The Book of X

by Sarah Rose Etter

  I WEAR A NEW RED DRESS TIGHT AT THE waist. Pain still shoots from my abdomen, but less now. I make my way to the office. In the streets, the sun shines and it is for me. Joy rises up through the earth into my legs and into my body, the world a beauty I am part of, everything fresh, blank, clean. I walk to the main streets, chin up in the crowd, finally part of the throbbing city.

  “What are you smiling about, you ugly bitch?” shouts a man on the street.

  “WELL THERE SHE IS!” THE BOSS ROARS, standing next to my desk. “Welcome back! How are we feeling?”

  I beam a weak smile. The office hasn’t changed the way I have changed: The walls are still dull, the cubicle gray around me.

  “I’m great,” I say. “How have things been around here?”

  “Not the same without you!” the boss says. “Now I can’t comment on where you’ve been, for legal reasons, and I also cannot tell you that you look fantastic, for legal reasons.”

  “OK,” I say.

  “Let’s make this a great first day back!” he says, and I return to the notes.

  IN THE LUNCH ROOM, I SPOON GREEN split pea soup into my mouth.

  Brenda walks in, a pink barrette holding her awful bangs back.

  “Haven’t seen you in a while,” she says. “Whatcha got there?”

  “Soup,” I say, gesturing at the soup.

  “What kind?” she asks.

  “Split pea,” I say, gesturing at the soup again.

  “You look different,” she says.

  I shrug, blush, look down into the sea of soup.

  “Guess Dr. Richardson really fixed you up,” she says, sliding her sandwich between her thin lips.

  I picture myself as a lean new animal. I imagine it: Tearing her limbs from her body, lifting her torso up as an offering to the sun.

  I SIT IN THE DIM LIGHT OF THE BAR. THE sunlight only comes through when the door opens. The scent of urine radiates from the bathroom.

  A man takes a seat next to me.

  “What a beautiful day out, huh?” he says.

  I nod. I drink red wine from a splotched glass.

  “So, what do you do?” he asks.

  “I type notes,” I say.

  “Nice. I’m in sales.”

  “I don’t know much about sales.”

  “It’s complicated, not worth explaining,” he says, loosening his tie.

  IN THE DIM LIGHT OF MY KITCHEN, HIS mouth tastes of beer and golden coins. I let his hands run over my smooth abdomen, a belly like all of the other bellies in the world, and he presses against me and then we are in my bedroom and he is sliding my dress off, and in the shards of light from the window, he runs his mouth over my breasts.

  I do something I have never done before: Clothing shed, I climb on top of him, legs on either side, and let my body into the light, into full view. I move my body against his, the sensation building between my legs, a heat that will expand, explode. But he is suddenly still, not moving, not touching me.

  “What the fuck is this?” he asks. “You’re all fucked up. What are these fucked up marks?”

  “No, I just had a surgery that...”

  He pulls away from me, the warmth of his body replaced by cold air, by nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I can’t do this.”

  Then the familiar symphony: The apartment door shutting quietly, the sound of his car door opening, the engine starting, the rubber, the asphalt, the long silence until morning, the world grinding on the same as ever.

  SOME DAYS, I SHED MY CLOTHES AND take inventory of my new body in the mirror.

  I am still thin at the arms and legs, brown hair softer and smoother. My eyes glint with a bit of suffering. My lips are still too thin, my jaw more uneven, my ears less noticeable.

  My abdomen is flat and smooth now, the rebuilt stomach perfect in shape, taut. But it is marbled with red scars, puckered skin, a mosaic of old stitch work railroading across the flattened land of my stomach.

  Sometimes, when I look at myself in the mirror, the world warbles around me, a trick of the eye, as if I am in another life. It feels like staring through heat rising off of the asphalt, the mirage of my new knotless body.

  ON FRIDAYS, I SLIDE GOLDEN COINS FROM the velvet pouch. I begin to save some coins in my underwear drawer each week. I save for a vague future that I cannot imagine, but which I can feel coming down on me with the pressure of a burgeoning storm.

