Kill Marguerite and Other Stories (17 page)

There's not one event. It's this shapeless ghost that travels with me, and it takes forms in all kinds of ways and when I least expect it. There are triggers, yeah, but sometimes I can't predict them. And often I have to do the work of reassuring whoever I'm with that it wasn't them, it was just this thing that happens sometimes. It's this whole cycle. Like, I could contribute to your piece but I probably
couldn't read it without going down multiple bad head trips. —S.M., 27

I was on the train going home, sitting and minding my own business listening to my iPod and looking out the window considering whether to make quinoa salad or a veggie burger for dinner and suddenly this dude's hand's between my legs. I was too shocked to move or say anything and I just sat there for a long while, not breathing, not protesting, not stopping it in any way, not looking at him, not looking at his hand, in total denial that this was happening, instead fixating on the familiar whine of Taylor Swift. The person in front of me had long dark hair that was draped over the back of the seat with one strand hanging loose from the rest. I wanted to reach out and pull that strand, it was all I could focus on. Then the bell for the doors rang and snapped me out of it and I got up and pushed past him to get off the train. When I told my friends later they made a big thing out of it and I shrugged it off, no big deal. But it was. —B.Y., 26

I think that having it fictionalized or not quite right is almost more hurtful than sharing it with people. And it's also almost more hurtful if were anonymous and not attributed to me. Because I own it. You know? And that's the hardest thing. I own it and it took a long time to own it, to acknowledge it. Even just acknowledging that these things happened to me, that took years. And it's not just me who was affected. Getting a reputation in high school, that's not just me who had to deal with it, I have a younger brother and sister who had to live with that too. I guess I've always thought that I would do something good with it. Like work at Planned Parenthood and tell
girls who want to have an abortion it is okay. Tell girls who have been raped that they are somebody. They will become themselves. I know you're an artist and you can do whatever you want but I don't know. This is mine. —J.D., 32

A former partner of mine had a really brutal experience as a kid that she wouldn't tell me about. I mean she would occasionally refer to it to explain certain reactions to things but she wouldn't tell me exactly what happened. Even though I knew it was a bad experience that she didn't want to relive, I was a little loopy one night, maybe a little drunk, and I made it into a silly game, like I was trying to get her to share some juicy but benign secret, like who's-your-crush, tell-me-tell-me. What-was-it-what-happened-can-I-guess-if-I-guess-right-will-you-tell-me, I went in a singsong voice, like it was fun. I'm so ashamed. She tolerated me for a few minutes with what I realize now was an embarrassed smile, embarrassed for me, I mean, and then she looked me straight in the face and said, firmly, No. —H.P., 28

SWAMP CYCLE

I am in the swamp which is dark and murky. Another character is with me in the swamp and a stink of infection breathes thick around us. The stink is repeating more broadly the stink of the pussing wound on my toe, which came from stumbling around in the swamp. There was a rough thing in the swamp last night; now, a pussing wound on my toe. This wound would be classified an abrasion. We have been moving along on the solider peat to keep my toe from ingesting the swamp which is a breeding ground for all kinds of things.

Another character is with me in the swamp and I have to take a shit. Before I can take a shit I'll have to admit needing to take one to the other character. This breeds anxiety but I can do it because I have to.

The other character is my father. I broach the subject, cheeks aflame. My father transmits disapproval with a hateful sneer. He says we must get out of the swamp; this is our first priority.

But I have to go to the bathroom, Dad. I have to take a shit.

The shit can wait, he declares.

But I would be more comfortable, I protest.

Can the shit wait? he asks in a rhetorical question, shutting down any response but he's right. I have already slowed us down with the abrasion.

I am defeated. We walk on.

The air is growing cold. The pus on my toe is hardening. The swamp floor is cold, and damp, and sludgy. Soon it will be too cold to want to take a shit. The cold air will make my skin tremble and my asshole shit-shy. Is the asshole a mouth or a gate to another world? A question neither rhetorical nor answerable.

The shit will be enormous, I think to myself. It is knocking on my gate and wants to get out. It is taking up space in my body that might go to something else, like positive energy. I need it to be outside of me. If only my father agreed with my needs.

With moist and urgent gurgles, my bowels clamor for their contents' release. I need my father to be my friend.

My father is now my friend. I tell her I must do it, take the shit, now. My friend nods and smiles appeasingly, but looks ahead with clenched jaw. My friend is grossed out and also wants to get the fuck out of the swamp, because of a few motivations, but she is kind of a pushover and will do what I say.

There is no path off of which to move, so I squat down straight in the swamp. My friend moves away to allow me privacy, and also to move away.

When I take the shit that I need to take, the shit is black and heavy and curved; and ridged, the shape of its bowels.

Waste moves inside me. Organs move inside me. After the shit, a membrane. My bowels are creeping out. I need my friend to be my father, because I have something to prove.

My friend is now my father. He fixes his face away. I want to gloat since I knew I needed to take a shit, and now
there is proof I was right. But my father refuses to witness the shitting: my triumph is stuck in the air.

My father's propriety stinks. While he stalks about ignoring me, I watch my bowels ooze out, inside out, curving forward so that I see the results of my actions.

At the end of my protruding bowel tube, which seems odd because bowels do not really end but connect to the stomach; but this bowel tube has an end. It ends in a nipple.

I lean over, grab my protruding bowel tube, and raise it to blow on the nipple.

