In Tongues

by Thomas Grattan

smiled, then wondered if my smile was part of the problem, that I wanted roughness but was also afraid of it, that I needed to tell people about this man who’d been terrible to me, not mentioning that terrible was what I’d asked for.

Still there are moments when she’s failed me with a force I’m undone by, and I hate to consider the ways I’ve surely done the same to her.

But there was a pull Philip had, a sense he deserved all that was his, that he could change his mind and suddenly deserve other things.

Teenagers, I find, have an unparalleled capacity for a self-involved sort of cruelty.

And when I chided myself for such entrenched selfishness, I thought of the selfishness I’d grown up around and learned to see as necessary, a tool to keep intact the small corner that was my own.

I wanted Philip to say he’d take me to a store with personal shoppers, music thrumming so each outfit I tried on felt part of a montage.

I wished for a camera, then changed my mind, as it would miss exactly what was alive between the three of us then, showing instead our blemished skin and half-closed eyes, the woozy look on my face when I’m happy.

When I was young, an overeager student teacher once gave us an assignment to discuss a superpower we wished we had. I wrote about being invisible. For days after, boys in my class bumped into me then said, with phlegmy bravado, “Didn’t see you there,” and I wished I’d been able to explain that to be invisible didn’t mean to disappear, but to have control over who might see me, and when and how.

Janice rolled to her side; her breasts pressed to my shoulder. I let them stay there, thinking of the violent pleasure of being smothered.

I wanted him to kiss the space behind my ears, grab my hair as he sometimes had, telling me that what he was doing was for my own good. To fuck me and say afterward that I couldn’t tell Francisco about it, for me to ask after how to say secret in Spanish and Czech and any of the other languages he knew.

In the guest room that night, rather than linger in my recent Pavel/Francisco fantasy (it had to do with being painted—there were drop cloths and brushes, admonishments to stay still), I imagined taking a slice of the coffee cake from earlier in the day, Brian eating it out of my hand.

How giving up felt good, the way it did when a man grabbed my throat or went at me with teeth, with force, and I didn’t have to try, just to let him. How it was sometimes only in those moments of abject pain or failure or with a pillow over my mouth that might not get lifted in time that I felt something close to better.