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A Piece of Her (A True Story)
by Nicole Bussard author info
I met her in line at the video store when the computers went down and everyone had to wait twenty minutes to check out. She was renting Bound and I was renting High Art, so we both, like, knew. We were the only people who stuck around for them to fix the machines, instead of going someplace else or ditching the movie idea altogether, and we both thought that was a sign.
She told me her first name was Mercury. She and all her sisters were named after planets. I’ve since learned that Mercury has the greatest temperature range of any significant body in our solar system. It’s also the closest to the sun, which gives life, as you know. But if you stay near it too long without protection, it can scorch the very skin from your body.
Three weeks went by and we decided we were in love and everything was great until they had to pull her wisdom tooth. She was born with only one, which according to a scientist I heard on the radio made her highly physically evolved. Since she had grown dependent on me, I held her hand while the dentist pried it out. It was white as porcelain. When the dentist walked away I put it in my mouth to see what it felt like and imagined her chewing with it—a hamburger, corn from the cob, pumpkin ravioli. “That’s gross,” she said. “Of course it’s not,” I said. “It’s a piece of you.” Then I swallowed it and like a wad of gum it stayed in my stomach for seven years.
One day there was another incident that at the time seemed unrelated, but, well, you’ll see. It was an eyelash that caught just above her lip where it sat like a lonely whisker. I held it up and told her to make a wish. She wished and blew it into the air. It landed on my knee. “What did you wish for?” I asked. “I never want to dine alone on peanut butter, bread, and water again,” she said. “At least I could get some jelly.” I put it in my pocket, that eyelash, that wish. “It’s yours now,” Mercury told me.
I found the three gray hairs on the bathroom counter, curled into the shape of a question mark. She plucked them from her head one morning before she went to work. I put them in a cheap tin locket. “You’ll have to give me something back,” she said. I offered her a story. “When I was a little boy I was in love with my mother. I loved her so much that I knew she could never love me back the same way, so I ran away. I waited for her to notice, to come and find me and bring me back. I waited and I am still waiting. I only went back home because my sister told me I wasn’t a boy after all.”
“That’s not a very good story,” she said, living up to her second name. It was Phoenix; she and her sisters were named after cities. Phoenix is the hottest and the driest, harsh but somehow inviting, making you want to tame it. Maybe you could steal some water and lay down a golf course. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Things got a little weirder when it came to her tongue. It was as sweet as the milk in the bottom of your rice crispies bowl. Sweet as an end-of-season, tree-ripened nectarine. She put it in my mouth and I wanted to keep it there. I thought about the tooth, the hairs, and the eyelash wish and held her tongue between my teeth. Lightly.
She talked about her mother a lot and this time she told me that when she was little she used to be a stray cat. When her mother found her she told her not to worry and she would always have a home. The mother said, “Don’t eat that, don’t shed on me, get down from there, and do as I say.” She said, “Come to bed with me and keep me warm.” Then she sent Phoenix away. Phoenix became a cutter, no a biter, no a thrower-upper. A heartbreaker and an early bleeder.
After she told me, I thought she was going to cry, so I made her feel better and while I did that I took a tiny chunk of that sweet tongue. I bit off the end on the left side and she looked surprised but didn’t cry. I carried it in my mouth, you know, between gum and cheek, the texture of a shrimp, a snail, a portabello mushroom. When she talked she only said half an “S,” a “D,” an “L,” and a “T.” People commented that we looked more and more alike, now that we were together. It had been almost seven months.
Getting that one breast was like pulling teeth. But I had to have it. I loved to hold it separately from her body, feel its weight, its softness like silky liquid, a handful of warm, moldable clay. We stayed up all night talking, me asking questions, her trying not to answer. “What do you want from me?” she asked. In the end I got the breast. I carried it cupped in my hand, nipple down, a self-contained bowl of heavy pudding.
In return, I took off my toe, the second one from the end. It was polished with a color called Firecracker. I left it for her on the pillow while she pretended to sleep. Later she said it was too hairy and dropped it on the bed. It shifted between the sheets every night when we made love.
