By Jessica Aurell
It’s July.
In keeping with the old custom, my birth is one of my very first deaths. Like my mom, like her mom, umbilical cord wrapped taut around my neck like every first born baby girl in our lineage. Dad breaks the news to a waiting room full of strangers. How my entire little body was gray-blue as the scales of a bruise. Right hand in a fist, clenching at my destiny. It’s a moment of worldwide paralysis.
The doctor slinks on his gloves
Lifts a mask to his guard
Throws me in the ring and beats me up good,
so surgically nonchalant
until I let out the chicken cry of a loser,
who gets to keep the prize.
Papa bragadocious, my Messenger on the Hill, paid the local movie theater fifty bucks to have lit up that night on the marquee:
“WELCOME TO THE WORLD:
JESSICA DAWN AURELL”
But the seventeen year old in charge of swapping out the lettering, left out the L in WORLD. So there I was–welcomed to the WORD, instead.
I am made of such obscure mistakes as these
A clash of mythology and predestination
Of faith and no reason.
It is July.
In toddlerdome, I demand darkness. I often trespass the coat closet, stashed with a mesh bag full of the beach toys we only ever use on New Year’s in Half Moon Bay. My summer-swollen head gets stuck in a bucket I frequent. Sight, sound, smell, taste all go blank as a black hole. Like the dungeon of a womb. My mom is a first and only time mom and takes me to the hospital at the slightest hiccup. There we discover that the pressure is so tight around my cranium, the doctors cannot just pull the bucket off, but must saw the bucket off with what appears to me to be a turbo speed pizza slicer. I only begin to cry once my skull is free.
This is around the same time that I start blacking out
the whites of my baby doll’s eyes with sharpie, wanting to shield them from the knife of the light which carved me.
My dad has me baptized and writes a sermon on the book of John, Chapter Nine, where Jesus spits in some mud and rubs it in a blind man’s eyes and then he can see. “His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’
I learn early on the importance of the guardian angel, waiting to be beheld ten times a day, who doesn’t fear breakfast like I do, or love the sound of breaking glass like I do. I am relying on something I cannot see because I love when I cannot see. I never feel more safe than I do when I’m stuck in that bucket.
It is July.
In the summertime, before my freshman year of high school. There’s a group of popular junior girls who take interest in my “potential”, because I’m long-legged and eastern european-esque, and they advise me to purchase a bra.
I follow their instructions, do a hack job of shaving my legs, spritz on some Pure Seduction body mist and stuff my Old Navy training bra with wads of toilet paper. They text me and say “Meet at the baseball fields” across from Flynn Wethers house. Flynn Wethers looks like a pencil but is the most popular boy at the high school. Flynn Wethers drives a vintage green convertible and I fantasize about road head in the wind. I build a body beneath my sheets out of dirty laundry and beanie babies and sneak out through my window like they do in the movies.
When I arrive there on the dirt, there are the popular girls and there are the popular boys and it feels as if I’m the last one chosen for a team sport. I am filled with eyes, then quickly taught about a beer bong, getting deep throated by alcohol before being whisked away on the shoulders of some guy who plays a sport. With the guy who plays a sport I have my first peck, my first tongue, and my first endoscopy. We are in the backseat of his father’s SUV. There is no wind but there are screens behind every head rest and I catch the reflection of myself in the blank. He feels up my newly fabricated breasts and I forget for a moment they aren’t real. I move his hands to my neck like I remember seeing a girl do on pornhub.
My throat is a football in his fist and I blackout and the next thing I know is I’m hiding in a pantry from the cops with my shirt on inside out.
I am informed of my sins the next morning, when I read on my formspring submissions that I am the blowjob queen of San Francisco. That I am a thirteen year old skank who buys her lunch with dirty money. That I suck dick like a girl does on pornhub.
I call a friend who wasn’t cool enough to stuff her bra and go to a junior party and she tells me she’s already heard all about my escapades. That her mom advised her to pray for me. That I should probably drop out of school and consider the monastery.
If I was a nun I would black out the whites of my habit as I did of my baby dolls eyes.
Of the purity of a night
Of the insecurity of “no”.
Of making it out alive with a cherry in the harvest.
It is July
In another five years. I’ve placed my hands in a black velvet box and taken the box to a psychic who meticulously reads the palms.
She says to me, “You will save many souls.”
And I say to her, “You don’t say.” And proceed to let this go to my head.
I become the Vigilante, with nipples fleshed against my blouse like baby bullets. But I’ve never shot a gun.
