The Book of X

by Sarah Rose Etter

  VISION

  I’m the queen now. All the students surround me with their offerings at lunch.

  “I’ve brought you an orange,” says a boy with one lazy eye.

  “Thank you,” I say. “That’s very kind.”

  “I’ve brought you crackers with cheese in the center,” says a girl in a plaid dress.

  “Wonderful.”

  They come forward one by one, each with a treat. I smooth my own dress down over my flat stomach. The offerings rise up around me, growing like sweet palaces.

  IN BED THAT NIGHT, I SLIDE MY HANDS down. I run my fingers over my knot.

  I try to tell myself I don’t mind it so much. Under the light of the moon, I picture my teeth growing into big fangs. I widen my mouth, let them catch the breeze. I close my eyes and try to believe, half-girl, half-snake.

  THE NEXT MORNING, MY MOTHER SITS at the kitchen table. Her yellow house dress tents over her knot, big as a cheap sun. I spoon cereal into my mouth.

  “Will you call the doctor?” I ask. “Will you ask him to unknot me?”

  “That’s not how it works,” my mother says, smoking. “And it’s the weekend. They don’t work on weekends.”

  “Why don’t you ever try?”

  “We’ve been over this. The doctors don’t give a damn about it.”

  “They screamed at me again. At school.”

  “I used to spit at them when they spat at me,” my mother says.

  Then she stares out the window into the long horizon as if in a deep trance, as if staring into another time, as if I were not there, never born.

  THAT AFTERNOON, WE’RE IN THE LIVING room. We are cleaning again.

  “These curtains are a mess!” my mother says.

  She lifts the fabric of the curtains like strange brocade hair.

  “And now what is this?”

  She pulls one of my father’s bottles from the ground, half-full of liquor.

  “Motherfucker,” she whispers. “Motherfucker.”

  She slams the bottle on the living room table, then sits down beside me on the couch, so close our knees bang. We face the bottle. Anger shimmers off of her in hot waves. I stay quiet. I know how this goes.

  “Now,” she says, “we wait for this motherfucker.”

  The sun sets, and the moon rises. We fall asleep on the couch. When the sun rises again, my father still hasn’t come home.

  “Time to get ready for school,” my mother says.

  She slides the bottle back behind the curtain, a strange magic trick, the evaporated day.

  VISION

  My father has special places for the bottles: Behind the toilet, in the back of the truck, beneath the pillows of the fancy sofa, beneath the chair in the living room, in the shower, in the trash can.

  “You’re hiding them everywhere,” I say. “I found one behind my bed last night.”

  “It’s not what you think. Please don’t tell your mother,” he says.

  “It is too what I think. What will she say when she finds out?”

  “You can’t tell her. You can’t, I’ll stop.”

  The world will spin on as it does until you do something to change it. I pull each bottle from its special place. I stack the glass bottles, half-full of clear liquid, on the front lawn, in the sun.

  The pile is bigger than the front door, bigger than the truck. I hurl my body at the pile of glass and begin to smash the bottles one by one, shards glinting in the sun like a new future.

  AT NIGHT, I LAY MY HEAD IN MY mother’s lap.

  “Unknot me,” I sob. “Please make someone fix me.”

  “There’s nothing we can do,” she murmurs.

  “Kill me then,” I say. “Please.”

  My mother exhales smoke, stubs out her cigarette, then puts her cool hand on my forehead, a rare touch.

  WHEN THE HOUSE IS SILENT, I SNEAK into my father’s office. This is my favorite place.

  The room bursts with him. The shelves are lined with his favorite objects: Paused lava rocks, bleached-white bones, books about meat, empty bottles that catch and refract the light like diamonds.

  I sit at his desk in his red leather chair. I spin the chair a few times. I open his desk drawer. The silver key to the Meat Quarry gates glistens against the black liner. I clench my fingers around that cool metal until it aches, then slide the key back into the drawer.

  A map of the Meat Quarry lines the office wall behind me. The quarry is mapped like veins of a heart: fat arteries, thin arteries, all connected and winding. Areas with the best meat are marked with a red X.

