Written by Maya Dally
1.
In one of my earliest memories, my brother and I are playing on a stack of old lumber like two brand new fawns. He steps on a board like a cartoon character might on a rake, and a nail gets him right between his eyes. It’s the most blood I’ve ever seen. When he screams, I think it means he is dead, which is what I tell my dad when I run inside the house.
2.
At the Morrill County Spelling Bee, I lose quickly on the word “knapsack,” and have to sit back down with the rest of the 5th graders, hot-faced and humiliated. I think back to Brooke Carrey, a girl in second grade who peed herself in class. I overheard our teacher telling her nobody would remember the incident, which was not true because I often thought of Brooke since then—small, wiry glasses, freckles on her lips, and piss running down her blue jeans. When they announce a lunch break at the spelling bee, I steal a first place ribbon from the judge’s table when no one is looking and bring it home to my mother who uses it as a bookmark for her James Patterson novel.
3.
I am twelve years old sharing a tent with a seventeen-year-old boy named Ben Franklin. He is lying behind me with a hand up my shirt and I feel like a stinking mouth as I come down from my high. I sink into a twisted shape of infatuation and admire how gallant he is to rub my back and feel my bra, nothing more. When he finally falls asleep, I let go of my stomach, which I have been sucking in for maybe hours.
4.
At fifteen, I fall in love for the first time with the new boy at school. He is decisively normal and just beginning to get handsome. He sends me photos of his dog, Daisy, and we date for three years. Every time he cheats on me, I close my fist tighter and tighter around him, huffing in little shoots of my own breath to keep him alive. I believe I am burned forever when we break up.
5.
In my first semester at college, I sleep with a friend whose girlfriend just cheated on him, but mostly I do it because my first love hated him and I am vindictive. It’s the worst sex either of us has ever had.
6.
For many years, I move through other men like a natural disaster, leaving them flooded and broken down like old homes in my wake. This is also a form of revenge, but I am always the girl in the tent.
7.
When I hear from my first love for the first time in four years, the first thing I ask about is his dog. It’s an act of self-defense, to show him just how unaffected I am by his reaching out, which of course is untrue. I do not tell him that I have called two separate one-night stands by his name during sex.
8.
He tells me that Daisy is dead, that he had to put her down in a pasture after being trampled by a horse, and he believes he’s burned forever. I fall in love with him for the second time at twenty-one, this time as adults. He worships the ground beneath my feet and I do not believe him, the little fist of myself far away like a shot dog in a field.
9.
Part of me wants to make this easy. Part of me wants to move through him and give him a sharp reason to leave. Say, I want you to be honest with me, and then I want you to kill me. Don’t you see that I have not changed? Aren’t I nasty? Aren’t I foolish? You should get while the getting’s good.
10.
I have always been a foolish girl. I don’t have all the answers and can rarely tell if I’ve made this come to be, or if it was always meant to be. I’m a thief in sheep’s clothing and I cry wolf when I don’t know any better. I am the nail between his eyes and yet he loves me anyway.
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Maya Dally has an MA in Writing and currently resides in Tallahassee, Florida, where she is teaching and earning a PhD in Creative Writing (poetry) at Florida State University. Her work is featured or forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, Wild Roof Journal, and Black Horse Review.