I. She tells me that she called me ‘demon baby’ for the first few years. I wonder why she does not still call me that now.


II. It was a Sunday night, we were eating dinner and my father was gone, on some kind of business trip. My mother had quit her job the year before, and she seemed to grow a little less beautiful every day that she spent home with us. Headaches were common. I started to notice wrinkles. It was hard on her, I can tell that now. She loved us but we exhausted her. We grabbed onto her legs, we pulled on her arms, we wrapped our faces in her stomach and we gnawed on her skin until we made holes that we could reach into with our chubby little fingers and pull out the energy from her body.

It was a Sunday night, which meant the nanny was gone, and we were eating pork, but my brother didn’t want to be eating pork. So he whined and he cried and every moan swam over to my mother’s ear and buried itself inside her head until her brain drowned in the whimpers. And she lost it. I remember exactly what she said to him, because she was saying it to all of us: “Get the ketchup, put it on the damn pork and shut up.” It was the first time she ever swore at us.



III. I hate when I see her with violet stains underneath her eyes, and I know it was I who painted them upon her skin.



IV. The disappointment is always the worst part. The sharp edge of her sighs slice into my flesh and as I watch the blood collect in stripes across my skin, all I want is to run to her and ask her to kiss my wounds and make it better.


V. I was in seventh grade and my sister was asleep. We were in a hotel room while my brother and my father were at home across the ocean. We were leaving the next day so we were packing and for some reason I can’t remember, I told her everything. Perhaps it was the time difference, the nostalgia that came seeping from the pink striped walls or the air- sweet, thick, exotic and fleeting. Or perhaps it was simply because I needed her, and some part of me knew that. I told her everything. I told her about how everything was moving and turning and changing and how in the beginning it felt good, but now it just felt wrong. I told her about the best friend who promised me she would keep my secrets, whom I believed until the day another girl told me she knew. I told her about makeup and liquor and pressure and she listened. She didn’t say a word as she folded the clothes but when we finished she kissed my head and told me goodnight.


VI. Some days I go to her and I ask her to fold my frame into her, to hide me in the caverns of her body and to let me disappear, swallowed into her warmth. I hate that I only tell her I love her when I need her.


VII. There are few things I am sure of in this world: Sunrises, arithmetic, the feeling of my pulse when I place two fingers on my wrist. And my mother’s scent; this I know better than the veins that twist around my knuckles or the white smattering marking the side of my hip. This I know better than I know myself.