  I run my fingers over the map, trace the arteries, memorizing paths until I hear the front door open. I sneak out, heart in my throat.

  EACH DAY AT SCHOOL, I STARE AT BODIES, memorizing their limbs, their smooth lines. The body of Sophia is my favorite.

  A PORTRAIT OF SOPHIA: LONG BROWN hair which shimmers where mine is dull, narrow shoulders where mine are gangly, long legs, no knot where I am knotted.

  IN THE MORNINGS, SOPHIA WALKS SLOWLY into the classroom as if covered in sleep. Sophia wears a red dress, then a blue dress, then a green dress. In the afternoons, Sophia laughs in the lunchroom, and light bounces off the white of her teeth. Sophia knows a joy I do not know.

  I watch Sophia move and I want to move like she does. Some days, Sophia catches me staring and waves. Sometimes, I lift my limp hand and wave back.

  I don’t know if my wave tells the truth, which is: I want to move like you do. I want to slice you open with a knife. I want to hide my body inside of yours.

  TODAY, MY MOTHER WANTS TO HELP. SHE closes my bedroom door behind her then sits beside me on the bed. The heat of her breath scorches my face.

  Close up, her wrinkles are deep canyons. I imagine myself walking through the chasms of her skin.

  “We need to do something about your looks,” she says, running a hand through my hair. “Let’s start with the clothes. The magazines say yellow is the color this season.”

  She walks to my closet and pulls out an old yellow dress made of lace. I shake my head.

  “Put it on! It’s fun to try new looks.”

  “I hate this dress. It’s too hot.”

  “Just do it!”

  I strip off my old blue dress. I slip the yellow fabric over my head. She yanks up the zipper and the bright lace tents around my knot.

  “Now these,” she says, wrapping a single strand of pearls around my neck. The pearls are tight, hot, plastic.

  She walks me into her bedroom. We are surrounded by her special creams, the ghost of her perfume, facing her big mirror.

  “There now,” she says. “Isn’t this just perfect? Shouldn’t we do this every day? Let’s take a picture!”

  IN THE PHOTOGRAPH, I STAND NEXT TO her mirror in the dress and the pearls. My eyes are red as if I have been crying, as if I want to remove the pearls, the dress, my skin.

  OUT UNDER THE BURNING SUN, MY brother digs the red meat up out of the earth, filling silver bucket after silver bucket after silver bucket. I imagine it that way. Then he is showered, clean, in fresh clothes at the dinner table.

  “Big day in the quarry today,” he says.

  We fork bland cubes of meat into our mouths.

  “It takes a gut instinct, son,” my father says. “And you have it. Boy, I wish I had it like you.”

  The room falls silent after this rare praise. My mother exhales a plume of smoke. The meat takes on the scent.

  AFTER DINNER, I CUT THE FLAT- stomached women out of my mother’s magazines.

  They wear bathing suits or dresses cut in at the hip. Slicing the pages gives me peace, silver metal humming through the paper until the women are separated from their scenes.

  Inside the dim light of my bedroom closet, I tape their torsos to the wall, floor to ceiling. I call them The Sophias. They are the girls a boy would like to touch.

  ONE DAY, SOPHIA SPEAKS. SHE IS WEARING a pink dress, the light from her mouth making her hair and her eyes and her skin brighte
r.

  “Why do you always stare?” she asks. “I hate it.”

  “I wish I looked like you,” I blurt.

  “No, you don’t,” she says. “It’s all the same no matter how you look.”

  The lie makes her a friend.

  I BEGIN TO BRING SOPHIA TO THE ACRES each day after school. We spend afternoons exchanging secrets, whispering about boys. We nod into each other’s hair.

  “Let me see your knot,” she says one day.

  I don’t fight. I stand in the center of the living room and lift my dress up slow as an ache. In the afternoon sun, my knot looks even worse, each stretchmark illuminated.

  “Well,” she says flatly. “That’s disgusting. Pull your dress down.”

  I sit back on the couch, dying inside, until she puts an arm around me, and whispers in my ear.

  “I think I saw Jarred staring at you today.”

