Cursed Bread

by Sophie Mackintosh

But then what, when there was nothing left of the bread to improve? What then. Eat of it and be filled. Eat of it and be transformed. Eat of it and nothing changes. The almost-imperceptible recalibration of our desire, our satisfaction. Try again.

I am a woman talking to you all of the time, wanting to feed words back to you, because you gave me so many, pushed them down my throat until I choked and enjoyed the choking, until the words spread through my blood, until I lit up.

I always did imagine the two of you as characters from a story, after all.

I was bloody all the way through. I didn’t have to say it out loud; the women nodded their heads.

because sometimes we return to what we recognize, whether we want it or not.

I thought to myself how the worst I had done really was not any of the little betrayals but in murdering my marriage with familiarity, and it was unfair because that is only what marriage demands, the careful establishing of familiarity in order to be able to live your life the next day and the next and the next.

The trick is forgetting for one moment and then forgetting for another moment and then look, the moments run together like a string of beads, and there is heartbreak in the forgetting of heartbreak, in the forgetting of pain, which returns bright and pulsing regardless of the seconds it has been put aside. Do not leave me here, it tells you. Pain becomes an animal, walking at your side. Pain becomes a home you can carry with you.

Nobody, at the beginning, believes they will debase themselves for love. Nobody believes in anything else but joy.

Your old life and my new one don’t seem so far apart now—two indolent, unsupervised women drifting through the afternoons.

Water and soap and flour, sweat-marked linen and butter and lye and buttons and thread—how could they possibly compete with the life you had imagined for yourself, up there in the mountains?

I’ve been looked at in pity and in fear and I’ve learned that the only way to really be seen is through desire. To be looked at and found whole. Found alive. Please look at me. I promise you that I am here.

You can witness the unthinkable, you can have the unthinkable done to you, and at some indeterminate point in the future you can still be happy, even if just for a fixed moment, a little ball of satisfaction in the chest—isn’t that incredible? Even blood washes out, or you can fill your mouth with things that hide the taste of it.

Serene Elodie, bovine Elodie, lying face down on a bed, damp and pale as bread soaked in milk, strong limbs used to swimming, now limp, palms facing up, What will you do to me I always used to wonder, What will be done to me.

But you, Violet—you have never been denied or walked out on. You will always find a desire reciprocated, no matter how bleak. And in the end, that’s just another thing I can’t forgive.

No number of their secrets, no amount of accumulated power, would make me one of them; and yet I could not leave, either.

I fell into this life, I was not thrown.

I can’t tell if we are at the point where a good love turns bad, if we already passed it, or if it is up ahead for them still at this point. I don’t know really where love begins, though I’ve been trying to pin it down, and I know even less where it ends.

I wondered if you would feel the lack in yourself, a cleaving, when your own ghost disappeared from sight.

For instance, he never kissed me, but when I want to I can imagine it differently, the audacity of memory can be staggering, the liberties I can take and the things I can give myself.

Sometimes reality peels back like the skin of an orange,

easier the mouthful of blood than the world in flames.

We know he’s unoriginal, we can laugh about it now, it’s our only power, loving him and also finding him pathetic, drunk on the idea of kingdom, but he’s not that unoriginal.

Or maybe he put a hot ribbon around your throat and pulled it, tight, until your head came off, and he put the head on a silver plate and lipsticked your mouth with great care, the way he had seen you do so many times.

I am not afraid to nose around in your slick red lungs if the mood takes me.

Perhaps the years should have preserved me like a thing in a museum, but bodies don’t work like that; if a body isn’t touched it falters faster, the yearning is visible at the surface, much as you might try to hide it.

I paced in my high shoes, coltish, absurd, I was only ever a step away from stumbling.

She was poisoned by envy at what she saw, betraying the wife again and again, even though they were supposed to be friends. Her eyes grew larger and more covetous day by day because everything she saw, she wanted for her own.

And he planned to leave with her, to seek a life of happiness far away from the woman with enormous eyes and an empty heart. And in time the strangers will leave too, they will travel onward, but the woman who watched from the shadows will stay here forever.

There was a grim satisfaction in her superstitions finding fruition.

Three houses away the mayor was being eaten by snakes.

I find myself wondering now whether our reactions were unique, Violet, or whether every town would erupt like that when the switch is flicked, when reality is peeled back like the skin of an orange.

The recent traumas still too close to the surface, too many things to be forgotten, though how we tried, everything terrible still happening, over and over. The air shimmered with gold.

I could run towards beauty itself, become beauty itself, better late than never.

Wool-wrapped days, white light, something injected in the arm.

I think about how desire grows in the spaces around the known, where things are at their most and least real, where the terror of all the possibilities fracturing out through our lives is suspended, momentarily, so we can look them in the eye for once, and isn’t that what we are searching for when we debase ourselves for love, one moment of certainty in this strange and beautiful world.