I’ve got twenty-eight bones in each of my hands. I felt absolutely sure there was something wrong with my hands; they never worked the way I thought they should. All my life I had dreamed of hands I could use. I wanted to hold people. I wanted to build fires. I wanted to go swimming. But with my big, clunky hands, I couldn’t do any of those things. I sat at home. I sat on my hands. I waited for the extra bone to fuse with its neighbor. It was, of course, wasted time.

So I fixed the problem myself. I opened up my hands. I split skin from muscle from fascia. I peeled each hand, like slaughtered bananas, and once the bone was out in the open- and let me tell you, bone is not quite as pearly, smooth and glimmering as you would imagine, in fact it is grey and spongy. And there, right below the metacarpals, was a large flat oval, gleaming in its superfluousness. So I pulled it out. Like cracking my knuckles, I pulled each finger’s support from its socket, and lifted the extra, nameless chunk of calcium out of its pocket. Then I pulled the muscle and skin back up over my fist, trimmed the extra skin and sewed it all back up.

Slowly, over the past few years, she has completely lost the ability to walk. Since that first slip and roll on the ankle, the cartilage, ligaments and bone down there in her foot have been crumbling, slow and steady, until finally they were absent from her gait. Admittedly, she could easily have replaced them with marvels of modern medicine, and in fact she walked for a few weeks on that empty bag of muscle (those bones literally just melted away, leaving the remaining structures of the foot relatively intact), but when she finally opened her eyes and let herself limp- it didn’t stop at limping. She fell. And in falling, she realized it was over and that never again would she walk. She stayed stock still.

root canal

I performed a root canal and blind-sided you with it,







and still you loved me. As you writhed and as I held you down next to me despite your enamel’s sound of deference as it cracked between the metal prongs of my pliers, I could see it in your eyes, the amber freckles of remaining love that let me know you would still love me even after I had ripped this tooth from your skull and replaced it with lead. The thought made me detest you, made me want to rip not only enamel from you, but then to scoop with my bare fingernails the pulp from the cavity- I will not stop there! I will heave each and every vertebrae from your spine, one by one, until your body matches your mind.

big hearted

I’m going to find someone with a big heart. 500g or more, at least. And when I find him-

Did you know that I have inhabited each of those four chambers? I have made my home within the red cushion of cardiac pressure. I built a bed on valves, on which it was impossible to sleep, next to the mush and rush of the constant bleeding. I traveled freely, opening doors to atria and ventricles, burrowing deep into those muscular walls, pulsating with them as they force ichor to where it is required. But I have never traveled with that gore. I have remained, like a stagnant drip of rot, violently affixed to the myocardium, a parasite you are too star-crossed to notice.

have you any idea?

This is the fluid mosaic model of the inner ear canal filled with the leaden heavy breathing of a familiar musculature. Watch the tiny bones within me quiver under your voice, watch them waver and final break, like a bough in a hurricane, leaving me deaf and dumb. And when you finally reach your loudest, I will revel in the following silence and the fact that soon your heft will be lifted from me and I will once again breathe for myself.

You are not allowed to touch me like that, with your hairy appendages brushing away my self security. You are not allowed to let me touch you, because we do not fit together, and as soon as you are on top of me I will want you off, and not only off, but as far away as possible. As soon as you are off me, I will run for my life into the shower to soak away, and dissolve like soap in the hot, sterile, tiled, solitary flow. I will run down the drains, staining the sewer with my shame at letting myself be touched by cave men from all ages.

My throat aches from the heat of your thoughtless spewing. No matter how much boiling water I pour down my gullet, those proteins will not denature, and I am left with the growing, squirming sensation of being your verb- an unwilling participant in the heat of alcoholic nights. I see the way you look at me in the dark, and I know that because I am talking to you this way, because I am putting my hand on your there, you are thinking that I agree with this and with you. Have you been so blinded by the preceding months? Have you really been able to convince yourself that this is possible? That it is possible for me to actually want your skin against mine? You are kidding yourself, you lunk. You ape.