  IN THE BAR, I PICK UP ANOTHER MAN. This one is short, eyes bloodshot, reeking of old cigars. He doesn’t hesitate on my body.

  “It’s all fair play,” he says when I take my clothes off.

  He moves against me until he finishes. When he sleeps, he snores. I stare up at the ceiling, still wet.

  In the morning, he is gone.

  I WAIT FOR MY NEW JOY. I TRY TO SENSE my new happiness like meat in the ground: I press my belly against my bed and wait for happiness to run through my veins like thin gold thread.

  My body is slack now, knotless.

  At times, I feel limp, worn, a frayed old rope. The photographs flash through my mind: My small knotted body swathed in fabric at the hospital, my mother and her mother before her, me in the yellow lace dress with the pearls around my neck.

  There is no photograph of my new body yet. There is no one to take the picture.

  I WAIT FOR THE WORLD TO CHANGE around me. I search for a hole where a new life could begin. I look for clues on the sidewalk, in the patterns of the clouds, in the trash cans of the neighbors, in a pile of my hair swept from the floor.

  I look for signs: Coins on heads up, four-leaf clovers, rabbit feet, a symbol.

  I type the notes. Once home, I cook the chicken. I sleep. I save the coins.

  Knotless, my life carries on. The days flick by and nothing changes. It is an endless loop of the same movie, the same woman in motion, over and over and over again and is this a life?

  THE NEXT NEW MOON, I DO NOT BLEED.

  I GAG LOUDLY, VOMIT IN THE BATHROOM, spirals of bile yellowing the water.

  Each night, I pray it isn’t true. But I know it in my blood which pounds: Mother, mother, mother.

  Weeks pass, my belly growing bigger and bigger, a shape different than the gone knot.

  “I have made a new knot,” I whisper to myself, a hand on the small hard bulge of my abdomen. The scars from the surgery spiral around the new shape. It is as if I have warped my own history again.

  ◆During pregnancy, a woman’s heart gets longer and wider so her ventricles can pump extra blood for the child

  ◆In order to prepare for birth, the body produces a hormone that softens the ligaments so the baby can pass through the pelvis during labor

  ◆During pregnancy, the uterus will stretch from the size of a pear to that of a watermelon

  ◆Babies cry before they are born

  SOON, I PICTURE IT CONSTANTLY: Me with the child, out in the sunshine. The child reverberates in my bone marrow, a new life emerging from the old.

  I close my eyes and try to sense her. I try to make the shape of her out: Her torso, her core.

  The same scene plays on repeat: The knotted girl bursting through me, splitting me open like my mother and her mother before her.

  THE BOSS PEERS DOWN AT MY BELLY.

  “You’re sure you’re not expecting?” he asks. “Just hitting the donuts a little hard maybe?”

  I hunch over my belly to make it look smaller.

  “Not expecting anything,” I say.

  I wait until the bathroom is empty before I retch into the toilet.

  In the break room, Brenda looks at my green soup.

  “Maybe you want to try a diet or something,” she says.

  “Not a bad idea,” I mutter.

  I imagine my hands around her throat.

  “I know a guy who can sell you a nice juice cleanse.”

  I imagine my hands clenching.

  I WAKE WET. I SHAKE OFF THE DREAM and sit up in a strange new warmth. Beneath the white blanket, my legs a
re soaked with blood. The mattress is soaked, slick.

  Blood rushes out of me when I stand. I jam a pillow between my legs and make my way to the bathroom.

  Skin against the white tile, another wave of pain washes over me. The pain tears through me again and again. I writhe on the floor.

  When it subsides, I pant on the ground, face on the cool tiles, body still heaving. I climb up the sink, clinging to the porcelain for strength, my child gone.

  VISION

  It is pregnancy season. I am big in the belly, my body heavy and aching.

  My mother stands next to me. This is called tradition.

  She helps me pull off my black dress, revealing my stomach.

  “You look just like I did when I was pregnant with you,” she says.

  She runs her hands over my knot, and I look at my belly with her.

  “You’re going to make us so proud,” my mother says.

  My belly extends like the moon, the growth of the child creating new purple marks across my skin.

  When the contractions come, they come hard. My mother soaks cloths in ice water and holds them to my face.

