Secrets, ranked
Anastasiia de Franckelle takes stock.
[This is another instalment of ALPHABET from my continuing novel VIYAKRA. This episode is brought to you by the letters A W O L]
Sometimes I go to the manicurist just so someone will hold my hand. My deepest sexual fantasy is that you see me cry and still find me attractive.
Like really sob, not just little whimpering, not a girlish whimper because oh wow all that for me. Aren’t I lucky.
My mother blames me for everything that happened, still. The definitions do not matter.
When I become too intimate with people I am often threatened with their disappearance. So I vanish instead. This has been consistent since I was fifteen or so. I have not said his name aloud beyond prayer since the shiva.
My mother still blames me for everything that happened. What matters is how you define it, now.
My deepest fear was going away without knowing true love. I am a child. I was not born lucky.
If I cannot whisper properly to you then I will put this on a billboard and hope that you pass it on the way to work or home or someone easier to sleep nearby. Lucky.
There is a small cancer on my back, upper right between the shoulder blades. It is growing, it has grown. It should be fine. My father has them removed often enough. But I am small. I am soft and stupid. I ate wrong and drank wrong and went out into the sun without a hat. I hated hats as a child. Even when I was good.
The cancer is in the spot I cannot reach when I put sunscreen on myself. Sometimes you can do everything right and it is still wrong.
Mostly it is that way, I think. But what would I know. What, what do I know except that it’s not fair. I wanted more time. Every hour with you from now on would not be fair enough for my sick heart.
Why didn’t we grow up together. You fool. Why didn’t you find me before all the definitions.
The same rules, same sun, beaches holidays time zone zip code phone numbers memorised without meaning to, without noticing. Dirt road newly paved. Salt in the air. Happy winds. Heights marked on the wall. Growing fine and straight.
I was good once and then all the words came. This is my five minutes of allotted self-pity per month. Hello. I am almost done. It all is. That’s the definition. This is how I define it.
I forgot the last thing to tell you. I am a little tired. My debts are clear. I’m not even lying to myself when I say that now. Tomorrow I will walk outside the fencing. There will be a sun that rises in the east and the sky will go mad with air pollution and longing. It will be beautiful.
I remember now. There are three scars on my left hand. I wanted to get them removed before I got married, really married, not the mistakes and the liquors but the cancer came first. I guess it always does. I guess some things do not leave you all the way.
One scar on the pinky, one on the ring finger, one on the place where the dead boy kissed my hand at the high school cotillion. They are paler than my normal healthier skin and raised. I see them whenever I see my hand. They glow like fireflies or radioactive daubs of paint.
No one else has noticed them, not yet. So I can get them removed and only you would know that they were ever there, ever existed.
I got them the day I tried to start running again for my emotional well-being, the July I finished losing the only baby I wanted so far. Sorry. That’s a long sentence.
There is a smaller scar on my right palm on the life line. Once it was my favourite freckle but then baby come and gone without me noticing and it changed colour so it was time for knife. A woman told me once that it meant something awful, permanent in my future so it might be good that it is gone but this is my five minutes of self-pity so be quiet. By “it” I meant the mole, not the baby or the knife.
Baby and hope and love and kind and nice and love are all four-letter words. Oh dear. Definitions unknown, unclear, forgotten.
Anyway I tripped hard while running in the stupid pink trainers I bought to encourage myself to make healthier choices and I slid about six feet, the length of the living man, across the pavement and kind of limped home like a sick dog.
It’s good you didn’t know me then, not well enough to count.
I went home and went back to work and it wasn’t until my brother came in and saw me kind of bleeding at my desk with the gravel still in my knees, the knees of an idiot, that I was like oh yeah I’ll get to that. I should wash up. I should get clean. I should find new words. But I didn’t. He came in with the first aid kit and scolded me and it felt good almost.
So that’s where the scars on the left hand come from. I think those are the ones that count but I’ve been wrong before. Top of palm then pinky then ringer. Courtship then promises then forever.
Tomorrow I am getting my nails done in the shade of your eyes which is maybe my final secret. This is how I keep you close. Look. Now you see everything I do.
Sometimes the manicurist will hold my hand back.
