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Jesus, the world is made of such awful poetry sometimes.
The dead woman stands there, just as before. Naked except for the white, blood-soaked cloth covering her head. From underneath the hood, thick drips of dark, clotted blood ooze down the woman’s sagging skin. Just-developed age spots freckle her flesh, rough scrub flanking the rampant rivers of her dark, purple veins. She’s sallow, livid, bruised. Her breasts hang like old meat cutlets. A wine-stain birthmark capping the curve of her left shoulder, once probably loved, kissed, marveled at as so perfectly hers, now stands like an infection point, an insult, an inescapable proof that this
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Fabric draped over her face, a deep, red, wet stain at the center, like Hell’s own maxi pad.
Abuse is its own kind of reincarnation, isn’t it? We become the ones who made us.
“Thank God you crumpled and didn’t just fall down onto your head,” the old woman is saying, feeling around my head in a way that’s reminiscent of Dr. Burton checking my skull for lumps. Only this time, the hands are caring, soft, slow. They’re checking for pain, not for imperfections.
My eyes never leave the spider—she’s as unruffled as lake water on a breezeless day. She has all the confidence a deadly thing should.
Come back tomorrow! Your life-threatening injury is important to us.
When I was a little girl my uncle Was a veterinarian And I was a little girl who loved animals I had a cat and a dog And once I asked my uncle (who was a veterinarian) Why does my dog love belly rubs But they make my cat attack? I showed him scratches up and down my arms.
He said the thing about cats you have to understand Is they are predator and prey They can hunt and pounce and kill But they’re small and light and probably Delicious So they take some things very very seriously I was a little girl when he said this But when I became a woman in this world I understood what he meant.
So much misery in this world just to give a few cruel men a quick spurt.
