Godshot

by Chelsea Bieker

She took my hand. She squeezed. “Whatever’s happened to you can either make you beautiful, or it will ruin you forever. You decide.” I pulled my hand back. “I’m not beautiful.” “I don’t mean beautiful like you’re thinking. I mean beautiful. I mean, deep and changed. Affected. Wise. When you see a woman like that, you know. She’s beautiful because of her undoing. Beautiful because she rebirthed herself from ashes.”

I had imagined spending the first ten minutes of the call telling her she was forgiven, listening as she cried and begged for me to love her again. But she hadn’t even told me she missed me. That she was sorry, too. That the whole thing was wrong, but could be fixed. I wanted her to fear losing me, tell me with desperation that I was hers. But I hadn’t ever needed to squirm away from her grasp. It seemed her hands never held me tight enough.

What horrors had he lived through as a child? People didn’t usually just become this way, I thought. It was probably not completely fair, whatever had happened to him, and now here he was, his untended wound blasting around the world, wrecking things.

But that was the way with boys. Always getting things that made them better—pants with pockets, tools for building—while girls received adornments, things to make us appear better to others.