Choice Words Read online

  insides into order

  NAMES OF EXOTIC GODS AND CHILDREN

  Valley Haggard

  In the parking lot, there were protesters everywhere. I hated them. How dare they make something so hard so much harder? I’d never really felt the need to wear armor, but I wanted it then. To be shielded, invisible, invincible. To have the privacy of my own pain. There were a lot of forms to fill out and papers to sign. Big Will and I split the price fifty-fifty from our tips from the ranch, a big chunk of the money we’d planned to travel with when we were free. I scanned a list of horribles as I signed my name: bleeding, cramping, fatigue, and then, the worst of all, continued pregnancy. I thought that possible outcome worse than the possibility beneath: death.

  I hyperventilated on the table with the doctor’s hands and heavy metal tools crammed into my body. “Keep looking at my beautiful face,” the nurse said again and again, squeezing my hand as I tried to breathe, pain and fear and blinding lights tight and clamping down on the black hole between my legs. Finally, it was over, and somehow, they sat me up and put me back together as best they could. When Big Will pulled out of the parking lot, I mouthed “fuck you” to the protesters shouting in our wake, but the truth was, I didn’t know who I hated more: me or him or them.

  We returned to the ranch up Coffee Pot Road, leaving government land behind, zigzagging up the bumpy, impossibly deep grooves in the earth. I returned to the kitchen and the wringer-washer washing machine and the dishes and laundry as best I could. But I didn’t feel like singing along to the country songs on our little FM radio anymore. On my afternoon break, instead of exploring or hiking or writing, I wrapped myself in quilts and curled up like a baby.

  It was one week later that I got a call from my mother. The singular phone on the ranch was in a little alcove next to the kitchen and worked rarely. Phone calls were uncommon, though not unheard of. My mother’s voice came through the crackling static on the other end of the phone, reached through the line, and homesickness ached through my bones. “Valley!” my mom shouted. “The clinic’s been trying to reach you. They couldn’t get through.” I’d given my mom’s number as my emergency contact. I’d gotten into the habit of living places one could not call.

  “Oh?” I yelled back. The wranglers were starting to mill about, gathering for dinner. I tried to pretend I was alone in the room. “The procedure didn’t work,” I heard my mother’s voice say. The news bounced off and then thunked into my belly like a heavy stone. There was still a baby alive inside of me. “Mom,” I said. “I want to come home.”

  She sent me a plane ticket and by the next week I had packed up my canvas army-navy bag and was gone. It was too much to say goodbye to those mountains, to that valley, to the cabins and the lodge and Hooker and the horses and the flowers and my fiancé and all of the other wranglers I’d grown not to like but to love. I said this lie, “see you soon,” and returned to the clinic before getting on the plane so they could redo the job that had failed before. I cried the whole plane ride home, suspended in the sky above our country, freed from the cluster of molecules, the magical cells, the holy organism in my body that had refused to die.

  My mother picked me up from the airport and moved me into her queen-sized bed back home. I was bleeding and cramping and full of rage and sorrow and grief. Pain took hold of my guts and squeezed hard like those cold metal clamps were still there, as if they always would be.

  The hydrocodone and valium did not take away the pain but wrapped it in a flimsy layer of gauze. I lay in the fetal position, twisted up in blankets on my mother’s bed for a week as she nursed me back to health with broth and tea and love. Sometimes I still turn over names for the child that could have been, but I never come up with one that is good.

  DATE OF LAST PERIOD

  Amy Alvarez

  The first time I had my period, we had burnt

  Jamaican beef patties and broccoli for dinner.

  Blood came as a surprise—and not. All the other

  girls in my grade had already bled. The cheery red

  on my white cotton underwear would readmit me

  to their ranks.

  Over dinner, Mom explained pregnancy: endgame

  of this bleeding between my legs. Terrified of tearing

  as she’d described, I kept my legs closed for the next

  seven years—no glimpses, not a finger. Even tampons

  threatened the flower. It took a team of three girls

  outside a stall door barking instructions—tilt back, put

  one foot on the edge of the seat—before anything could enter.

