Locked in moonlight on a holiday where death fills every corner, is a mask I’m supposed to laugh at, I am not in my body, am somewhere else. Adjacent to the curled form. Close enough to hear them call my name in a loop. A cacophony of voices tumbling through autumn air, sliced into the chill that was not yet cold but brought relief from August’s oppression—but that girl, who was me, could not feel cool air, could not hear the cicadas, could not see the blink of lightning bugs. So close. So far away. She’d crawled onto the skin of the church like a flea in the night. Clung to a warmth that was safety, that shook her off, bisected her body with a scratching talon, a place that had coddled her for fourteen years, held her until it became the place she shattered, the place he shattered her, the shards of what was, scattered everywhere and nowhere, swept into corners. A place that shadowed, blanketed, her in darkness.
But I was right there, a stone figure in a stained-glass windowsill—perched on a thick slab of stone ten feet off the ground. I must’ve climbed up, my legs still remembering how to scale limestone from my childhood, a year or two backwards, or maybe it had only ended a few months before. But the body remembers what’s good, knows how to climb even when blinded, even draped in a forest green taffeta dress that blended into midnight. And there, turned into herself, this girl who could never be me but somehow was, with her hair black and forced straight, lips red and face glowing pale, pretending to be something she wasn’t, something strong, something that took without asking, a being with fangs for consumption, that hungered when empty instead of shrinking into shadow. But she didn’t hunger, hadn’t been strong enough to fight a man in her still-small body, could only consume herself, could only be the shadow.
And in the air voices looped around the girl who I used to recognize, used to have a home in, who was still a baby, who’d only bloomed, only just bled—that coveted bleeding that is yearned for before it becomes known, that cradles unwanted secrets. As they called, one stands out. Her, my, mother’s. Her fear clawed through the air, unable to grasp what she couldn’t see, couldn’t find with her voice that was cracking, teetering on the edge of that void with me, reaching through air, flailing in voice, that my mother might touch anything that was me, could pull me from whatever horror pushed back, as she called through dark streets for a lost daughter, a daughter who’d only recently bought her first bra—but I was not in my body, wanted to cut our tether with the sharpness I couldn’t extract, couldn’t find in touch or throat.
How could I tell her? Tell her the girl was a shell curled against stone, melted into it to become something that echoed when it shattered, that knew how to find sound, tell her the girl was too fractured, too lost, too hollow to find words and push them through a larynx when all the air had left her world.
Because how do you speak, when your body gets away from you? How do you grasp at words, words that hum, words that scream, words you can touch, can feel under flesh or vibrating inside the skull—how do you pluck them with your fingers and fit them into your mouth? When feeling is too much, when being is losing life, when darkness shelters, how do you see the letters again?
And beside her, unbothered, I heard his voice too, deep and harmonizing, so close to a man’s it couldn’t be distinguished. Heard it calling me. Felt its pull, that cut through who I used to be, who had loved the way I looked when the glass of my body shattered. As his sound, that I knew like my own, that I will always know in forgotten synapses, climbed inside the delicate tunnels of my ears, a tickle from claws that dissected, that turned the inside out, vibrated with pretended worry. It was the sound of a hunter whose prey cannot escape, who knows they are the danger, and even shrouded in that Halloween costume, my vampiric fangs false and blunt, I could not consume him instead. Could only be consumed. And we both knew this truth. Had already lived it.
Nearby, a loud whisper, from someone who was a friend, gouged into me, scraping the edges inside. “She just wants attention.”
Her words serrated open wounds. And since the girl who must’ve been an old version of me before I’d finished growing, could see this friend’s face bathed in yellowed streetlights, since I was not in my body, since I know this friend so well, saw her a dozen feet away, to another friend.
They giggled, rolled their eyes. “And she thinks she’s so pretty. So skinny. Whatever. No one cares about you.”
Did they know I didn’t have a body? That if I’d had a mirror, no reflection would stare back into my lightless eyes? That you don’t have to feed a body you cannot feel, a body that isn’t real, a body with no voice, that cannot speak, cannot reach the words to push them through vocal cords as your name loops in the air. Did they know I didn’t want a prize that cannot, should never be, kept?
Abigail Card holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University and is the Managing Editor for Cider Press Review. Her work is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, and has been published in For Women Who Roar, Abandon Journal, RAIN, Sustainability Times, and Prism. Abigail Card’s work centers around intersectional feminism, unraveling grief, neurodivergence through the lens of voice, and exploring environmental issues. When she isn’t writing, she’s usually hiding in old-growth forests, having coffee with friends, or traveling with her family.