This means sex.

I need my father to be my lover. My father is now my lover. My lover comes over and crouches before me, dropping trou and spreading ass cheeks in front of where I am squatting and staring at my excrement. My third nipple guides my excreted bowel tube into my lover's asshole, whipping through his intestines instinctively. My protruding guts rub on the skin of my lover's guts. My bowels slide in and out. In and out. Stay.

My guts are swelling to fill my lover's guts, and the intensity is too much to bear. I need to detach. My third nipple clamps down on the end of my lover's bowel tube with its teeth. Then it swiftly retracts. In so doing, it rips my lover's bowel tube from his body. He shrieks and falls to the swamp floor, our intestines drooping between us.

I no longer need my lover. The swamp sucks him down. He's gone.

My intestines retreat partially inside me, leaving the nipple extended, still gripping my lover's guts in its mouth.

The swamp burps.

We walk on.

I am in the swamp which is dark and murky. A stink of infection breathes thick around me. The stink is repeating more broadly the stink of the pussing wound on my toe, which came from stumbling around in the swamp. I have been moving along on the solider peat to keep my toe from ingesting the swamp which is a breeding ground for all kinds of things.

My toe aches deep. I imagine the parasites and bacteria that have wormed their way into it. My toe throbs anew at this thought.

I need to stop and tend to my toe.

My third nipple lets go of my dead lover's bowels, which drop between my legs to the swamp floor. I pick them up and wrap them around my toe. I tie them in a bow. My toe is soothed. The bubbling stops.

I wish the other character were here to witness this transformation, as the wound was a sore spot between us. But the other character is gone.

I miss them. I want an other character.

I hear a moist and urgent gurgle, and experience a momentous shift in my gut. An enormous weight ejects itself, pummeling through a dilated and yielding esophagus. I vomit up this weight, and look what I have vomited.

It is an other character.

We have made life.

My third nipple again comes alive. I need the other character to be the baby. The other character is the baby. The baby shrieks. I hold its mouth to my third nipple. It latches on. I lift the baby with the nipple in its mouth and hold the baby in my arms. This is the first I have seen the baby in perspective. The baby is normal looking, I guess.

The baby sucks my bowels.

We walk on.

Around us the swamp lurches, heaving with the stink of shit and rusty afterbirth. After a stretch of sucking, the baby begins to howl. The baby howls and howls. I suspect she may be constipated.

You seem uncomfortable, I observe. Do you need to take a shit? I position the baby on the peat. Sure enough she begins to shit, though not without great difficulty.

The baby's face is red and blotchy from being born and is becoming redder and blotchier from the difficult shitting. Her shit is like a balloon that squeaks from her anus in an excruciating sound. She looks at me panicked. I, too, am alarmed. The shit is too large for her asshole. Her asshole needs to be my father's asshole.

The baby is now my father. My father is taking a shit and not looking at me. Though I know he is my father, I will treat him like the baby because that's what he needs.

Good work, I say to my father, who is no longer crying or panicked but comfortable in his skin. You feel better now. Later he will be embarrassed.

My father is now the baby. I make funny faces and she squirms on the swamp floor giggling. I pick up the baby and settle her on my hip. This swamp may never end. We walk on.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My grateful acknowledgments are extended to the editors of the following journals and anthologies in which portions of this manuscript have, in various forms, appeared:

“Circe,” in
Pocket Myths: The Odyssey
.

“Slug,” in
Fist of the Spider Woman: Tales of Fear and Queer Desire
, Arsenal Pulp Press; and in
The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing
, Lake Forest College Press.

“Kill Marguerite” (chapbook), Another New Calligraphy Press.

“Tomato Heart,”
The Wild
Vol. 1.

“The Girl with the Expectorating Orifices,”
Everyday Genius
; and
Lit Magazine
.

“My Father and I Were Bent Groundward,” in
Thirty Under Thirty: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction by Younger Writers
, Starcherone Press.

“Dionysus,”
PANK: The Queer Issue
.

“Earl and Ed,”
Monsters & Dust
.

“Twins” (chapbook), Birds of Lace Press.

“Swamp Cycle,”
Artifice Magazine
.

“Floaters,”
Red Lightbulbs
.

“Traumarama,”
Projecttile
.

Thanks also to Cathy Nicoli, who interpreted and performed “Tomato Heart” as a movement piece at Amherst College in 2007; to Jessica Grosman, who performed “Slug” on Montreal's CKUT's Audio Smut show in 2009; to my editor, Bryan Tomasovich, who shrewdly and enthusiastically helped shape this book, and all at Emergency Press who have supported the project; to my family, who must not be confused with the characters in this book; and to Leeyanne Moore, Christopher Grimes, Lidia Yuknavitch, Kate Zambreno, Judith Gardiner, Gene Wildman, Lennard Davis, Samuel R. Delany, Sandra Newman, Joan Mellen, Andrea Lawlor, Abbi Dion, Lily Hoang, Davis Schneiderman, Alexandra Chasin, Amber Dawn, Johannes Göransson, Cynthia Barounis, Gabe Sopocy, James Share, Rachel Bockheim, Jenn Hawe, Libby Hearne, August Evans, and Anne Derrig for their contributions, feedback, and support.

Emergency Press thanks Frank Tomasovich and Jill and Ernest Loesser for their generous support.

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