  The first night I didn’t get my period, I don’t remember

  what I ate. He and I talked about whether this was what

  we wanted under a dim pendant lamp over the kitchen

  table. I decided on pills. I remember feeling my body

  readjust—like swaying at boat’s bottom, that gentle

  watery nausea. I remember mucus, and finally, the joy

  blood brought: bright red with clots the color of crushed

  violets.

  REMEMBERING HOW MY NATIVE AMERICAN GRANDFATHER TOLD ME A PREGNANT WOMAN HAD SWALLOWED WATERMELON SEEDS

  Jennifer Reeser

  You might as well cut a five-year-old child’s head off!… A woman will… take the risk of dying with her baby, rather than to live without a child.

  —Cherokee Shaman Wili-Westi, on learning of the white man’s abortion procedures, in “Cherokee Belief and Practice with Regard to Childbirth,” Olbrechts, Anthropos

  The shamans can’t contain what they don’t know.

  Showing such astonishment, they curse.

  They call it “murder medicine.” Wado.1

  They shame, “… for Womanhood would rather go

  And die than live without a child to nurse.”

  The shamans can’t contain what they don’t know.

  While she receives a bowl, but he, a bow;

  While warriors shake scalps, avowed in verse,

  They call it “murder medicine.” Wado.

  Into the osi menses shack, all flow.

  The midwives murmur, “Swallow Shepherd’s Purse…”

  The shamans can’t contain what they don’t know.

  Since Suicide Root2 will keep an embryo

  From coming—till the purchase of her hearse—

  They call it “murder medicine.” Wado.

  The watermelon seeds inside her grow

  Till she becomes taboo—and what is worse?

  The shamans can’t contain what they don’t know.

  They call it “murder medicine.” Wado.

  The watermelon seeds inside her grow

  Till she becomes taboo—and what is worse?

  The shamans can’t contain what they don’t know.

  They call it “murder medicine.” Wado.

  FROM “MAKE YOUR OWN WAY HOME”

  Leila Aboulela

  FRIDAY AFTERNOON

  It is strange to visit Tracy in a nursing home. Somehow Nadia associates the words with the old and the infirm, and Tracy has not yet said goodbye to her teens. But that is what the elegant gold letters say, and when Nadia rings the bell she asks herself, but what else do you expect them to write on the front door?

  Cosy, unobtrusive, the house is like any other in this quiet north London street. A quaint gate, a small front garden, and when she goes inside Nadia can see the back garden with a clothesline, a green lawnmower propped against the wooden fence of next door. There are four women in the room. Tracy, three others, and two empty beds. It’s not one of our busy days, the nurse later says. The curtains separating the beds are open and Oprah beams down from the TV, which protrudes from the wall high above.

  Bullying is the topic of the show. Childhood victims of bullying are telling their stories to a sympathetic audience.

  Tracy in a pink nightgown, lank hair, a little pale. No, it doesn’t hurt much now; it did at first. We all had it done, one after t
he other. I was first, then they brought me back here in a wheelchair. She tells Nadia about the other women in the room. The old-looking woman is Irish, Mandy or Maggie; Tracy isn’t sure. Her husband is sitting with her on the bed, they are laughing at the television show. The skinny woman with the permed hair, Kay. And the blonde with the great tan, she’s come all the way from South Africa. She was far ahead of us, Tracy whispers; you can still see now how big her stomach is. And believe me, Nadia, she soaked her bed with blood.

  The South African girl has a visitor, a similar-looking friend who arrives with flowers. Kay’s boyfriend appears shortly after Nadia. Fat and reluctant, he edges his way into the room, empty-handed. I should have brought flowers, thinks Nadia. But then she consoles herself with the thought that if she hadn’t come, Tracy would have been the only one without a visitor.

  Do you have change for the phone?

  Tracy takes twenty pence and gets up slowly from the bed, shuffling her feet around in search of her slippers. When she walks to the door, she holds her lower stomach with one hand and Nadia sees dark stains on her friend’s nightgown.

