Maylin and the Tunnel of Love
Vertical Girl | Horizontal Girl — Dead Inside Girl /
The sewing needle had its own hole through the leather of her wallet, like a prowler’s tool that unlocked her skin. It came from her mother’s pincushion, a stalk among the steel Cyclopes. But she had another use for it.
Maylin lay in Smith’s musty bed, occasionally flicking the ants from the gray sheet. She leaned out and fished the wallet from her purse, flipped it open, freed the needle, and tested the point on the pad of her thumb. Pressed harder. Then against her thigh, the wide top of her thigh like another face that faced you as you doubled over and folded over you like a jackknife.
Poking the skin, making tunnels in the top layer thin as paper brought back an insensible joy. It was a secret gift, a wild experiment. She did this for a while, then pricked through another layer, watched it bubble white over the needle, and made a long stitch. Then another. Deeper, she found the pink, stinging layer and healthy blood like a cardinal on the snow, and sucked the blood between her lips. It was like making out with her thigh-face, and she did. She loved it. She loved it.
Tasting the iron and salt in her mouth, testing the sharp point on her tongue, it was something of her own while she waited for Smith to return. Maybe she’d pierce it. What would he think? It was hard to imagine what might shock him or bring him back.
He was already gone, already someone else’s. Maylin wondered who was the other girl Smith saw when he wasn’t with her. Did the other girl also see a face in her thigh, did she also face the wall while he screwed her from behind, or did they do it face-to-face? What else did he do to her? Did he blindfold her or kiss her sweetly? These questions were unthinkable before she knew him the way she knew him now.
In the beginning, Smith was a portal. On the other side, Maylin was a different person down to her cells, maybe her DNA. She was gripped by vertigo that she took to be the definition of love. Bumped into door jambs, tripped over her feet. He changed her from vertical to horizontal. She understood that what she had believed to be her faults — the scars, the tuneless skin and thick hairs, the stunted bones underneath — were irrelevant. The shocking truth was that she could be altered so fast and so completely. So willingly.
Now the only thing left was to finish the job Smith had begun. She pressed the needle into the thick flesh of her tongue and cried at the pain, spit it out in her palm with a trickle of blood. Leaving him before he left her was going to be as hard and painful as piercing her own tongue or bloodying her own face.
Spring again, birds and green grass. At home in her room, she willed the phone he’d given her to vibrate, flipped it open to see if she had missed his call, strained to hear the sound of his truck. But Smith had abandoned her and the bright days were like tin pinwheels. One day the phone displayed “NO SERVICE.” The portal had closed. Once a vertical girl, then horizontal, now she was Dead Inside Girl.
This girl hitched into town, charmed bouncers and got into bars. Told lies to explain why she hadn’t come home, why she was sick, how she forgot to say she was sleeping over at a friend’s and couldn’t call for some convoluted reason. This girl drank until the ground swooped up and she blacked out. Sometimes she woke in her own bed, sometimes in strangers’ beds, but always crushed and never loved the way Smith had loved her at the start, and never loving the way she had loved him.
This is an excerpt from a novel in progress. Read more.