  Inside, the baby keeps moving, keeps forcing itself down, I am at the mercy of fresh pain. My mother holds me tighter as I twist.

  My moans keep coming until my mother’s hands appear, holding a black strip of fabric, which she slides between my lips, tying it tight around my head.

  “When it gets bad, bite down,” my mother whispers.

  She moves down to my splayed-open legs, finding another angle to help, a place to put her empty hands.

  The black cloth holds tight in my mouth and I bang my fists onto the ground, my roaring muffled.

  A huge contraction tears through me, the biggest one, a quarry of red slicing open, a path, the pressure of the child’s head breaking through my smaller skin, making it wider, splitting my body.

  My mother catches the bloody child in clean hands. The first wails begin.

  My mother brings the child to my arms. I look for the only thing I wanted, the only thing that would make me happy.

  “She’s just like us,” my mother says, her voice cold.

  I could feel that all along, but prayed it was not true. I rip the black cloth from my mouth and wail.

  ◆Greek women believed they would miscarry if they fainted, got scared, or had strong emotions

  ◆The majority of miscarriages are the result of random genetic errors that make normal fetal development impossible

  ◆Roughly 50% of pregnancies ultimately become miscarriages; often, a woman will not even realize she is pregnant before she loses a child

  ◆Miscarriage occurs in all animals that experience pregnancy; in many species of sharks and rays, stress-induced miscarriages often occur at capture

  IN A DREAM, I CARRY MY CHILD ACROSS The Acres and to the Meat Quarry. My child is in a small box. I hold a silver shovel.

  I walk through the wintered tunnels, the meat less red now, brown instead now, glisten gone. I take the left, though the walls no longer reach out to touch me.

  I dig into the ground where they don’t harvest, I dig down into the dirt where they’ll never go. I dig until I sweat, until I am covered in the red dust, until I am in a small hole deep as I am tall.

  I climb out, chest heaving. I pick up the small box of my child. I press my lips against the top. I try to remember a prayer and no prayer comes.

  The box looks even smaller at the bottom of the hole. I move the red soil like a machine: bury, bury, bury.

  I walk home slowly, covered in the red.

  EACH DAY DEATH WAITS FOR ME. SOME days are clear as a river, others, a black serpent waits in the bush, watches me, ready to curl around my body, clench down, take pink air from lungs. I return again and again to the memories, to the barn, the white house, to the Meat Quarry long since closed, gated up.

  VISION

  My daughter latches to my breast, pink lips, pink nipple, the flow of milk. It is the morning, golden light through the window, a room of white. Her small hand curls around mine, fingers clenching, the crown of her soft head translucent, downed.

  Outside, the world goes by, first a car, then a truck, then a train. A small hum begins in my gut and works its way up to my chest, through my throat, past my lips, the light vibration rocking her as she sucks, nourishing until a thin line of blood works its way into the milk, pinking it, until she pushes my breast away, her mouth opening into a dark red void.

  PART III

  I RETURN TO THE ADS AGAIN. THIS TIME, I look away from the city, away from the sharpness of the skyscrapers, the elbows, the hard corners of the metal dumpsters rotting in the street.

  The ads read:

  SHACK AVAILABLE

  LAND PARCEL EXPIRING, CHEAP

  75 ACRE VACANCY WITH ELECTRIC NEAR ROAD LAKE ACCESS ACRE MUST GO

  SMALL CABIN FOR RENT

  I circle the fourth listing, then go into the country. The train hauls its body over the tracks. The sun glints through the window and my hollow womb echoes back.

  Flashes as we cross the landscape: My mother’s hands and their specific sunspots, my father’s stale scent in the morning, the pattern of my brother’s beard patching across his cheeks.

  The small town is in the country, but far from The Acres and my parents. I step out of the tiny train station and into the town proper, four blocks of shops: a bar, a grocery store, a post office. Blue-black mountains rise up beyond all of that.

  I follow the directions and move through the blocks, then take a few lefts and a right down a dirt road. An old man waits next to a mailbox, his eyes watery and blue.

