My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

That seems the likely ending to this love story: me dropping everything and doing anything, devoted as a dog, as he takes and takes and takes.

Sometimes I marvel at how easily I deceive people, doing it without even trying.

I wonder if this is flirting, but it can’t be. Flirting is supposed to be fun and this is too heavy for fun.

“Make peace and move on” sounds like jumping off a cliff, sounds like dying.

He feels sorry for me, which is worse than worrying about me, worse than anything.

He traces road maps of blue veins on my skin, talks about how hungry I make him, that he’d eat me if he could. I wordlessly offer him my arm. Go ahead. He gives it only a soft-mouthed bite, but I would probably let him tear me apart. I’d let him do anything.

Break his heart? I try to imagine myself having that power, holding his heart, mine to abuse, but even when I picture it pulsing and pumping in my hands, it’s still the boss of me, leading me around, jerking me this way and that with me clinging and unable to let go.

She didn’t understand the horror of watching your body star in something your mind didn’t agree to.

Somehow I sensed what was coming for me even then. Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen.

I wonder what level of crazy I’ve reached and how much further I could go, how many more steps until I become a woman who boards up the windows to live uninterrupted in the filth of her past.

I bite down on the inside of my cheek because I won’t let my body do what it really wants—to contort itself inward, to curl so tight my bones snap.

I’d never admit to this, but the thought of a monster’s breath on the back of my neck gives me a thrill. It propels me forward, the epitome of asking for it.

With the sun on my face and a dog at my side, I have so much capacity for good.