Joan

by Katherine J. Chen

The promise is this: If she, Joan, has a choice, then she will choose to be a thrower of rocks. She will live.

She will say, when she is old, I survived this and this and this, but first, before anything else, I survived my father’s fists.

When the pattern of daily life skips a beat, that is when a poor man may stumble upon a cave full of treasures, by luck, by accident, or a twist of fate.

“I believe God crafted the sound of a woman’s scream,” she says, “to pierce the heart and to test our humanity, whether we still have it or whether we have left it behind.

“What would I gain by being a man?” she says. “A cock, a deeper voice, hair across my chest. I would not become stronger. I am already strong.”

For a man cannot see anything in the world without wishing to wear it like a trophy on his back, to call himself master over it. To her, this is what it means to be a man.

And if you cannot cry, if you cannot mourn, that can mean only one thing: you are dead.