  JARRED IS TALLER THAN THE OTHERS AT school, lanky bodied. His hair is short, uneven, cut over a kitchen sink. A dirty streak of freckles crosses his nose, cheeks.

  Under his skin is an anger that casts a shadow around him.

  “Why are you always looking at me?” he asks.

  I lift my eyes and stare right into his face.

  That’s when I realize it: His left eye is lazy, the pupil unfocused, staring off into another world. His right eye pierces into me like a knife.

  I TELL SOPHIA WHAT’S IN MY INSIDES.

  “It’s awful inside of me,” I say.

  “What’s in there?” she asks.

  “I have a pit of badness in my stomach,” I say.

  Then we sit in the quiet of the confession.

  VISION

  Under the fluorescent lights, I am gaping wide. My incision is wide and long, from hip to hip, across my flat belly, right where a woman would grow a baby.

  With each breath, black blood gurgles out from the slit. My insides are no longer red. Now, my organs are black, no longer soft, now covered in dark sparkling crystals.

  I can’t stop looking at my terrible insides, at how wretched I have become there, how beautiful the rot is.

  My wound keeps glittering with each breath, a terrible evening of stars shimmering inside of me.

  EACH WEEK, MY MOTHER TAKES ME TO visit the bodies of my grandparents. We walk to the edge of The Acres where there is a cemetery squared by a low white fence.

  “It keeps the wolves out,” my mother says.

  Crooked white crosses spell out their names in script above the dates of birth and death. We place small offerings on low grassy mounds.

  “They’ll love this,” my mother whispers.

  The offerings: Flowers, small sugar cookies, rosaries, a small cheap statue of an angel. Against the crosses, the gifts look wrong. They will spoil in the rain, melt down to strange, warped blobs of colored sugar and plastic.

  “Now, isn’t this nice?”

  My mother sits between the graves and caresses the grass.

  “I just miss you so much,” she says to the ground, her sob a fist which clenches the heart in my chest.

  I leave her side, wander the edge of the cemetery. My eyes land on a black shape beneath the grass, a rocky mound. I lean down. It is a tiny tombstone, smaller than the crosses.

  Stephen X

  B: Jan 3

  D: Jan 5

  “Don’t look at that,” my mother hisses. “Get over here, that doesn’t concern you.”

  “Who is it? Who is Stephen?”

  “Who do you think it is? Use your head.”

  A hollow feeling enters my chest and stays there through the drive home, through dinner, until I am in my bed, wrapped in my sheets, still as a body in a grave.

  VISION

  My father guides the truck over the land through the town to the big cemetery. Here, the strangers are buried. The sun is fat and hot in the blue sky.

  “You ready to play our favorite game?” my father asks.

  “Yes! Let’s play it!”

  He stops the truck and we climb out. The steel black gate lets out a low moan when he unlatches it. We step into the cemetery, long green grass sprouting up between the headstones which jab up out of the ground like strange granite teeth.

  “And... GO!” my father shouts.

  I work my way through the cemetery, weaving through the graves. I get lost in the names, the small tombstones.

  My father is always faster than I am. He starts shouting his numbers. “1913! 1908! 1898!”

  I shout mine back once I catch up, heart pounding. “1916! 1884! 1911!”

  “1879!” my father yells, and he is the winner.

  We climb back into the car. He puts a very sad song on the stereo and hums along as he drives us to the ice cream store, the second part of our ritual.

  “I’ll still buy you one,” my father says.

  We both buy vanilla. We don’t speak on the drive home, just listen to the very sad song again and again as he navigates us home.

  ONE AFTERNOON IS DIFFERENT FROM the rest. Sophia and I are alone in the house, which is quiet. I like the silence like that, a blanket.

  “I want to teach you a new game,” Sophia says. “I learned it from Jarred. Let’s go into your bedroom.”

  In the dull afternoon light, she climbs into my bed with me.

  She slides her knee between my legs.

  “This is called rocking horse,” she says. “Jarred loves this game.”

  Then she moves her leg until my face flushes and my body trembles, until pink sweetness explodes from between my legs and floods my veins.

