Content Warning: Gore, Bodily Harm

A previous piece, somewhat linked to this one.

            There’s a lot of hurt there, between my ribs. I’ve known it for years, and have listened to it fest and churn, to eat away the cartilage, suck out the marrow, and crack the bones in turn before replacing them with barbed wire, wrapped around my spine to twist me up and hunker me down in hopes of making it hurt less.

            I consider often what it means, why it exists, and what to do about the metal wires wrapped beneath my skin. The logical conclusion is to take it out, but if I do that, will my chest cave in, unprotected? Will my lungs thrum against fragile skin, my heart press and beat against a thin layer of protection? And what of my spine—surely it has grown to accept the wires, to allow them to exist here in this world inside me, to grow around them and weld organic and inorganic together.

            When, I wonder, did they become part of me? I consider high school, when things are completely wrong for any teenager. Nothing is quite right at that age, and that always seems to be where one points. But no, that is only when I began to notice how breathing hurts, and how turning to quickly tore at my flesh. It was younger, then. Perhaps forever.

            I have found an alarming amount of books that speak to me on this subject. “Walk out of that shadow,” said Tess of the Road. “You are religion’s womb,” I heard The Priory of the Orange Tree whisper. Perhaps I am old enough to recognize it, to see that these have been here all this time, that me, these wires, and these books have been simply waiting for my mind to recognize them as connected.

            It is difficult to heal when you’ve decided to draw a line through your chest with a knife, to slowly, bit by bit, soften the wires’ sharp edges, to debarb the barbs. It aches terribly, and blood oozes over my hands and into my mattress at night. Perhaps it would be better to do this by daylight, but I wonder what the neighbors would think. Would they consider me mad? Aren’t we all full of sharp edges to remind us to be good? To remind us that there is either the straight and narrow or the wide birth to the flaming gates? With the prick, how would we know? How would I know, as a woman?

            Maybe it is because of this that I have chosen night as my safety, swaddled in shadow with only a reading light to illuminate my work. It is careful, and it is slow. Only enough to open up the wound here and there, giving my time enough time to heal between. But reopening the wound only makes it sore, and I wonder what it will all look like when I am finished.

            I have started to cut a horizontal line across the vertical, near the top. It helps me reach the further parts of the pain, to soften them, to stitch it back up at the end of the evening. Each new book I realize a new barb has found itself inside me, and I work to address it. I will not heal by tomorrow, or by next week. I will not heal beside the neighbors. I will only heal when I can do this properly, in the light, outside without a shirt, lying in the grass. I will heal when I can breathe again, without unnecessary pains placed inside me.

            Yes, I do remember now. The day I received this infestation of metal and wire. I remember the cutting, the implant. I remember the words that stoked its growth. I remember how they said it like it was a gift.

            “Women are equal, but…”

            The sentence shouldn’t continue past the comma. I twist a barb down. My God did not make me something lesser. I run my finger across the gore in my chest, ensuring it is softened. I am not an item, and I am not yours. I gather my needle and thread, and there, in my mattress during the dead of night, I begin to stitch myself back up again.

            I refuse to be your womb.