An ornate piece of heavy furniture easily standing six feet tall topples forward. It is made of glass. Standing directly in front of it, I don’t have the strength to prevent its fall, but I try. Instead of stepping to the side, I reach out both hands to catch it. The glass falls, covering my body, shattering it. In the next moment, I am naked and I am peeling skin off in strips. As each strip of peeled skin touches the floor, it turns to glass and shatters. Dozens of tiny glass fragments crafted from skin litter the floor. I touch my fingertips to my face, feeling for cheekbones, eyebrows, nose. I scream, the guttural sound ricocheting off the bare walls in my cell, when my fingers curl into the bloodied, mangled mess of skin and glass.

I was twelve the first time I thought about shredding my skin. The house we live in is deep in the holler, “down home”, where people leave their front doors unlocked and their windows open, where the nights are ruled by cicadas and where honeysuckle grows wild. Dogs and goats roam the yard by the outhouse, clothes hang on the line and we all know one of us kids are destined to fall in the sinkhole under the big tree, where the old well used to be, and die before we grow up. Sometimes, on the rough nights, I dream I might be brave enough to just go ahead and jump in. I never did, but, sometimes I wonder why I didn’t. The adults, for the most part, breathed a sigh of relief when the matriarch died two years ago and her eldest paid to have that hole filled in. I wonder how many of us kids mourned the loss of a way out.

The house, same as all of them down home, still don’t have running water. Options for bathing include hauling water in milk jugs from the well to fill the tub inside and taking a cold bath that way or saving yourself the effort and using the creek that runs out behind the house. Neither are solid options: one is a lot of hard work, the other means bathing in the open where anyone in the house might see you. Baths, then, happen once a week usually, on Saturdays, in case you decide to walk the two miles to church Sunday morning. I hung a sheet over a tree branch to keep anyone in the house from seeing me when I bathed, but the sheet disappeared after the first week. Now, I bathe only before the sun comes up, before anybody wakes up to watch.

But I can never win.

I can’t scream, when he comes out. I can’t run. When he pulled me into the woods that lined the creek that day I was twelve, I said no, I always say, “I don’t wanna,” but I did go. And, after saying I didn’t want to go, I didn’t scream. The smell of pine makes me freeze even today. I love flowers, but the sight of Dutchman’s Breeches or tansy make my muscles tense. These are the flowers I glue my eyes to when my insides are torn and the ants crawl into my wounds. It was after he was done that I panicked, that day I was twelve. Sometimes I don’t remember clearly the year, but I was turning thirteen that week, and I was so terrified of this that every day of that awful week is seared into my DNA. So, he left the woods, smoking the Marlborough cigarettes he always had with him, leaving me sitting in the dirt.

I looked at my hands cause they shook and, instead of seeing it was dirt under my fingernails, I thought it was the ants I swear live inside of me. Nobody else can know about the ants; no one can ever know that I’m not really a girl. Not even an animal; I’m just nothing, just a mass made up of insects. The thought left me in a state of panic. I couldn’t go to the house with the ants crawling under my fingernails, and I could feel them in my private parts and in my hair, too. But I couldn’t go to the creek, knowing he might look out the windows and see me. Instead, I walked on trembling legs back to the creek to get my gown, the bar of soap and my razor. And then, still naked, I ran on bare feet back into the woods and onto the dirt path that led to the pond that sat about ten minutes from the house.

The pond is not fresh water, holds fish and harmless snakes in it and is most definitely not ideal for a bath. But it was the safest body of water within walking distance that I had. I went under and watched as the bubbles I blew through my nose floated to the surface, letting the water surround me. Sitting where water meets dirt, I scrubbed my body until it was raw, until tears streaked my face, until I started hyperventilating. An uncontrollable urge to get clean, to erase every imprint of his hands and body from mine, overcame me. But I couldn’t reach all of the scarred parts, skin blocked access to the dirtiest parts. I was never going to be clean again because I couldn’t cleanse what I couldn’t see. I’m poisoned, you see. Poisoned from the inside out. It’s been three years since then and I ain’t clean yet.

The sun was rising, its rays breaking through the thick shade of the woods. At the time, all I could hear was a piercing silent scream inside my head, a scream so loud it drove rational thoughts away but, now, when I think of that moment, the sound of birds rustling the leaves of the trees as they flew from one branch to the other plays behind pain’s roar.

I lathered soap into my small legs and started shaving, something I’d only been doing for a short time. When I saw a real ant crawling on the inside of my wrist while I pulled the razor over my legs, I lost it. I screamed—an actual one, not a silent one, and I dropped the razor and started clawing at my wrist, trying to get rid of the ant, the real one, the one I’d seen. But killing that one didn’t help because I knew they were everywhere. My heart was chaos unleashed; pain personified. Suddenly, and quite vividly, I was being thrown to the ground again—he wasn’t there, but I thought he was, it felt like he was—and I could smell him. The smell of pines that surrounded me overloaded my senses, and all I wanted was the stabbing to stop. I wanted the pain to stop. But I couldn’t stop the pain. The only thing I might hope to do was clean my body of the poison, and the ants.

When I grabbed the razor next, I ran it, hard over my skin. Girls at school said they kept their legs straight when they shaved their knees so that they didn’t get cut, so I bent my legs and raked the razor over my knee hard. Blood pooled to the surface. The sight of blood calmed the chaotic thoughts in my head and I dropped the razor.

I didn’t find the ants – I hadn’t cut the right parts to find them. But I didn’t feel them after I saw the blood. And the dirt under my nails was gone, thanks to the (undoubtedly dirty) pond water. I stopped crying and, scared of him seeing me and scared of being crazy, I pulled the now wet gown on, gathered the bar of soap and walked home.

I threw the razor into the pond.

 

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