The Natural Way of Things

by Charlotte Wood

The voices are men’s, loud, cheerful, workaday. Just before the door opens the other girl darts across the room to Verla’s side, so they stand together facing the door, their backs to the window. As the door opens the two girls’ hands find and close over each other.

Strange, but she could almost forget her body, that marvelous thing. She used to stand before the mirror, wondering at it. It was something, all right. Must be, to cause such fuss.

Was it the softness, perhaps, that made them want it so much? And hate it so much? The body was separate from her, it was a thing she wore. The things that were done to it had nothing to do with her, Yolanda, at all.

pretty-but-fat

It was why they were here, she understood now. For the hatred of what came out of you, what you contained. What you were capable of. She understood because she shared it, this dull fear and hatred of her body. It had bloomed inside her all her life, purged but regrowing, unstoppable, every month: this dark weed and the understanding that she was meat, was born to make meat.

Would it be said they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the center, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves. They lured abduction and abandonment to themselves, they marshaled themselves into this prison where they had made their beds, and now, once more, were lying in them.

calls through the scrub in her mind to Yolanda, her protector, fellow creature: I love you. I am your sister, and you are mine. And at last Verla knows herself loved.