Here There be Monsters

by A. J. S. Mims

pain.

  She’ll understand, he thinks,

  Her eyes dark tattoos.

  I’m afraid to hurt,

  He says, and begins to cry.

  Today she will cry.

  You left me, she says,

  Her heart a throb of pain.

  He loved me, she thinks.

  The grave a permanent tattoo.

  Now he doesn’t hurt.

  There is pain in remembering, he says,

  But not as bad as a tattoo I think.

  The hurt will fade with time. You won’t always cry.

 

  Choices

  This is not how I planned this at all, the first time meeting our daughter. I always imagined it be on my terms, a smoky bar late at night.

  Not a sun filled Starbucks, full of sad pierced college kids writing the next great novel on their lap tops. This is not what I wanted!

  I grip my tall chi tea so tightly my knuckles go white. I don’t even know what a chi tea is but the barista said I’d like it. I’d rather have scotch.

  I don’t even know what she looks like, this girl who is a part of both of us. I carefully blocked out the image of the squealing infant as I handed her over to her adoptive parents.

  I’ve been trying to decide what to tell her ever since I got the e-mail, the single sentence that threw me into chaos: “Can I meet you?” How do you explain yourself to a child you gave up?

  Everyone told me to have an abortion. You had just died, I was heavily using drugs again.

  “You can’t have this baby!” they all said.

  I wonder if that was more for them, though.

  Because even though I couldn’t keep it, I also knew I couldn’t kill it, this last little living piece of you.

  So I got clean. I carried the child and picked out a couple that wanted it. I didn’t tell them about you; it was still too fresh. I told them almost nothing because I didn’t want to get attached.

  I kept my eyes closed the entire time she was being born. I refused to hold her. I turned my head to the wall when they came to pick her up. I didn’t answer their tearful thank you, I just walked out of the hospital and tried to pretend it didn’t happen.

  But I can’t tell her that.

  I know her the second she walks in. She looks just like you, same curly blond hair and gawky awkwardness. But she has my cold gray eyes. It’s my eyes that scan the shop, trying to find something she’s never seen. Her eyes snag on me and she stalks over.

  Anger covers her twenty year old face. She scowls as she sits down and it’s a twenty-year-old me scowling at my mother.

  “How did you know it was me?” I ask quietly, trying to stop the silence before it really starts. Wordlessly she pushes a picture across the table.

  It is a picture of us, taken a few months before you died. We stare at the camera, young and reckless, cocky grins flashing. I barely recognize myself. I haven’t smiled like that in over twenty years.

  “Oh.”

  “Please don’t think this is the start of a relationship or that I’m going to call you mom.” She takes a deep breath and runs her finger through her hair. “Sorry, but I have parents. I just wanted to know where my genes came from.”

  “Of course.” This is hard, much harder than I imagined. And I have no idea what to tell her.

  “Is that my dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where you guys even together or was I just a drunken mistake?”

  “Yes, we were together!” I say from between clenched teeth. I glare at her. As angry as she thought she was, I had two decades worth of fury bottled up. “We were going to get married!”

  “And then I came along and ruined everything,” she said sarcastically.

  “No.” I rubbed my finger over your face in the picture and even though it’s been twenty-one-years you absence hurts just as bad. The pain never really dulled.

  “He died.”

  Her face went white and suddenly she looks much younger.

  “I’m sorry,” I said quickly, not really sure what I was apologizing for.

  “My parents never told me that.”

  “They didn’t know,” I sighed. “I found out I was pregnant the day after his funeral. I knew there was no way I could raise you. You would have been too much of a reminder. I was afraid I would start to hate you. So I decided to give you to someone else to raise, where you would be loved the way you should be.” I paused and looked her full in the face for the first time. “You look just like him.”

  She doesn’t say anything, just stares at the table. After a moment she slowly reached out for the picture. Our fingers brushed for a second.

  “I don’t think I need to see you again,” she says as she stands but the anger is gone. Maybe she decided I was too pathetic to hate.

  “Okay. I think that would be best.” She stares at me.

  “Here,” I say abruptly, taking my necklace off. A Celtic warriors knot in a leather thong. “It was you dad’s.”

  “Thanks.” Her fingers closed tightly around the keepsake.

  She stares at me a moment more and then walks out. I watch her, this girl who is part me, part you, but part something else, too, and it’s like watching you walk away.

  I wait until she gets in her car, and then I put my head on the table and cry.

 

  Art Form

  Trying to stay

  Sober

  Is a trapeze act.

  Take a deep breath

  And you’re flying,

  Flipping, twisting, turning.

  For a moment it’s

  Exuberance.

  Freedom.

  You’re going to be okay.

  And then your hands

  Get sweaty and you

  Slip.

  The ground rushes up

  And all you can think

  As you fall is

  I’m failing.

  I’m tired.

  I give up.

  And with a crack,

  You hit the ground.

 

  Wasteland

  “Your whole life you can be told something is wrong and you believe it. That was what happened to us, wasn’t it? It was like when we were little kids and we played games on the ivy – covered hillside in the backyard. We were warriors and wizards and angels and high elves and that was our reality. If someone said, Isn’t it cute, look at them playing, we would have smiled back, humoring them, but it wasn’t playing. It was our transformation. It was our own world. Our own rules.”

  -Francesca Lia Block, Wasteland

  This reminds me of us, and the way we played in the backyard. We could be anything we wanted; that backyard was our desert and jungle, the bottom of the sea or the surface of an unknown planet. We could be explorers or princesses, thieves or warriors. I’m sure to our mothers we were just cute kids playing. But in our minds it was real. We really could be anything we dreamed up inside our little heads.

  So what happened? We seemed to lose the magic ingredient that made our fantasies reality. Did we just grow up? Gaining wisdom and knowledge can kill your dreams. We weren’t cute little kids anymore, we were girls and later women, with all the perils inherent to our gender. Suddenly we knew we couldn’t be anything. People limited us, so we started limiting ourselves. We weren’t going to be models and astronauts and the first woman president. Instead we became the ones no one thought would amount to anything. We knew how to have fun and raise hell; so who cares if we were smart or talented or still secretly driven. We spent so much time playing dumb that we started to believe we really were stupid.

  I guess that’s where the anger came in; yes, and the violence. ‘You don’t like the way we are well fuck you! We don’t like you either!’ It started to be easier to use fists instead of words, we became proud of our scars and bruises and scowls. We became broken and battered, ground zero of blasted bomb sites.

  People want to blame the booze and the drugs and the men on our downfall. But it was lack of
attention that caused us to act out. You may have hated us, but at least you saw us.

  “I am woman, hear me roar”?

  How about, “I am woman, see me standing silently in front of you, with frustration in my eyes and a knife of distrust at your throat”?

 

  Strength

  You knock me down.

  I taste iron from my busted lip

  And spit blood into my palm.

  I wipe it away.

  Slowly, I stand and grin,

  My mouth a smear of gore.

  I take another hit but stay on my feet.

  I laugh at you.

  I’ve been fighting my whole life,

  Against giants with sledgehammer fists.

  You don’t scare me,

  Even when you break my nose.

  I am tougher than you, stronger, too.

  I may have a black eye tomorrow

  But you will look worse.

  About the Author

  A. (Amanda or Mandie) Mims resides in a cave located somewhere in Antarctica, but every summer she dreams of flying north. She lost both arms in a tragic wombat accident, and now composes all her works with her toes. Sometimes, she still feels the wombats gnawing on her ghost fingers. This is her second collection.