Fiction
This Is How You Break a Woman
Maybe you should’ve been a lesser person
Once I brought home a coyote and told my lover we had a new pet. Until it ate our chickens. — “Hunger” by Kelli Russell Agodon
1.
Let’s get down to the bone of you, the meat. I must admit, all the electrocutions have made you downright unrecognizable. First, there was the shock of your mother shoving food in your mouth. Eat, she said. On good days, the difference between nipple and spoon were periodic elements. Mostly you recall the tines of a fork scraping across your clenched teeth and your mother’s silent pleas, which reminded you of the many church sermons you’d slept through. Her entreaties were urgent and constant: Don’t make him mad. Don’t make a scene. Eat the food he bought for you. Goddammit, eat! You turned away, violently, and the fork slashed your cheek and you felt aflame, but that was fine, just fine, because you were tired of swallowing the gifts he gave you. Only a curtain of glass beads separated you from him, and you knew, on the days when your mother worked late wiping down tables and refilling ketchup bottles, that fear was a hand parting the beads to one side. Fear was candy in a smiling man’s lap. Believe me when I say the man who lived in your house was a knife in a light socket.
