Mud Vein

by Tarryn Fisher

My brain is sometimes like a rogue Rubik’s cube. It twists until it finds a pattern.

“Florence and the Machine. Do you like it?” “You’re fixated on death.” “I’m a surgeon,” he said, not looking up from where he was dicing vegetables. I shook my head. “You’re a surgeon because you have a fixation on death.” He didn’t say anything, but slightly hesitated as he cut into a zucchini—barely noticeable, but my eyes caught mostly everything. “We all do don’t we? We are consumed with our own mortality. Some people eat right and exercise to preserve their lives, others drink and do drugs daring fate to take theirs, and then there are the floaters—the ones who try to ignore their mortality altogether because they’re afraid of it.” “Which are you?” He set down his knife and looked at me. “I’ve been all three. And now I’m undecided.” Truth.

“I don’t feel anything. Not even fear. Can you tell me what to feel, Isaac?” His throat spasmed, then he licked his lips. “It’s emotional Morphine,” he said finally. “Just go with it.”

This was not me. I was spilling my guts, as some people called it; divulging. It was word vomit and Saphira Elgin had her fingers down my throat. I discovered that private things were mostly sour. They sat spoiling in the corners of your heart for so long that by the time you acknowledged them you were dealing with something rancid. And that’s what I did; I threw every rotting thing at her, and she absorbed each one. It seemed that the more Saphira Elgin absorbed of me, the less of me there was.

It didn’t matter; most bravery boiled down to nothing more than a strong sense of duty that piggybacked an even stronger sense of crazy. Everything brave was a little bit crazy.

“It’s your darkness that pulls me in. Your mud vein. But sometimes having a mud vein will kill you.”

Someone could take your body, use it, beat it, treat it like it’s a piece of trash, but what hurts far worse than the actual physical attack is the darkness it injects into you. Rape works its way into your DNA. You aren’t you anymore, you’re the girl who was raped. And you can’t get it out. You can’t stop feeling like it’s going to happen again, or that you’re worthless, or that anyone could ever want you because you’re tainted and used. Someone else thought you were nothing, so you assume that everyone else will as well. Rape was a sinister destroyer of trust and worth and hope. I could fight cancer. I could cut chunks out of my body and inject poison into my veins to fight cancer. But I had no idea how to fight what that man took from me. And what he gave me—fear.

That’s why writers write—to say things loudly with ink. To give feet to thoughts; to make quiet, still feelings loudly heard.