  AT LUNCH, I CHEW A SANDWICH. JARRED does the same. His eyes catch mine. We lock gazes until he slams his sandwich down on the table.

  My pulse quickens as he walks to my table. He gets close enough to drop his head to mine, his lips near my ear.

  “Stop looking at me, you fucking freak,” he whispers. “You’re disgusting.”

  He walks back to his seat and sits down. I keep my head down, fill my mouth again with bread.

  VISION

  I go straight for my father’s tools. I find a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. The tools are heavy and cold in my hand. I trust metal.

  In my bedroom, I strip off my clothes. The pliers in my right hand, the screwdriver in my left. I wrap the mouth of the pliers around the first twist of the knot. Ijam the screwdriver into the knot’s crevice.

  I pull with all of my might, my teeth grinding against each other. I want the pliers and the screwdriver to splinter me, I want to undo myself. Blood rushes from my knot in thick red streams.

  My bedroom door opens, and my mother fills the doorway.

  “What are—” she starts. Then she is on me, ripping the tools from my hands.

  “What is wrong with you?” she demands.

  “I want it gone!” I scream. “I want to be like Sophia!”

  My mother puts me into the bath, both of us silent, only the pink water making sound. Soon I’m surrounded by the warm water, eyes closed. Then my mother’s hand is on my cheek.

  SOPHIA LIVES CLOSER TO THE SCHOOL. She takes me home one afternoon. At her house, everything is proper.

  Her mother is in the den. Her mother is a thin, sharp woman. She is precise as a knife. She says, “No sugar, remember,” and hands us carrots to eat.

  At Sophia’s house, there are rules about sugar, screaming, laughing too loud. We go to Sophia’s room, which is pristine and pastel pink. We sit on her bedroom floor. I confess again.

  “I feel so sad some days,” I whisper.

  Pain has been welling up inside of me: My knot makes me other.

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  I run a hand over my stomach. I feel as if I am from another planet.

  “I just want someone to take it away,” I say.

  Sophia nods. In her eyes, I see a big warmth which expands. She reaches out and touches my hand. My pain becomes a bit smaller. We don’t play rocking horse at Sophia’s house, but there is this.

  I WALK
WITH MY BROTHER INTO THE Acres. The land stretches all around us. My brother carries his mallet and shovel. He’s meant to test my instinct.

  “How do you know where the meat will be?” I ask my brother. “Teach me how to sense.”

  “Dunno,” he says. “It’s like I have a magnet in my gut and it pulls me there.”

  “Find one then,” I say.

  We keep walking until a small hum comes from my brother’s mouth. It sounds like the thrum of metal.

  “Here,” he murmurs.

  The ground is nothing but sparse dirt. I stomp a foot to be sure. It feels no different than any other land under foot.

  “No, no. Don’t do that.”

  His breath quickens. He stands strong on a certain spot. His fingers move to the buttons on his shirt and he undoes them one by one. Bare chested, he lifts his mallet into the air above his head and brings it down to the ground.

  The earth shakes with the puncture. The mallet leaves a deep dent in the dirt.

  “Let’s take a look,” he says.

  We bend over the new hole, stare down into the deep dirt.

  “See, the dirt gets redder at the bottom. Step back.”

  He lifts the mallet again and drops it once more into the same hole, driving deeper this time.

  We lean over the hole again, which slowly fills with red liquid. Blood rises up from the meat below to the upper crust of the soil.

  “Red never lies,” he says, grinning. “That’s how you know.”

  He grabs his shovel and digs. Blood rushes forth with each new slice into the earth. Soon, he is covered in it. My brother keeps digging and digging, down to the meat, a slick machine.

  TODAY, MY MOTHER IS FOCUSED ON illusion.

  “We must do something about your face,” she says.

  I follow her voice into the yellow light of her bathroom.

  “Look at you,” she says. “You’re a mess.”

  She pulls her makeup from the cabinet. Small pots of color cover the counter alongside sharp silver instruments, black brushes.

  “Let’s start with the eyebrows,” she says.

  She brings a thin pair of tweezers to my face. She grasps a single hair and pulls. Tears well up in my eyes.