First, Body Read online

  Dora sees and takes her one chance, gathers her clothes in a ball, slips from the bed and out the door.

  In the bathroom she wads the paper gown in the trash with the soaked pad. She stuffs paper towels in her underpants. She doesn’t look. What good would it do to know? Her shoes are in the other room where the woman has stopped wailing.

  The window here is wide enough, and Dora Stone is gone.

  I see her on the road, riding. I know it’s true but still don’t quite believe she’s doing this. She’s dizzy. She can’t sit down. The air rises in waves off the pavement. It’s not the heat but the light she can’t bear. She weaves and cars honk, but nobody stops and the sound of horns is a distant sound to her, a sound from her life, before. She can’t see anything except her own hands on the bike, gleaming metal, and the road moving under her. She means to go home, but it’s too far, and she goes to the field instead, lies in the refrigerator instead, and this is where the things she can’t remember begin:

  the boy on the bike

  the mother on the porch

  the dogs in the dark

  their smell, her smell

  and then the men

  the needle, the mask, the scissors gliding along her skin.

  This is where you wake in a white room. This is where the mother, your mother, opens her eyes at exactly the same moment you open yours.

  You do not think of God or mercy. You think of water, cows and trailers swirling across flooded lawns; you think of wind, the furious swaying heads of palms in the moments before they fall; you think of your grandfather’s cities, the ones he built and can’t remember now, the cities where streets flow with mud and hail, rivers of forgetfulness, and the roofless identical houses split open, walls and rafters splinter on the ground; you think of boats, their crammed cargo, arms and legs dangling over rails, torsos twisting, all those dark bodies straining toward this shore.

  Now it’s the blue room at night, and Estrelle stands in the corner, and Dora thinks she should have gone home hours ago, and why does she stand there, and Estrelle says, Don’t you ever tell.

  She thinks he comes again. She thinks he’s a scatter of stones, but it’s only rain. She thinks he must know what’s happened to her body, how she’s forever changed. But only Estrelle comes, only Estrelle speaks. Boys like mine still rising out of the swamps because of ignorant girls like you.

  He who’s touched her everywhere, who touches her now, who’s asked with his silent hands what happened here and here — green bruise, white scar — he who’s seen her body in every light, touched her body in every dark place, whose fingers brush her lips like moth wings, he never comes.

  He’s lying in his bed and she can’t believe he doesn’t feel the hard table beneath them, doesn’t see the paper birds, doesn’t ride and ride and then lie down forever in the white box, doesn’t lie down to burn in the field with her.

  It’s September. Dora Stone is still fourteen, starting ninth grade. She trims the dark ends of her hair, lets it grow back blond. She visits friends. She swims in tiny turquoise pools. She drinks rum and orange juice like the other girls. A glass shatters on concrete. She laughs at her own stupid hands, her own foot bleeding.

  Dora’s sixteen, and Estrelle’s in the kitchen crying, saying her poor mama’s dead at last and Lewis going to be married next week, moving north with his pretty wife, baby coming a little bit soon but not too soon, and Lewis gonna get that training, be an EMT like he always wanted. Did he? Dora doesn’t know. Think of it, her boy, saving lives every night, and yes she’s worried and yes she’ll miss him but mostly she’s proud. Estrelle’s in the blue room in the middle of the night. She’s got her hand over Dora’s mouth. Grandfather’s had the seventh stroke. The wind blows the curtains over the bed; the woman’s gone.

  There’s a man on the television. Mugged having a heart attack. Detroit. Lewis, is this where you are? Revived by an off-duty EMT. Did you save him? Did you rip his shirt, put your hands on his chest, your mouth on his mouth?

  Dora’s twenty. She lives alone, has left her mother forty miles north in the big house, alone. She has a job.

  Collecting urine.

  Taking blood.

  Everybody in this city is terrified: the men with big veins, the women with no hair, the little girls pissing in jars. Nobody wants to find out. She knows what to do. She knows how scared they are, that later, when they know for sure, they’ll be hurt all the time. So she’s careful with the needle and the rubber hose. She doesn’t want to hurt them now.

  She’s had lovers, a string of them, a parade — the serial lovers, she calls them, one after another. She’s dangerous still — this body, this skin, this blood — don’t touch, me if you don’t want to know. But they do touch. They come and go. They pass through her and under her. They pin her down.

  Sometimes she thinks he’ll come the way the others come. They’re muddied reflections in black water — they’re imprints in white sand — they’re mouths opening in the rain — her lovers — they’re a line of men in white masks and white gowns — they’re the wrinkled sheets — they’re naked boys. They want her to lie down.

  He thinks he was the one in danger. You could argue with him now. You could show him your rubber gloves, the vials of blood, the spit in the sink, the warm yellow fluid trembling in the glistening jars. You could tell him how careful you are at work, how careless at home. You could tell him how it felt on the hard table, on the long ride, in the refrigerator, in the dark room, how it was through the days of silence that followed and now through the years of fear when you think this will happen again and again — to your body alone — this will keep happening until one day, one day you really will be gone. You could tell him how terrifying it is to live in your bright skin. You could make him touch the place it still burns. You could touch him. You could open his veins. You could drink his blood. You could tell him the one thing that matters now: Listen, it won’t be that long — unknown and unforgiven as I am, I want to live in my body somehow. You could ask him who he saved tonight. You could make him tell you what he sees when he closes his eyes and the heart beneath his hands starts to beat again.

  About the Author

  Melanie Rae Thon is an American author of novels and short stories. Originally from Kalispell, Montana, Thon received her BA from the University of Michigan and her MA from Boston University. Her writing has been published in The Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize anthologies, The O. Henry Prize Stories, Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, Conjunctions, Tin House, and the Paris Review. Thon is a recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Reading the West Book Award, and the Gina Berriault Award, as well as two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and one from the Tanner Humanities Center. She has also been a writer in residence at the Lannan Foundation. Thon’s works have been translated into nine languages. She lives in Salt Lake City and teaches at the University of Utah.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The excerpt from Joan Brady’s novel Theory of War is taken from the edition published by Fawcett in 1994.

  “First, Body” first appeared in Antaeus and was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories of 1995. “Father, Lover, Deadman, Dreamer” first appeared in Story. “Little White Sister” first appeared in Ploughshares and was reprinted in Syracuse University Magazine. From “Nobody’s Daughters,” “In These Woods” was first published as “What She Wants” in the anthology Women on Hunting and was reprinted in Hootenanny; “Xmas, Jamaica Plain” first appe
ared in Ontario Review and was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 1996 and Granta; “Home” first appeared in Bomb. “The Snow Thief appeared in The Penguin Book of International Women’s Short Stories and Writers Harvest II. “Necessary Angels” first appeared in Paris Review.

  Copyright © 1997 by Melanie Rae Thon

  Cover design by Tracey Dunham

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-8460-7

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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