LITMIR.BIZ

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the ground, half-full of liquor.

      “Motherfucker,” she whispers. “Motherfucker.”

      She slams the bottle on the living room table, then sits down beside me on the couch, so close our knees bang. We face the bottle. Anger shimmers off of her in hot waves. I stay quiet. I know how this goes.

      “Now,” she says, “we wait for this motherfucker.”

      The sun sets, and the moon rises. We fall asleep on the couch. When the sun rises again, my father still hasn’t come home.

      “Time to get ready for school,” my mother says.

      She slides the bottle back behind the curtain, a strange magic trick, the evaporated day.

      VISION

       My father has special places for the bottles: Behind the toilet, in the back of the truck, beneath the pillows of the fancy sofa, beneath the chair in the living room, in the shower, in the trash can.

       “You’re hiding them everywhere,” I say. “I found one behind my bed last night.”

       “It’s not what you think. Please don’t tell your mother,” he says.

       “It is too what I think. What will she say when she finds out?”

       “You can’t tell her. You can’t, I’ll stop.”

       The world will spin on as it does until you do something to change it. I pull each bottle from its special place. I stack the glass bottles, half-full of clear liquid, on the front lawn, in the sun.

       The pile is bigger than the front door, bigger than the truck. I hurl my body at the pile of glass and begin to smash the bottles one by one, shards glinting in the sun like a new future.

      AT NIGHT, I LAY MY HEAD IN MY mother’s lap.

      “Unknot me,” I sob. “Please make someone fix me.”

      “There’s nothing we can do,” she murmurs.

      “Kill me then,” I say. “Please.”

      My mother exhales smoke, stubs out her cigarette, then puts her cool hand on my forehead, a rare touch.

      WHEN THE HOUSE IS SILENT, I SNEAK into my father’s office. This is my favorite place.

      The room bursts with him. The shelves are lined with his favorite objects: Paused lava rocks, bleached-white bones, books about meat, empty bottles that catch and refract the light like diamonds.

      I sit at his desk in his red leather chair. I spin the chair a few times. I open his desk drawer. The silver key to the Meat Quarry gates glistens against the black liner. I clench my fingers around that cool metal until it aches, then slide the key back into the drawer.

      A map of the Meat Quarry lines the office wall behind me. The quarry is mapped like veins of a heart: fat arteries, thin arteries, all connected and winding. Areas with the best meat are marked with a red X.

      I run my fingers over the map, trace the arteries, memorizing paths until I hear the front door open. I sneak out, heart in my throat.

      EACH DAY AT SCHOOL, I STARE AT BODIES, memorizing their limbs, their smooth lines. The body of Sophia is my favorite.

      A PORTRAIT OF SOPHIA: LONG BROWN hair which shimmers where mine is dull, narrow shoulders where mine are gangly, long legs, no knot where I am knotted.

      IN THE MORNINGS, SOPHIA WALKS SLOWLY into the classroom as if covered in sleep. Sophia wears a red dress, then a blue dress, then a green dress. In the afternoons, Sophia laughs in the lunchroom, and light bounces off the white of her teeth. Sophia knows a joy I do not know.

      I watch Sophia move and I want to move like she does. Some days, Sophia catches me staring and waves. Sometimes, I lift my limp hand and wave back.

      I don’t know if my wave tells the truth, which is: I want to move like you do. I want to slice you open with a knife. I want to hide my body inside of yours.

      TODAY, MY MOTHER WANTS TO HELP. SHE closes my bedroom door behind her then sits beside me on the bed. The heat of her breath scorches my face.

      Close up, her wrinkles are deep canyons. I imagine myself walking through the chasms of her skin.

      “We need to do something about your looks,” she says, running a hand through my hair. “Let’s start with the clothes. The magazines say yellow is the color this season.”

      She walks to my closet and pulls out an old yellow dress made of lace. I shake my head.

      “Put it on! It’s fun to try new looks.”

      “I hate this dress. It’s too hot.”

      “Just do it!”

      I strip off my old blue dress. I slip the yellow fabric over my head. She yanks up the zipper and the bright lace tents around my knot.

      “Now these,” she says, wrapping a single strand of pearls around my neck. The pearls are tight, hot, plastic.

      She walks me into her bedroom. We are surrounded by her special creams, the ghost of her perfume, facing her big mirror.

      “There now,” she says. “Isn’t this just perfect? Shouldn’t we do this every day? Let’s take a picture!”

      IN THE PHOTOGRAPH, I STAND NEXT TO her mirror in the dress and the pearls. My eyes are red as if I have been crying, as if I want to remove the pearls, the dress, my skin.

      OUT UNDER THE BURNING SUN, MY brother digs the red meat up out of the earth, filling silver bucket after silver bucket after silver bucket. I imagine it that way. Then he is showered, clean, in fresh clothes at the dinner table.

      “Big day in the quarry today,” he says.

      We fork bland cubes of meat into our mouths.

      “It takes a gut instinct, son,” my father says. “And you have it. Boy, I wish I had it like you.”

      The room falls silent after this rare praise. My mother exhales a plume of smoke. The meat takes on the scent.

      AFTER DINNER, I CUT THE FLAT- stomached women out of my mother’s magazines.

      They wear bathing suits or dresses cut in at the hip. Slicing the pages gives me peace, silver metal humming through the paper until the women are separated from their scenes.

      Inside the dim light of my bedroom closet, I tape their torsos to the wall, floor to ceiling. I call them The Sophias. They are the girls a boy would like to touch.

      ONE DAY, SOPHIA SPEAKS. SHE IS WEARING a pink dress, the light from her mouth making her hair and her eyes and her skin brighter.

      “Why do you always stare?” she asks. “I hate it.”

      “I wish I looked like you,” I blurt.

      “No, you don’t,” she says. “It’s all the same no matter how you look.”

      The lie makes her a friend.

      I BEGIN TO BRING SOPHIA TO THE ACRES each day after school. We spend afternoons exchanging secrets, whispering about boys. We nod into each other’s hair.

      “Let me see your knot,” she says one day.

      I don’t fight. I stand in the center of the living room and lift my dress up slow as an ache. In the afternoon sun, my knot looks even worse, each stretchmark illuminated.

      “Well,” she says flatly. “That’s disgusting. Pull your dress down.”

      I sit back on the couch, dying inside, until she puts

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