  Nadia lied to her parents to be here. Of course. What could she have told them? Long ago Lateefa unwittingly bestowed glamor on Tracy, making her friendship even more desirable. Lateefa said, That girl Tracy is no good. Don’t be her friend anymore. Perhaps she saw warning signs in the streak of color on Tracy’s lips, the awareness in her eyes. When Tracy wore a short skirt, she no longer crossed her bare legs carelessly like a child but did it deliberately with all the calm knowledge of an adult. She’ll have a bad end, Lateefa said, and Nadia knew that her mother’s mind held images of the fallen women of the Egyptian cinema screen. The wrathful uncle from the south of Egypt stalking his niece with a loaded gun. Only blood could wash his family’s dishonor. And off the screen, in urban Cairo, where there were no guns, there would be shame. Lateefa could imagine the shame. Mothers get divorced for this kind of thing. Sisters remain unwed. Grandmothers go to their graves before their time, crushed by sorrow. A girl’s honor is like a matchstick: break it, and it can never be fixed.

  Tracy has no gun-wielding uncle from the south. Her father will not divorce her mother because he already did so years ago. He went to Australia, and Tracy’s dream is that she will visit him there one day. She watches Neighbours with obsessive love, she has three stuffed koala bears in her bedroom.

  Tracy threw a tantrum when the perfect blue circle showed up on the stick she dipped in her morning urine. She could not believe it; such a thing could not happen to her. And today is a kind of relief; it is over at last. Time to get back to normal, to start pretending that nothing has happened.

  Her mother paid up the two hundred and fifty pounds without a fuss. Then she packed and drove with Tracy’s stepfather and the twins to a house-swap holiday with a family in the Black Forest. The travel plans were made ages ago, house-swapping takes a long time to arrange, and there was absolutely no way they could cancel. And as Stepdad said, was it fair that the family’s holiday be disrupted because of Tracy’s carelessness?

  So yesterday Tracy was counseled, as the law prescribed, today she is to spend the night at the nursing home, and next day she will go back to her everyday life. End of story.

  They called me white trash. Oprah’s guest says this and bursts into tears. Compassion gurgles around the studio audience. Only Oprah reigns plump and polished—the softest baby cheeks—coiffured, and coated with a yellow designer suit.

  Now the show reaches new heights: former bullies appear to confront those people whose childhood they ruined. Boos and hisses from the audience. Irish laughter from the bed in the corner. Nadia can see that Maggie and her husband are holding hands. I never get to see this show, she is saying to him. It’s the time when the children are always watching their programs on the other channel.

  But Nadia cannot laugh like them, her own childhood is still too close to her. She is moved by the pain unfolding before her on the screen. Was she bullied? Did she ever bully anyone? Uneasy thoughts. And why is it that, so many years later, it is so easy to distinguish the bullies from their prey? Adult bodies surrounding the children of long ago. The years have changed nothing.

  He wasn’t there. Tracy gives the coins back to Nadia. Let’s go upstairs. We’re not allowed to smoke in here.

  Upstairs is a bright room overlooking the front of the house. Oriel windows with seats all around, a high ceiling, sandwiches on a tray. Coffee, tea, a kettle. Magazines and pamphlets on the low coffee table, posters on the walls. “Have You Considered Sterilization?” … “The Morning-After Pill—Ask your GP about it.”

  Nadia chews a cheese sandwich, makes tea, leafs through the pamphlets. So what are you going to use now, Tracy, progesterone injections, the low-dose mini-pill, the IUD? She reads them out as if she is choosing lunch from a menu.

  Shut up, Nadia.

  Tracy lights her second cigarette, and for an instant the flame gives her features a delicate glow as if she is painted, not real. She snaps the match in her hand into two before she throws it in the ashtray.

  They sucked it out. The vacuum roared and sucked and gobbled. It’s a very loud noise, I told the nurse. Not really, she said, you must be imagining it. All the painkillers that you took. She held my hand and chatted to me to distract me. I lay down and it was like an initiation rite in those weird ceremonies they have in horror films. The contents of your womb, she called it. This is what they call it here. So many words for such a tiny thing.

