Cursed Bread

by Sophie Mackintosh

I am a woman talking to myself alone in a room and I am a woman mute in a police station and I am a woman in a bar who nobody pays any attention to. 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.

She orders her groceries in hampers from the city. She bathes in milk and rose petals. She sits out on the balcony all night, doesn’t sleep. The ambassador rescued her from an asylum. She was a cabaret singer. She was a whore.

Hello, I’m Violet, she said. Elodie, I replied, wrong-footed.

when nobody was looking I slipped one empty shell into my bag, then another, and then I knew I was drunk too, though I hadn’t even finished my second glass of wine.

He put the hand not smoking the cigarette on my knee and it felt like the most intimate thing we had done in months. I refused to be undone, remained focused—on the couple watching us, the smoke, the fingers of the ambassador which seemed to be pressing

and met not my husband’s eyes, but my own.

We were running out of steam, had reached the limits of our imaginations. I could see my husband losing interest. Were you in love? Violet asked, leaning closer. Did it throw you both into love? It threw me into something, he said. He looked into my eyes in an imitation of the way they had looked into each other’s, convincing enough to an unsuspecting witness. To know it was an imitation was my punishment.

What about me, I thought, but they didn’t mention me at all, not then and not later, maybe not at all.

If you eat the bread, you’ll die,

What’s your first memory of me? I asked him. The real one.

In the years after, I grew to treasure the memory of that moment, of seeing my future before I knew what it was, seeing the pair of them before they were my husband and my father-in-law, when they were just two strangers.

and they reminded me of my own family, whom I never thought of if I could help it. This filled me with both sentimentality and unease, set my heart’s scene, because sometimes we return to what we recognize, whether we want it or not.

he looked up at me and ordered a boiled egg and bread. Black coffee. I didn’t know that he would become something to me and that that something would change with time, would grow dearer and then less dear, less strange and then more so, the memory of the old affections jostling for space with the new hurts, incredible, recriminatory.

I have always been a sort of archivist, glutting myself on what has been left behind.

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.

his hands not on me.

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.

I think I was? Do you lay bread on your tongue and think of me, Violet, do you swallow it like a sacrament, do you still get down on your knees? Is there someone on their knees before you,

clutching at your ankles, murmuring words for whatever ghost is watching at the door to overhear and remember?

In between, the remembering.

But sometimes I just want to be witnessed. Sometimes seduction is the last thing on my mind.

have sinned and sinned and sinned and will do it again, gladly, until there is no redemption left.

couldn’t tell if what excited me was the image of Violet and my husband specifically,

I know that feeling now, coming to consciousness as if after an accident. Desire can do that to you.

What have I done? you asked me sometimes, never what has been done to me?

She reached for the bread then and took a bite, and then another, chewed it slowly. It’s good, she said, her eyes wet. Her throat remained still.

She had realized that the barrier between one world and the next was not really a barrier at all, at best a sheet of silk, able to flicker and let the light through.

I picture you sometimes as a set of Russian dolls, each layer revealing nothing except a tiny, weaker version of yourself, at the end only hollowness. You made yourself a character in your own story, at least as much as I made you a character in mine. Now it’s impossible to know what I was told and what I created. You become less than, more than, yourself. You take up the very air and I can hardly breathe,

but I have faith that it will exhaust itself one day, Violet, that one day I will be done with all of this.

my life began or ended, depending on how you look at it—a

I’ve learned that the only way to really be seen is through desire.

Even blood washes out, or you can fill your mouth with things that hide the taste of it.

towards the bigger bonfire, and with one graceful leap, no hesitation, he jumped right into its heart. And in the moment before I screamed, mine just another among everybody else’s screams, there was a strange sense of rightness, of homecoming—a sense that underneath all the wine and dancing and forgetting, this was what we had really come to see.

He felt more for his bread than he would ever feel for me.

that beauty is relative.

Perhaps I miss the lavoir most of all. My circle of women is gone; Mme F is still in the asylum, Mme G is dead, Josette too.

And isn’t that a marriage. Two people locked in a box together. I still talk to him, Violet, almost as much as I talk to you. Even a mouse in a trap will self-amputate rather than remain stuck, I tell him. If you’d only touched me, I tell him. All that summer I was dying over and over, I tell him, but I’m only telling the air, the empty room.

My husband chewed and chewed, with the mouth that never kissed me.

It’s hard to tell what an image will come to mean, what a person will mean, when you are still seeing it for the first time, and some things you always see as if for the first time.

Last night there were feathers growing on the palms of my hands,

At church on Sunday the ambassador inserted himself next to me, where my husband usually sat. None of us commented on it, but Violet took up her usual place on my other side. As the sermon began, his leg pressed against mine, nudged harder, purposeful. Flesh braced against flesh. I recognized the scent of the ambassador’s sweat from their pillows. On my other side, Violet took my hand. Her fingers went to my pulse. Your heartbeat is so fast, she whispered. You’re not well. I looked straight ahead. She put her arm around me to reach him, to stroke his shoulder with her fingertips.

I have lost so many hours, days even, to remembering these moments that I never lived.

My stolen memories of your life reach back into the distant past, far before I ever met you.

What does it feel like to be found in that way, to have somebody walk into your life, put the money down on the table and say, Come on, or did he say, Let’s go, or did he say nothing at all, did he sit momentarily and give an account of himself, did he threaten or bribe you? Were you afraid, secretly, were you hoping, secretly, that he would take off your head, take the decision away from you? All we can be sure of now is that there was a split in your life, a before and an after,

We don’t all get those kinds of stories in our lives, Violet. Mine have never been like that. But would you like to hear them anyway? You never asked me about them when we were friends, but perhaps you’re ready to listen now.

Shame was another dress you tried on, discarded, lavish in your waste, a curiosity to be played at. It meant nothing to you.

mainly I felt grief at the waste of all the years, how much my body could have been touched, and yet how rarely it was touched.

Don’t be shy, she said, soothingly. We’ve shared so much. Believe me when I say there’s little I haven’t seen. She patted me encouragingly. Next time you try to fuck my husband, though, I’d get new underwear. You look awful in this. I’m not sure he would even have been able to get hard.

Three blows, she said, counting them on her fingers. One for each of us—me, you, and him. Three blows for the woman who watches everything and sees nothing.