This proves to be a problem, when on some South Central street corner I get rammed by a big bully on a bicycle; who grabs me by the nape of the neck, puts a box cutter to my abdomen and says, “Hey I’ll kill you! I’ll really fucking kill you!”
In the shallows of my girl-jean pockets there is pepper spray disguised as lipstick. I feel it cylindrical between the crease of my thigh and my crotch. I feel the skin puckered beneath the pressure of the blade. An incorrect intuition takes over, blurting out in my own voice, “Well, I have pepper spray”, scolding like a teacher as I simultaneously snatch the weapon from my holster, as the bully simultaneously snatches the weapon from my hand and skips it across the street like a riverside child.
We lock eyes in the flashbang, before I projectile vomit directly on his face. I was vegan as an eating disorder at the time, so missiles of raw, barely digested carrot, cabbage, and corn pummel his head as his stare of intimidation morphs to sheepish terror. In shock and disgust, he drops his own bike before me and runs off scattering flecks of barf like a windshield wiper, without securing a single spoil of mine.
I love the mistakes of my body, which without fail serve the purpose of some divine plan. When I get home and undress to wash myself off, I discover in the other pocket a miniature and hand-blown glass turtle. A parting gift from mom as I flew the nest, a token of resilience and protection.
Of perfect timing
Of who the hell do you think you are
alone in LA without a shield or an army
Of getting lucky this time, one more time.
It is July
In many more years. And I am folding my armor at the laundromat. I try to listen to a podcast and be educated, but I’m paying more attention to the doodles on the sky blue walls that outline Coldplay lyrics in clouds. Look at the stars, look how they shine for you. When I am tapped on the shoulder by a squat man with braids and stubble and stench and asked about my sneakered feet, I feel as if I am in a bubble, abruptly burst. This man, at the laundromat mind you, tells me, “I want to take care of you, I want to pay your bills, I want to see your toes”
So of course I give him my phone number. Mostly because he won’t move it along. With my granny cart loaded with my wares he’s pursuing me out the door. He says he gets paid on Fridays, nipping at my ankles like a puppy. I say okay. Tiny Tim tells me he’s a security guard at the TD Bank on Fulton. I say okay. He tells me he wants to take me shopping, wants to buy me a summer wardrobe, wants to pay for me to get my nails done. I say okay, okay, okay. He tells me that he’s honest, that he’s noble, that he loves me. That’s when I notice the corpse of a bird.
It is a bad sign.
Of a perfect specimen
Of the frog pinned down for the science class dissection
Of a slimy prince who cannot uphold his end of the bargain.
It is still July
The same July and I watch the bird decompose a little more every day. Before I leave my apartment, I look out the window to check for the man from the laundromat. Somedays he is standing across the street, waiting for my first steps out the door, to saunter over and say, “But baby, I’ll give you whatever you want, just give me a pair of your dirty underwear.”
One time he does zelle me thirty dollars and another time fifty dollars, but I mean honestly, do you think a girl like me’s soiled g-string is worth a measly eighty bucks? The blow job queen of San Francisco?
So I’m on my way to my job because a man thinks I’m cheaper than a rental car and I pass the dumb dead bird who I’m getting sick of. I cross the street at the Dunkin Donuts and again at the funeral home where my morbid fascination always keeps an eye out for unloading hearses. And there between the bones of the crosswalk is a detached femur of a dog. Or I can only guess it belongs to a dog. It’s surely bigger than the leg of a cat, but the paw is smushed in such a way that makes it appear almost as a goat’s hoof.
With the curiosity of a car crash, I slow my gait to inspect. It is the cleanest cut I ever saw, a perfect ball from a perfect socket. The sun refracts twinkles off dry brown blood. We’re near the hospital. I pray the dog died swiftly, sacrificed to the fender of an ambulance charging on to save a life. But this is a one way street, with the hospital at the other end. You can’t possibly save a life rushing away from.
For the next month I pass the limb where it’s become my monument, patches of dirty white fur sewed into pavement. I am the pall bearer, the funeral procession, the mourner. I will save many souls. Sometimes I lay on the ground next to it at night, stitch my spine into the ground until each vertebrae is flattened and forgets itself. The longer I spend with the leg the more lockstep I am with paranoia. There is no other way around it. If I want to go anywhere I must pass death.
Jessica Aurell is a Brooklyn based writer, triple cancer, and jaded waitress. She is rewriting the Bible. She is waging war. She is counting her blessings. You can read more of her ramblings at trophyseance.substack.com