  AN AVOCADO IS GOING TO HAVE AN ABORTION

  Vi Khi Nao

  An avocado is going to have an abortion. What is the grapefruit going to do about it? It hasn’t gotten it pregnant. Certainly not. It rolls its thick yellow rind back and forth when it pleases. Being a rocking chair isn’t going to help the helpless, pseudo-alligator pear whose flesh has turned vegan, whose blood has coagulated green. Six plump equidistant apples sit on the windowsill watching the landscape become an enclosed wardrobe. Tomorrow the six queenly apples will rot; today their bruised flesh will watch the horizon fold its polychromatic shirts into a void. The cucumber wilted in a clear plastic bin sighs, turning its round shoulders inward. Tomorrow its insides are going to slowly drip on its own crispy precipice before desiccating. The avocado can’t sympathize, but thinks: how can I carry a child that is larger than the rest of me, who looks nothing like me, until, of course, I rot? Is it possible that color dictates heritage? And nothing more? The avocado arches its back, twisting from side to side. The avocado won’t rotate any more after this. It is not a pervert in that way. No, no, no. Never that way. The avocado arches its back so that its round child can slip easily out of its blackish orifice. Having no hips and no pelvic bones doesn’t make it any easier to convert a life into stillbirth. It lives near indecent neighbors like the carrots. The firm long orange legs of the carrots have gotten very soft. So soft, like latex. That kind of tenderness is never good in the kitchen. The knife won’t know how to assert its whetted vocal cord. The pear is willing to compare itself to the avocado. It tells the soft, non-pearly neighbors: sometimes my flesh is so crispy that I can’t even pee out a seed. However, I am willing to force myself to pee out an eye or two—so that I can see what I am made of. So that I can gaze at my own image. Others, having gazed at me, tell me that I have hips like an avocado. I have enormous potential to birth a child. But I have a seed like an eye, a crack in the door, that won’t and can’t gaze back at me. The avocado replies, I don’t feel for you. I am only capable of an abortion. It won’t be long before I have to endure this annihilation that has blown into a planet.

  yolk (v.)

  Emily Carr

  he’s gonna havta reach inside you.

  he’s gonna do it. you asked him to. he’s gonna tell you how old it is.

  he’s gonna decide when old is too.

  then you’re gonna wait.

  you’re gonna stand against the wall in your paper gown.

  you’re gonna wait in line.
wait for him to vacuum inside you.

  you’re gonna listen. the other girls, like a sorority, they don’t consider

  this any more than the Piggly Wiggly line. for all they know, they

  could be buying lipstick.

  you’re thinking this is gonna hurt. he’s gonna havta reach inside, again.

  what’re you gonna do then?

  you gonna scream? you gonna clench your teeth?

  you gonna say to yourself, you gotta do this?

  he’s waiting, too. there’s a window, a TC, two face-to-face rows of

  stained upholstery. by now,

  it’d be Regis & Kathy Lee. he wouldn’t watch it; he’d be out smoking.

  he doesn’t smoke inside anymore, not since May.

  you’re gonna do this, for him, who doesn’t smoke inside anymore,

  who’s out there, wrapping his lips around the filter. his saliva wetting

  the paper, his fingers absorbing the sweet raw tobacco smell. he,

  who doesn’t know anything about this: how it’s like an assembly

  line, except it’s not assembling, it’s taking apart, tossing out, special

  receptacles.

  you’re gonna do this, right?

  you havta. you are not, you are not gonna chicken out now, not now.

  the corridor pans out, thins, readjusts.

  you are just not gonna do this. the fluorescents fracture into halos.

  time spools.

  you gotta remember what is now, what is here. the light disco-balls, in/

  out, light/dark. you can’t feel your toes, can’t feel your fingertips. the

  line of girls shimmies, sways.

  you gotta dance if you’re gonna keep perspective.

  gotta put one foot in front of the other & dance. you gotta find

  somebody’s hand, you gotta find their hand & hold on.

  you gotta find somebody who’s gonna help you do this, who isn’t