Waif

by Samantha Kolesnik

I call it “The Time Before Men,” a version of myself I can never get back. I guess, you could say, some might also call it Innocence.

People didn’t care about truth; they only cared about how the lie appeared.

I was a flesh case full of secrets and other sad things. If our marriage did get worse—if he ever did decide to graduate from fist to knife and cut me open—all his secrets would come tumbling out. I would stain the carpet with our failed marriage.

The older I became, the more convinced I was that no one escaped this earth unscathed by human suffering.

My tears were always a problem. My emotions were an even bigger problem. Ever since I had been little, the shocks and waves of others’ cruelty had rocked me apparently just a bit too much. I’m not sure how men thought women were supposed to react to pain because our tears seemed to send them into panic or rage. We would have been better as sponges . . . absorbent and full of holes.

Now that he knew I was attracted to him, he had to show me how little he cared. What the man didn’t understand, though, was that I could persist for a long time without reciprocation. Masochism was my talent.

That was the problem; my arousal wasn’t mine anymore because Matt didn’t view my arousal as anything other than invitation.

So, I preferred my own world of men, safe in my imagination. Men were far more interesting there, and intuitive. Men, in my world, beneath the God’s-eyes-only-shower-fall, could do unspeakable things without demeaning. They could fuck without diminishing. But mostly, the best part was that they were with me, seeing me, hearing me. It wasn’t performance; it was partnership.

That was the crux of my oppressive experience with men in the flesh—the ones you wished would touch you never did, and the ones you never wanted to touch you did so without asking.

Men fought to keep even their most hated possessions from other men. Even if he were to throw me away, better he destroy me than let someone else have me.

That was the scary part about men like Matt. They let their rages go so far before teetering over the edge of a cliff, looking at the consequences, and deciding to step back.

I didn’t fear him, emotionally, but I knew my body, my fucking fleshly prison, wouldn’t survive what he could do to it. If I were to call out the weakest link in team Angie, it would be my flesh and bones. My mind, my heart; they had fight.

“Just understand that everyone starts as a child. A mother’s beautiful child. A man—a man will never understand that. But you can.”

But the dead neither laughed nor wept, I thought, as I drifted in and out of sleep. The dead only existed in the minds of the living, and what parts of my mother my mind remembered were all the parts of her left.

I was, I thought as I strained to keep awake for a moment longer, my mother’s ghost.

But largely, my mind hated my body and wished it could be free of it and still exist. Unfortunately, the only freedom my mind would be able to obtain from my body would be death and death seemed unpleasurable in all regards.

She looked likely ten years younger than she was, which was what most men perversely wanted to possess: female youth.