LITMIR.BIZ

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looking at your old magazines.”

      But she catches a glimpse. Today, she is vicious. Her brown eyes flash then froth, rabid. She slaps the journal to the ground. Then her palm stings across my cheek in a quick flash of red.

      “Some things are private!”

      Her body disappears into the blackness of the doorway. The attic goes silent.

      Face red, I look at the ground where a single photo has fallen from between the pages of the journal.

      It is a picture of us together.

      I am swathed in more fabric than usual. My brother clenches an arm around me. My mother wears a flowered dress, her own knot hidden. My father stands off to the side as if he has been sold a bad car. We are all squinting beneath a bright sun that is just out of frame.

      WEEKDAYS, I GO TO SCHOOL. I WALK THE mile. The school is green with a pitched roof.

      Most days, no one minds me. I stay quiet to keep it that way.

      I keep track of the facts, though.

      In my classes, I learn about the human body and history and the human brain, deep seas, jungles, islands, and the distant cities beyond our town and the distant planets beyond our world.

      ◆An octopus has three hearts, nine brains, and blue blood

      ◆Female lions do 90% of the hunting for their pride

      ◆The heart of the blue whale is so large that a human could swim through its arteries

      ◆One square centimeter of skin contains roughly 100 pain sensors

      ◆The sun will only get brighter before it collapses

      WHILE I’M IN SCHOOL, MY FATHER AND my brother work the meat from the quarry with their hands and their shovels. That’s what my brother says.

      On Saturdays, my mother and I clean the meat in the big silver sink. On meat cleaning days, watery pink rivers rush off the flesh. The fresh piles of meat rise like bloody castles on the counter.

      On Saturdays, we must act very proper because we must take the meat into town. This is a ritual that requires preparation: I clean myself and put on my best dress. I am like the meat in this way.

      In the evening, we drive into town, the clean flesh piled in the truck bed.

      “Ten gold coins! Twenty gold coins! Thirty gold coins!” bid the men in the town. Their stomachs and guts are large but knotless. They avert their eyes from us or else they stare too long and too hard at our shapes.

      I often imagine a man with a body like mine, a man I might marry.

      “Do men ever get knots?” I ask.

      “Lower your voice. And no. A man has never had a knot. That is a woman’s burden.”

      “SOLD!” my father bellows.

      The men scoop the clean meat into their own buckets, red and raw, the smell of wet coin in the air.

      SOMETIMES, MY FATHER BRINGS UP THE old days.

      “My father bought this land for a song. Back then, it was harder to tell which lands would have meat.”

      “Nobody thought this land did?” I ask.

      “Sure didn’t. Dad knew better though. He could hardly keep the grin off of his face when they were signing the papers. He always told me his gut knew we’d hit it big.”

      “How did he find the Meat Quarry?”

      “Well, everyone in town thought he was a fool,” my father says. “In the early days, he crawled the land himself, waiting for the feeling in his gut to grow stronger, belly against the soil.”

      I move closer to my father. His eyes are not too red yet, the scent of the liquor faint. This is the nicest time to be close.

      “It took him two weeks of that. He was on the 13th day when he started to lose faith. But he kept crawling. On the last day, it was raining, and he was out there in the mud, searching.”

      “How did he know when he’d found it?”

      “He said his gut lit up bright, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Said he’d never felt anything like that before.”

      “Like instinct?”

      “Like instinct. Your brother has it too, even stronger than I do. But boy, did it save my father’s ass. Everyone in this goddamn town thought he was a joke. Now, we’ve got the best meat on this side of the river.”

      LATER, ALONE, I LIE ON MY BELLY IN THE center of my bedroom. My knot presses against the carpet.

      I practice my sensing: eyes closed, reaching out with my gut to see where new meat might be on our land.

      I wait for the hairs to stand up on the back of my neck. I sense as hard as I can. I feel nothing.

      AT SCHOOL, THE OTHER STUDENTS SURround me. Their round faces bobble like bad balloons, screaming.

      “LOOK AT HER! LOOK AT THE FREAK!”

      Their bodies are lanky, pimpled, letting off new odors. Their voices echo off the metal lockers. Their eyes are all on me: blue, brown, green, gray, each eye making my flesh shiver, everyone an enemy.

      “YEAH, LOOK AT ME!” I yell back.

      I pull up my dress, bare my weak fangs, my knot bright in the sunlight streaming through the windows, a single eye of flesh daring them all to move, to come closer, to try me.

      VISION

       I’m the queen now. All the students surround me with their offerings at lunch.

       “I’ve brought you an orange,” says a boy with one lazy eye.

       “Thank you,” I say. “That’s very kind.”

       “I’ve brought you crackers with cheese in the center,” says a girl in a plaid dress.

       “Wonderful.”

       They come forward one by one, each with a treat. I smooth my own dress down over my flat stomach. The offerings rise up around me, growing like sweet palaces.

      IN BED THAT NIGHT, I SLIDE MY HANDS down. I run my fingers over my knot.

      I try to tell myself I don’t mind it so much. Under the light of the moon, I picture my teeth growing into big fangs. I widen my mouth, let them catch the breeze. I close my eyes and try to believe, half-girl, half-snake.

      THE NEXT MORNING, MY MOTHER SITS at the kitchen table. Her yellow house dress tents over her knot, big as a cheap sun. I spoon cereal into my mouth.

      “Will you call the doctor?” I ask. “Will you ask him to unknot me?”

      “That’s not how it works,” my mother says, smoking. “And it’s the weekend. They don’t work on weekends.”

      “Why don’t you ever try?”

      “We’ve been over this. The doctors don’t give a damn about it.”

      “They screamed at me again. At school.”

      “I used to spit at them when they spat at me,” my mother says.

      Then she stares out the window into the long horizon as if in a deep trance, as if staring into another time, as if I were not there, never born.

      THAT AFTERNOON, WE’RE IN THE LIVING room. We are cleaning again.

      “These curtains are a mess!” my mother says.

      She lifts the fabric of the curtains

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