  “You look a little fancy to be all out here,” he says, gesturing at my dress. His denim jacket is worn, dust on his boots. He is not new.

  “I have other clothes.”

  “Got a feeling this isn’t for you, out here.”

  “Why?”

  “Smaller than the city.”

  “Just let me take a look.”

  He gives me a hard squint.

  I FOLLOW HIM DOWN THE PATH TO THE small cabin. The cabin is painted red, the color of old blood. Inside, the walls are freshly painted. The cabin offers: A small bedroom, bathroom, cramped living room with wide widows, a kitchen with a small stove and a small silver sink.

  Through the windows, I can see a lake glistening in the distance.

  “I’ll take it,” I say.

  This sentence is followed by a series of transactions.

  BACK IN THE CITY, I LIVE A HALF-GONE life for weeks.

  “I’d like to resign,” I tell the boss. His face is rutted with wrinkles by now. Where have the years gone?

  “Resign? What for? The company needs you.”

  I picture the company as a child: A series of cubicles with eyes and a mouth which is pressed against my breast, latching.

  “I’m moving away.”

  “You had a strong future,” he says. Anger rises in his face.

  “My last day will be in two weeks,” I say gently.

  “Ungrateful, always were,” he whispers. “You have betrayed us.”

  EVENINGS AND WEEKENDS, I FILL THE open mouths of empty brown boxes with my life. Clothing, bedding, small statues and rocks, a single photo of my brother, the remaining soaps and shampoos from the bathroom. The objects of my life take on more weight when combined.

  Soon, there is only my mattress on the floor with a lamp beside it. I sleep there unmoored. Each night, I dream of knots: Squares, lariats, double bows, rolling hitches, surgeons.

  ◆The clove hitch is the weakest of all common knots

  ◆To loosen a tight knot, one must rub it against a rock or soak it in water

  ◆The Mystic Knot is a combination of six infinity knots and a symbol of long life full of good fortune

  ◆Whenever a piece of rope is knotted, it is weakened

  EVENTUALLY, THERE IS ONLY THE bareness of my apartment, virtually scrubbed of me, more sense of ghost.

  ON MY LAST DAY, I SIT
IN THE LUNCH-room, spooning green soup into my mouth.

  Brenda sits across from me, sliding bland crackers into her mouth.

  “We dropped another bomb today,” she says through the crumbs.

  The sound makes me murderous, rage in my blood.

  “You know, they deserve what they get,” she says.

  I can picture it: Me slamming her body to the ground, then doing something deadly. I wash my soup bowl in the silver sink. I do not say goodbye to Brenda.

  IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR OF THE moving truck, the city stays static. I half-expect the skyscrapers to collapse or explode. But the knives stay upright as always, glint once more in the sun, the city grinding on.

  I UNPACK MY LIFE INTO NEW arrangements.

  I feel sure, during moments of unpacking, that I have moved to this town to die. I have no work to do here, only my savings of gold coins to chip away at.

  AT NIGHT, THE QUIET OF THE COUNTRY roars, the sound loud and dark as a void. I can hear my organs grinding against each other beneath my blanket. I can hear my ovaries begin their monthly symphony.

  MY DAYS PASS ALONE. I DON’T SEE anyone. I keep my body inside the cabin. I don’t brush my teeth. I sleep like a dead woman. In my dreams, I am still knotted. In my dreams, I am knotted and I am digging holes in an endless field. The dirt rises up around me like dirty palaces.

  FINALLY, I NEED FOOD. I WALK TO THE grocery store. The sun beats down on the dust, which kicks up around my footsteps. The light inside the grocery store is not fluorescent but a warm yellow.

  I fill a small basket with red meat, eggs, spinach, lemons. The cashier has her hair pulled back, no makeup.

  “New here?” she asks, as if newness is a disease.

  There’s a sharp intake of breath behind me, and I turn around.

  The man in line brightens into view: He is tall, bald but with a thick dark beard, dark flashing eyes. He wears a blue button-down shirt and dark jeans.

  THE STORE SEEMS TO RATTLE AROUND us. Our eyes finally meet. I have the sudden urge to place my hand on the side of his face, tenderness surging in my chest.