Her third name was Bougainvillea; she and her sisters were all named after flowers. Bougainvillea is a vine with bright and lovely blossoms that look like paper and smell like nothing. In its native habitat it brightens the doorways of adobe shacks and adds color to the branches of dead or dormant trees. The books say it flowers best under stress. And it has thorns.
She liked to pretend she wanted nothing from me, especially when she was upset. “You can’t help me,” she said, “you have nothing to offer.” But later I would find things missing. Like the one night she took my right ear. Painfully yet kind of tenderly, like your mother digging with a needle for the splinter in your finger. I still don’t know why she took it. For all I knew she was telling people at work that I sent it to her in the mail. She kept it in her backpack wrapped in yards of toilet paper until it shriveled into a tiny piece of bloody leather. For all I knew she was telling people at work that it was a scalp.
People started to comment that we looked different, now that we were together.
After nine months I became obsessed with her eyes. Not all brown or green, more like the back of a turtle, a pattern of yellow and gold and colors of the earth. Patchwork countryside seen from an airplane in winter, changing with the seasons. Because I loved them I took one. Well, okay, I tricked her and sucked it out during a passionate moment. It was during one of those times when she was giving herself to me already—I just took a little more than she expected. After that she wore a fetching eye patch. I bought her a skull and crossbones hat to go with it.
Her fourth name was Cilantro; she and her sisters were named after spices. A book notes with interest that while Cilantro is much loved among Asians and Latinos, people of European descent frequently are reviled by the smell of it. That was the thing, people either loved or hated her, there was no in between. But either way, if you eat too much, it tastes like a mouthful of soap.
And because I loved Cilantro she tricked me too. Not like I did to her, with my good intentions and all. No, she took from me the most important things. For example, when we came out of our couple’s counseling, I noticed she had taken the pads off the ends of my fingers, just the part where the prints are, all ten of them. She chewed the tough and fleshy ovals between her front teeth while she was sitting in traffic, wearing my clothes and pretending to listen to classical music. I found them discarded like old gum in the ashtray of her car.
It had been eleven months and now she only spoke to me in sign language. Not the kind where you make symbols with your hands, but the kind that you speak with your eyes and your lips while regular words are coming out of your mouth. When I spoke she told me to Shh, she watching Ally McBeal. “You’re just like my father, he shushed me all the way through the Mary Tyler Moore show,” I said. “I’m not competing with TV ladies any more.” We fought and I went for her arms but she got mine instead, always having been a little more vicious. But after two weeks she realized that that made me more dependent on her than ever, so she gave them back. They flopped uncertainly on the stumps of my elbows.
At fifteen months it became clear she no longer needed me, and I grew angry and vindictive, and I took her leg. She didn’t need both of them anyway, did she? She had me, and we could get along fine with three legs between us. And this time I didn’t even keep it. I put in the dumpster next to a deflated inflatable ball, a broken mirror, and a box of square photos marked “Patty ‘67.” The leg was prickly from a 4-day-old shave, bulky around the knee, with formations like cumulus clouds around the top of the thigh—slightly less attractive than your typical woman’s leg. But I wanted something substantial; I required proof.
You know what her last name was? It was Cannonball. She was an only child and her name was Cannonball. Her parents had been expecting a boy.
Lately she didn’t look so good. Where was that sweet tongue, those soft and heavy breasts, that eyelash wish? Now she talked and walked funny, she was guarded and mean, and the leftover leg bulged with muscle in a most unfeminine way. When we had sex, which was not often, I wanted her more than anything in the world. Those times we fucked our brains out, we fucked our asses off, we fucked our fingers to the bone. When there was nothing left I tore out my heart and threw it at her feet. “You best pick that up again,” she said.
As I walked out I called “Goodbye Mercury Phoenix Bougainvillea Cilantro Cannonball!” She was surprised because no one ever called her that.
The next time I saw her she looked whole again. Up close I noticed only a thin scar-map outlining the puzzle-piece edges of what I used to have of her. I compared her to myself—bald, no teeth, ribs and stomach collapsed, gangrenous, and just these steel hooks for arms. She told me I looked good. Inside I screamed, “Can you still not see me? Look at me—I’m falling to pieces. I’m a mess.”
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