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Tag: domestic violence
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Bra
flash fiction by Vanessa Chan
I recently injured my arm, so I cannot reach around my back. That means I have to put my bra on the wrong way around. I start with clasping the bra in the front, under my breasts, then pulling the band in a circle along my skin until the clasps reach my back, before I can pull the straps and cups in place. It chafes.
My friend Shauna used to never wear a bra. She told me that bras are symbols of the patriarchy, that they have no purpose, that the underwire served only to point and lift our breasts closer to boys’ vision. I told her she was lucky because her breasts were small, perky. She told me I was too self-conscious and needed to be more confident; she said that’s why Tommy Patrice had picked her to go the prom with, even though he had asked me out first, and I had the bigger, rounder breasts.
The other thing about Shauna was that she died a week before high school graduation. She was found face down in a monsoon drain floating in shallow brown water that smelled like trash. One of her arms had been dislocated; it twisted behind her like it was waving goodbye. Everyone knew Tommy did it, but they never charged him. Only some people blamed him. She was easy, they said. She didn’t wear bras, they said.
It’s true that breasts have no muscle mass. Except for the nipple, they don’t react stimuli; they can’t be reshaped, they can’t point at things, they can’t protect themselves. Not like arms – arms can hold you up, turn you around, beat things away, get bigger and stronger.
But lately my twisted arm means I can’t do the things I usually do to keep myself safe. I can’t grip the keys between my fingers as I walk down the street. I fumble longer trying to get myself into my door. I don’t have the strength to push away unwanted advances. I am unstable, off-center, easy prey. I tell myself that Shauna was wrong. Bras aren’t just to mold our breasts and give them a sense of direction. No, bras are like armor, the underwire protecting against the elements, the cups keeping out unwanted intruders, the clasps making it just a little harder to break in. And so, I twist myself around every day to buckle my breastplate.
I will not be hunted.
Vanessa Chan is a Malaysian writer based in New York. Her work is published or forthcoming in Atticus Review, Jezebel, and Mekong Teahouse, and she recently won the Fiction Factory Flash Fiction contest. She is an MFA candidate at The New School and writes about race, colonization, and women who don’t toe the line. Vanessa can be found at vanessajchan.com or on twitter at @vanjchan.
Armor photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash
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River Bottom – flash fiction by Misty Urban
She sat on the deep wooden porch in the chair her grandfather had made, and she rocked. The evening clouds, dark in their underbellies, clumped and hurried toward the line of beech trees lining the creek. The insects hummed and the birds chittered and the frogs croaked nervously, and once in a while the big garrulous ga-THUMP of the bullfrog belched through the other noise.
From the bedroom inside the house she heard the same sporadic hacking, the guttural expulsion and then the dry wretched scratching for air. Behind it was the rattle she’d heard before, when the grandfather who’d shaped this chair had lain, years ago, in that very bed, choking up lungs tarred black by a life in the coal mines. When she heard that rattle, she came out on the porch to wait.
No one worked in the coal mines anymore; now they blew up mountains and scraped the top flat as an angel cake, pushed the blasted rubble and the twisted roots of the great oaks and spruces into the valleys, suffocating rivers, towns, a whole way of life. Fast, maybe. But not clean. Death never was.
Some time ago, before the belly of the sun had reached the far blue hill, he’d stopped calling her name, ceased the faint, desperate cackle for “Ell – Ell—Ell.” Soon it would all cease, all of it. The spitting up of his saliva and the stomach lining poisoned by lead, nicotine, the many strange compounds with their haunting names that he had breathed by choice and by lack of choice all his life. The querulous “Nell! Get in here, you good-for-nothin!” The curses, the hand flat and hot against her ass or the back of her head, or pointed, as it had once or twice, toward the shotgun leaning behind the door. The hands that had been so eager and fumbling in their cold meaty softness on her wedding night, when she was bought and unwrapped like a slab of meat. All the times that heavy imprint had come with a “Dammit, it’s for your own good!” or “Why you make me do these things?” or “Wipe that look off your face, or you’ll get it agin.” You could hardly blame a man for doing what he’d seen other men do all his life, for doing what he was driven to do. But you could hardly blame a woman, could you, if the bruises went deep and lodged there, waiting.
She wasn’t unchristian; she’d left a glass of water by the bed. He couldn’t reach it. It wouldn’t help. Tomorrow she would look on a new sunrise, a new land, the land that had belonged to her family for a hundred years and would now belong only to her, the fields, the creek bottom, the ancient trees that had not yet been gutted by disease or rot or bulldozers dowsing for coal. She listened to the dry scratching voice and the way it blended with the frogs, like a chorus of nature, no sentient thought behind it but the desperate wish to survive. She listened the bullfrog bellow and stop. She rocked. In a little while the faint, damp, muddy river smell would come drifting up on the fog.
Misty Urban’s work has appeared in Karawane, Talking River, New Letters, Indiana Review, and Quarterly West, among other places. Her short story collection A LESSON IN MANNERS won the Serena McDonald Kennedy Award and was published by Snake Nation Press. I teach writing and coordinate the Writing Center at Muscatine Community College in Muscatine, IA. Visit the author online at MistyUrban.net.
Image courtesy of Giles Lambert