Waif

by Samantha Kolesnik

As I sat in the grocery store parking lot, I marveled at how Matt and I could hurt each other so severely in private but remain publicly an object of admiration.

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

Do-gooders made phone calls, and phone calls led the bad to worse. While the do-gooders patted themselves on the back, someone else got the lash. That’s the way it always was with righteous folk, though—far more acceptable to seem virtuous than to be it.

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. “You’re too sensitive,” my father said when I was younger. “Lighten up,” my younger brother added, quick to support my father. “Why don’t you try cross-stitch? It’ll relax you,” my mom once offered in a meek and deadpan voice.

My brother had a good laugh at that. I might’ve, too. At the time, it had felt good to laugh at anyone else, so long as no one was laughing at me. Later on in life, I regretted how I’d treated my mother. She was the one, after all, who’d given me a whispered warning about Matt. “I don’t like how he puts you down, Angie,” she said softly in my ear at our engagement dinner. But her warning then had only hardened my heart against her.

He had perfectly manicured nails. He cared about his hands. That meant he cared about what his hands touched.

“You think? But if you buy the minis, it feels like you get more.” I laughed and he just stared at me. Oh God. I had done the thing no woman attracted to a man should do. I had given my card away. Laughter at the non-joke was the biggest tell of female attraction. The realization panned over his face like a curtain drawing shut. I’d never see his smile again.

I thought about going inside before Matt woke up and taking a shower to think about Ben. Masturbating in the shower wasn’t my preferred method and it always took longer that way (an inconvenience more than a titillation) but ever since marrying Matt, it became a survival mechanism. I had once made the mistake of getting off in bed when I’d thought I was alone and he’d walked in unexpectedly. It was hard to defend. That was the problem; my arousal wasn’t mine anymore because Matt didn’t view my arousal as anything other than invitation.

He couldn’t conceive of my desire for a sex life completely separate from his oppressive and frankly unattractive flesh.

The worst part about sex with Matt was that it felt like he was doing something to me, rather than with me.

It wasn’t performance; it was partnership.

“What’s up?” I asked, standing at the doorway to his office. My voice quivered despite my better intentions. I had realized this years ago, but whenever Ben would hit me—and the frequency could be quite unpredictable over the course of a year—my body would surge with adrenaline. This usually resulted in tremors and shakiness in my voice. Sometimes I had bad dreams. Sometimes I couldn’t sleep. If I were to be honest with myself, my body was sometimes more subject to my hatred than Matt. I hated that I couldn’t control my body enough for it to defend itself appropriately when he hit me, and I hated my body even more when, afterward, I had to be subject to its whims. It felt like an undeserved prison sentence.

If we lived in a lawless world, Matt would have already murdered 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.

It was, perhaps, my mother’s manner of acknowledging I was no longer under her care, and that as an adult woman, I would have to navigate the world of men alone.

But the dead neither laughed nor wept, I thought, as I drifted in and out of sleep.

I was, I thought as I strained to keep awake for a moment longer, my mother’s ghost. And then I did hear it. Xha-xha-xha.

“I’m saying it’s, at the least, unpleasant, and I think Ben’s would taste better.” “Well you kinda taste like shit, too. How ’bout that?” I laughed and picked up my book again. I had been through this same scenario so many times with various men over the course of my lifetime. They always wanted to get in an insult if their egos were wounded, and the insults were rarely ever original. I didn’t care if I tasted bad to Matt. I would taste bad to Matt. But it did bother me, on some level, that he’d never thought to ask or consider if I liked what I was doing while having sex with him. Why didn’t humans seem to care about that? It was better to just partake in fantasy.

SPITE CAN BE A POWERFUL motivator.

folliculitis

“I have specific taste. Most people don’t have any sense of the erotic . . . they look at a knuckle or an earlobe and don’t think twice. That’s why most porn is pedestrian.” “Well I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I don’t watch the stuff.” “And why should you? So little of it is made for your gaze,” Mince said.

I was in the world of men alone, as my mother had warned me I would eventually be. The world of men required certain sacrifices of me and I had simply tired of making them. It was high time for men to sacrifice for me. To give generously for my affection—to give of their bodies, not just of their wallets. Paying for dinner was easy. Paying with your flesh, as women had been expected to do since the dawn of time? That was hard.

What he didn’t love so much was my body. “Can you shave more often?” “Is one of your breasts larger than the other?” “Do you have to menstruate every month? There’s medicines now that can make it four times a year for you.” Oh, Stefan.

What made a man? Hatred for women, perhaps. If not hatred . . . then apathy. Utilitarianism.

hypertrophic

“Mince will patch me up. I’ve had worse than this.” “Mince is a monster.” “Most monsters are just people the heroes abused. Besides . . .”

she said softly, “. . . the world needs its villains. It manufactures them and it grows more efficient at it with every passing year.”

I never got to mourn Brittany in the way I got to mourn other people I’d lost from my life. She was a secret confined to my memories, tied forever to the scent of clove smoke and autumn.

My hand caressed the collarbone of Reena and she stirred. I looked at her beautiful form, stretched out and overlapping my own. I wondered at how any deity could create something so stunning and plop it here where all men would do was try to ruin it.

Reena laughed then, and it was beautiful, like a spontaneous burst of original music that would only be heard once, a laugh borne of old pain turned sweet.

I had walked the world of men alone, but unlike my mother, I wouldn’t stay in that world.

Family was chosen. The rest could go to Hell.

Many thanks to C.V. Hunt and Grindhouse Press for giving Waif a home. Thank you to author Andersen Prunty for editing.