“Can you please repeat what I just said?” Debbie asked. Her usual, wry smile I recognized so well said, “Why do you even try to fool me? I know you so well.”

“Oh…what…No, I am okay, I got you. I actually heard you,” I replied.

“No, you didn’t, and I know it. I absolutely do not mind repeating myself for the fourth time, Abha. And, if you really got me, why don’t you repeat what I just said? Repeat it,” Debbie said.

You are sixteen years old, your twin sister just had a miscarriage two days prior, and your mother is taking you both to the gynecologist for the first time. The sound of your heartbeat pounding in your ears envelops the male doctor’s words as he pokes and prods between your open, shaking thighs. You’ve only had sex a handful of times and you’re still thoroughly uncomfortable with a strange man standing between your open legs, looking closely inside of you.

Whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction, every piece begins the same: with a haunting. It grows as any respectable haunting should, first with creaking footsteps in the other room, the sense something is watching, until there’s a full-blown apparition standing beside the bed whispering, “You need to write this down.”

It was a night like any other that summer. Short skirt, fishnet stockings, thick lines of black eyeliner, ruby red lips, and dancing. I’d had a line of coke before the night began, and part of a bottle of cheap wine—seriously cheap, dollar-a-bottle Strawberry Hill. It was early in the night for us, a hallway mark of 1 a.m. David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” was at the part of the song where everyone screams along.

Why didn’t I follow my first impulse and bolt out into the night? If my boyfriend came home and hit me in the face, I would have left. Instead, he broke a lamp, smiling, while I begged him to stop. That smile terrified me. But he didn’t touch me, and all he said were the words I screamed at him when he stumbled into the room drunk for the third night in a row, turning them into questions.

Right now, I am looking at a photo of us. From a lifetime ago. Stuck within the pages of an old book, the photo fell to the floor.

Bat bites are difficult to see and may not be felt.

- CDC, Div. of Public Affairs

The chief concern was “bat bite.” There was no mystery in those words. The mystery began when the concern was personified, as in, “A bat bit my daughter.” That’s medicine.

Heavy, viscous steps. One hundred of them from the car door to the wheelchair rack. Another thirty-seven past the receptionist and into the lobby. Three more, and then your toe taps against the elevator railing, careful not to fall.

I held in my hands the facts describing how he died. The question was whether to share with my mom the details of her father’s combat death.

Dear Breasts,

It’s been almost two years since I saw you. My last memory of us is you hidden underneath a checkered teal hospital gown that flapped against my naked bottom. I couldn’t look at you. I pictured the doctors cutting you off and resting you on a silver platter next to the operating table. Two jello molds, each with a cherry on the top. The whole thing felt surreal.

I was chopping carrots to make soup when I returned the hospital social worker’s call about my patient, Sharon. I had made calls like this many times before.

I stretch out my legs on the sand. I can see her almost approach me. She is wearing a white beach jacket and a straw hat with a veil over it. In sunglasses and standing proud, her breasts sprout. No one would ever have suspected the loss of one or the other. She is smiling, and her mouth says, ‘I am happy in the land of palm trees, coconuts, and certainly, I don’t have to search for any monkeys because I was never one.’

When I was a little girl between the ages of six and eleven, I loved Barbie dolls. In my child-mind, Barbies (not just Barbie, but the other dolls in the line like Ken, Skipper, and Midge), with their anatomically incorrect, smooth, hairless, nipple-less, sex-organ-less bodies, silky hair, and infinite array of matching outfits represented the untarnished, uncomplicated yet glamorous life I might build for myself.

March 14, 2020

The days are getting longer, but winter still holds New England in its chilly grip. Looking out at the empty harbor, no boats bob merrily on moorings, and the still dark water reflects the last rays of the setting sun and scattered streetlights. John and I sit in a half-empty theater, with vacant seats clustering around small groups of two or three people.

My pelvic floor is broken. The PT slides her fingers inside me and presses on a spot at the back of my vagina. A jolt of pain shoots through the inside of my ass. Not exactly my ass, it’s too far forward, but like the outside of the inside of my ass. It’s a hot spark deep inside where the tissue is tender and aching beneath the rock-hard surface of nebulous vaginal-anal space.

Besides my husband, I have lived with no other being longer than Mullen. When we lived in Austin, after I suffered a miscarriage, my husband saw a pitiful ginger tabby kitten at an adoption fair. If we had any reservations, they were nullified when the adoption volunteer gave us Mullen’s history; his was the saddest tale in the shelter. A few weeks old, he had been found in a plastic bag, riddled with fleas and mange, cast away on the side of Mo-Pac.

The salt-wetted air tangs your tongue and sprays your skin, but still the tide feels strangely distant. Under normal circumstances you would gaze at the steady horizon, trying to absorb the enormity of the ever-shifting ocean. Its depth, its strength, its unknowable currents and flavors.

I once saw a monkey jerking it. It was at the zoo, of course, where several blue-faced baboons swung over plaster tree trunks and romped across a funny little walkway modeled after a hanging bridge. As much as schools want zoo visits to be positive, educational experiences that transform the lives of young people forever, what has stuck with me in a lifetime's worth of field trips is deflated polar bears, hobbled cheetahs, and a monkey ignoring all the other monkeys to beat his meat.

The first playlist I made for someone came in the form of a mix CD that I’d burned on an old Dell desktop computer. It was a summer mix, meant to be played in my best friend’s pink Sony portable CD player as we skateboarded and biked down the backroads of our small Florida town.

I see you,

with your dimpled smile,

your tubby legs,

your first stumbling steps,

a complete trust in the universe

that nothing will harm you,

even as your harried mother

calculates all potential risks.