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Who do you tell about the demons when the demons are the ones who you tell?
This was rural prostitution. We didn’t dress like the street workers in the movies. No spandex miniskirts or fishnet stockings. We weren’t Julia Roberts meeting Richard Gere. Our hair was greasy, we smelled of sweat, and there was little to do with our faces other than frown. We bit our nails until they bled and stared down the street while we wore thin coats and dirty sneakers in the winter. In the summer, it was old jeans and torn tanks, like what Daffy and me wore that first time.
Needless to say, sex for us was not something made out of love. I looked back on history, trying to find the elusive bed of roses. All I saw were women under the heel. They say prostitution is the oldest profession, recorded as long as history has been. In the Second World War, they called prostitutes “comfort women.” Those paid by the Japanese military to service upward of a hundred men a day. Some of these “women” were not women at all. They were little girls.
After I’d heard the word prostitute for the first time as a kid when someone had called Mom and Aunt Clover that very word, I decided I would be like the Greeks, the Aztecs, the civilizations before me, who had believed in gods possessing powers we humans crave. Prostitute. She would be a god with nine arms. An odd number that she swung back and forth with the pendulum of time. Prostitute. She would have nine hands, but only eight thumbs. Prostitute. Her hair blowing in the wind as she outruns all those who chase her. Prostitute.
No matter the power of my mythical female god, I knew, sitting there on that cold pavement, that there was little power women had on the street. Still I had to try. So I imagined my nine-armed god floating in the sky, her arms outstretched to me, bathing me in her warm blue light. Her long dress ...
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We humans have always been in pain. History tells us that in the artifacts civilizations have left behind. Pain is there in the broken vases, the fractured poetry, the overwhelming music we have played for centuries. We belong to grief until the engine goes out. Then we belong to the dirt, our bodies identical to other fallen things.
I touched the water with my bare hands, and the river touched me back with hers.
“Did you know our telescopes are strong enough to see sorrow from space, Arc?”
She drove, the windshield wipers kicking the rain out to either side, as we held our thoughts like a piece of hard candy. Something we could turn over with our tongue and make room for against our gum line and cheek.