Woman V.
By Geneva Zane
I don’t know. One night I woke up with the pain in my stomach, the sweating consumption, the wet pain. I wanted to call out to my father, wanted him to find me and lift me from my winter sheets and carry me to the hospital, but my teeth were clenched together and spit was pooling into the lines of my face. My sister did not kick her feet fitfully against the covers, did not hear me whimpering, and maybe this began our descent from each other, the cessation of our shared dreams. Maybe if she had heard, had crossed the boundary of our bedroom and held my collapsed head in her lap—who knows. One night I woke shaking and writhing beneath the moon. At a certain point I stopped looking to Gods and began praying to women.
There are never less than a thousand women in my head at all times, brushing against me in elevators and reaching out over the interstate to offer me a ride, a cigarette, the time of day. The quaking weight of them all. But it is still a shock to see a girl in conversation with herself, wholly narrative, wholly monologic. A body like a basilica—the kind of thing you look at and think: how did they do that? Every part symmetrical and pedagogical and unknowable. Somebody lay these bricks, erected and condemned the scaffolding, breathed in dust. Somebody mined these stones.
Never again have I hurt so completely that I could not cry out for help, save for that solitary moment of realization, of body epiphany, when I shook with the desire to fall to my knees and weep, to crack open my jaw and beg, and could not. At last, here, in the snow caverns of nowhere, I had found the sublime answer, the God I prayed for, and she would never be mine.
“You’re very sweet,” she said, unbinding her golden body to turn off the lights, turn down the bed, so perfectly unutterable that I began to shake, reaching into the dark, taking her into my arms...
There are never less than a thousand women in my head at all times, brushing against me in elevators and reaching out over the interstate to offer me a ride, a cigarette, the time of day. The quaking weight of them all. But it is still a shock to see a girl in conversation with herself, wholly narrative, wholly monologic. A body like a basilica—the kind of thing you look at and think: how did they do that? Every part symmetrical and pedagogical and unknowable. Somebody lay these bricks, erected and condemned the scaffolding, breathed in dust. Somebody mined these stones.
Never again have I hurt so completely that I could not cry out for help, save for that solitary moment of realization, of body epiphany, when I shook with the desire to fall to my knees and weep, to crack open my jaw and beg, and could not. At last, here, in the snow caverns of nowhere, I had found the sublime answer, the God I prayed for, and she would never be mine.
“You’re very sweet,” she said, unbinding her golden body to turn off the lights, turn down the bed, so perfectly unutterable that I began to shake, reaching into the dark, taking her into my arms...
Geneva Zane received her BA in creative writing from Bard College in 2018. She is neither a PCC-Affiliate nor a writer/artist at large, but rather, a writer/artist on the lam. Her works have been published in Hanging Loose Magazine and Chronogram Magazine, and she was a finalist for Fence Magazine's 2017 Modern Prize in Fiction. She lives in the Hudson Valley.