way to the booth where they pierced ears. She cried.

Her parents said, “Don’t be a baby.” They compared her, unfavorably, to her little sister. They said even a first-grader could do it; there was nothing for her to fear. The girl repeated her objections: she didn’t want pierced ears, she didn’t like needles. Her parents reiterated their argument: she was a big girl and she needed to act like one.

They pierced her ears.

Coda: When the girl got to be a teenager, she horrified her parents by adding six more piercings, five on the left ear and one on the right, using the post of the piercing earring that had inflicted the original insult. She spaced them out over a period of years, snickering to herself as their horror mounted with each new hole.

Attachment

It was, and was not, her leg.

The weight of it came and went, along with the pain, dull, prickly, sharp, an antique cactus of pain, pinning her to the rubble. She could not move her leg from the pain, but, with concentration, she could move the pain from her leg.

She would lose it, the leg. Already, she began to let it go.

The pain was not the worst part. The darkness, the strange particulate air, imbued with suffocating dust like cotton candy spun from topsoil, that might be the worst. And the creaking, the eerie, haunted-house squeal of uncertain girders wailing through the night, that might be the worst too. Or maybe the damp, creeping cold into the parts that could still move, but not very far. But then the leg would start screaming, rising up like an infidel from the desert. And she would breathe through the dirt-thick air, and push the pain back.

Far, far away, she heard other sounds, yelling and drilling, sounds her brain recognized as hopeful, rescue sounds. This was America after all, and they would reach her sooner or later and bring her back to the light. She couldn’t see the mountain that had stolen her lower limb from her, clamped down on her knee like a junkyard dog with a squirrel in its jaw. The squirrel would die, but first it would go into shock and feel nothing. Just as she could scarcely feel now. She would go up, maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow. And she’d leave the punctuated pain, and the broken piece of meat, down here. Goodbye, leg, she thought. We had a good run.