Cursed Bread

by Sophie Mackintosh

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.

Sometimes, not very often, I found myself tied around the throat with a hot thread of panic at the inevitability of the days,

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.

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.

You never asked me what it was like to spend my life listening as other people spoke. You never asked what it was like to hold those words inside me, to decide what to share, what to insinuate, but mainly what to keep for myself, these glowing and sordid little secrets that sustained me.

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.

It’s risky to let myself become so drunk, it lets in that strange and searching light,

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.

Across the midday sky, a flock of pale geese flying elsewhere; I envied them too. But the sunlight on the river was still beautiful, at least, still pricked me with pleasure to see it. I was humiliated, but I wasn’t dead yet.

I think of her with compassion, and not just because I know she would hate that.