Nonfiction | Carter Williams

There was a soft pile on the sidewalk by the high school. It was unnoticeable really, huddled into the grass, but unfortunately, since my eyes are friends with my feet, I spotted it quickly. It’s a small animal. Was a small animal. The bits and pieces left were raw and bloody like the inside of a rotted pepper. It was curled round as if it was sleeping, skin peeled away like it’s summer and there's no AC. Plum bruised and meaty. 

I had half a mind to wonder who might have done it. Was it a student, playing God in the bed of his pickup? Was it a serial killer in the making, practicing the perfect way to carve? Did they toss it from a window or place it gingerly? Maybe another animal killed it; probably a more logical conclusion, but my mind disagreed.

A human leg is composed of four bones, twenty-four muscles, and five arteries. Like cogs in a machine, they enable us to walk, to cramp and spasm and bleed. These parts allow me to take my recommended ten thousand steps a day. As if I’m a windup doll, I’ll go as long as they let me. I can ignore the ache in my shins like I deserve it, picture the tibia tearing through my skin with morbid fascination, remembering the basketball player that enraptured my fifth-grade class. 

I envy my friends who can observe the lovely and alive, capturing photos of bugs or tucking rocks into their too-small pockets. Unlike them, I’m just aware enough to avoid being thrown across the pavement by a driver on their phone, or tossed in a trunk by a man who swears his dog is sick. 

Instead of the sticks and rocks and bugs, I focus on the aforementioned scenarios. Maybe it’s a part of womanhood, or being raised with the internet where I have easy access to missing person databases and true crime specials. Maybe it's a dark part of me I’d like to find an excuse for. I picture myself dragged into the trees and bushes, sticks or gravel digging into the multiple groups of muscle that make up my thighs. Time how long it would take to grab my taser and if I can’t reach that, I wonder if my hands are strong enough, if my anger is strong enough. If I could be Judith Slaying Holofernes.

•

There’s a lingering violence threaded quietly through my childhood. A soft undercurrent I barely notice. It didn’t come from my parents, who were loving and kind and God how they yelled sometimes but whose don’t? I mainly deserved it, with my sharp words and disdainful eyes. I grew up clutching at my patellas, huddled under a desk and praying that my mom wouldn’t get shot protecting her students. I painted Caravaggios in my head. Googled what bullets could do to the human body, what muscles and tendons and bones looked like in the aftermath.

I was gifted pepper spray when I moved away for college and a knife when I started walking home from work. I faced the harsh reality that men my father’s age can find me attractive, even if I’m the same age as their daughters.

I’ve never been catcalled on the sidewalk and I hate that it makes me wonder if I’m pretty enough. I’ve never been hurt by a man and I hate that it makes me feel lucky. The word rots in my mouth. Lucky. My body hasn’t been touched by someone who thinks they have the right and I think that means I’m lucky. 

Sometimes it feels inevitable. Like I’m waiting for the day I get pulled into the bushes. The day that I can look at The Abduction of the Sabine Women and know exactly how they felt.

•

The animal hadn’t looked smooth from afar, I couldn’t yet see the purple veins or lidless eyes, just the pile of organic, forgotten something. It was clean, all things considered, no spatter or strings like a Pollock; peeled to perfection, gently. I haven’t a clue what it was. It wasn’t big, a squirrel or rabbit maybe, something weak that I could’ve held in cupped hands. The eye was small and it wouldn’t stop staring. Could something survive that? Was there agony, was it quick? 

I tried to do research, make sense of what it could have been, scanning article after article of hunter’s guides. This is the most humane way, many say as they take bunnies from their backyard hutch. But none of the pictures of crucified rabbits and squirrels matched what I saw, too pink and angular. Maybe I saw just the remains, the undesirables. A single eye staring up at me. 

I called my mom the second I was able to break eye contact. Who else was supposed to comfort me? I think it must be ingrained in our DNA to ask for our mothers when distressed, like muscle memory. She listened and apologized as I laid out the scene, unsure of what to say to scrub the image from my mind. I call her any chance I get, with whatever excuse I can make up, if I buy something new at the grocery store, or stub my toe and the skin is tender to the touch. She always, exasperatingly, placates me. Oohs and ahs at the bread I’m trying, or God Lord, Carter’s at each appearing bump and bruise. 

Did this naked thing call for its mom? I think it must have. I don’t know if that’s a comfort or perhaps one of those things I do to torture myself, force my mind to feel every drop of humanity possible. Design a form of torture on par with this killing, mutual agony that must spread and be felt completely. 

•

I think of my fingertips split down the middle and dissected. How long until I cried, until I begged, until the only words in my mouth were Mom, Mommy? How long would it take to get to my wrist? I imagine the skin would part easily, no fight to put up. Separating like sheets of cream and slices of strawberry. They would handle me so tenderly, no mess, spilling like a symphony. Methodical and savored. I wonder how long until I couldn’t feel it anymore, up to my shoulders and down my chest. Hang me on a wall like The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. Am I beautiful?