Stillwater

(Fiction) Corrupted Mythology

Content warning:
Explicit language & sexuality

Author’s Note:

The following was written as a free-write, a stream-of-consciousness exercise.

Photo by Annie Hendrix

At the Beach body wash. Drenching. The water smells of perfume and salt. Vanilla, formulated in such a way that evokes the smell of childhood. Mine, leach field runoff and sheep. Manure. Cigarettes and marijuana. Soda and whiskey. My boyfriend’s sweatshirt. Crunching ice between my teeth. My used body a walking wound, self-medicating, hungry and incomplete.

I plead with myself. I beg the morning to promise me something worth living for. Something my mother was born for. Something for which both my mother and father work as slaves to their own lives. Something at the end of suffering.

Somehow, always, the light floats in rivers on the wind, touches blades of grass, bounces off leaves, my eyes like lanterns. I drink. I want to keep drinking. I drink and drink until I want nothing else but to disintegrate and reintegrate with the floor, the toilet, my best friend’s peach fuzz cheek pressed into my boyfriend’s face. His arms around me. I want to be irreversibly drunk. I want to forget the magnificent world, forever. I destroy myself daily and somehow am reborn each morning after a few hours of sleep. Nothing can kill me.

Outside there are sheep. Almost anywhere in the world where there is countryside, they are there. At peace. Sometimes it seems like all you have to do to achieve the same is to let go of your lead. Become fluff.

My boyfriend is not an artist. He is an auto mechanic. An occupation so useful it makes me resent his single, working mother. I don’t want him to be responsible. I want him to want to suffer, selfishly, alongside me. I look at his ink drawings and encourage him to become a tattoo artist. He looks at me like I’m the prettiest, stupidest person he’s ever seen. He teaches me how to change the spark plugs in my car, then bends me over the hood and fucks me, right there in the twilight, in the driveway, in front of the sheep. I orgasm. I orgasm because I love it when he fucks me.

He touches me in the shower while the water pours over my skin. He washes my breasts in lather. He fucks me on the couch in the living room by the fire. In the morning while I’m still half asleep. When he fucks me, I am no longer a suffering wound. I am the temple of pleasure he prays to, exalted and full of him. Years have passed and I still can’t get him out of my mind. No one is as violently affectionate as he was, or as simple and kind.

I didn’t love him. I loved the shape of my body in his eyes. I loved the heat we created with the immense friction between us. And when he said “You are beautiful,” I believed him because he didn’t love my mind.

I think of how many boys’ sweatshirts I’ve been inside and wonder if I loved any of them, and decide the answer is no, because I didn’t understand what love even was. I didn’t know until—

Our noses bridge as we sit on the coarse pebbles on the ground hidden in the trees near water’s edge. There are people around, only two. I can’t stand this. I am a river. Sweat pours down our foreheads. My body melts in heat. Droplets sparkle on our eyelashes. Our lips meet, and I stare into his brown eyes as his fingers slide between my legs. He is not the man I love, but he is an intoxicating proxy. I am just short of begging him and then

I beg.

I know there is something wrong with me, with my hormones. But the doctor doesn’t believe me. I sit on the bench and her face is lemon-sour. They will have to replace the paper liner I’m soiling just by existing. That I am even sitting there taking up space is wrong.

I wait.

They tell me everything is normal even though I know there’s nothing normal about my hunger. My hunger to which only Freyja is an answer.

Inside Freyja, inside me, there is a pool of contaminated water.

“Why don’t you cry, Freyja?” she is asked this repeatedly.

“I can’t,” she says.

She is meant to weep tears of gold, but the tears stopped flowing and all that is left of her is her body and her stillwater eyes. Mosquitoes breed in the puddle. She is not hungry. No gift moves her, not bread, music, or wine. All is wasted on her numbness.

“Why don’t you sing?” she is asked.

In every corner of the world, war rages despite—or perhaps because of—her will, the way she has shaped the future with the power of her consciousness. The hall in which she typically accepts the fallen soldiers is full. She can’t house them, she can’t love them, and she can’t cry for them. She turns them away, and as she is dry and ungiving she is alone.

Her brother Freyr comes to her not in her dreams, but in the dreams of another, and she wants nothing to do with him when he says the harvest isn’t enough. It has never been enough. “We need you to sing for us. How selfish are you to spend your days basking in your pleasure, your eyes clear and dry. How dare you turn away? We need you to cry.”

I cross the trail. A buck is there with several does, his wives. The land is full of acorns, yerba santa, poisonous vines. The gin-clear water, pooled crags in the rock hold objects and Freyja crouches, pensive. She is bent over her own shadow, the light nourishing her pale skin, and there in the alluvium she finds three golden tears of varying size. The river begins to flow. The buck stands behind her.

At river’s edge, a grey rock grey rocks in defiance. It rests center all that is moving and when Freyja sits on the rock she is centered too. She is in her body, the moving stream beside her. Fluttering bugs, buzzing, the bees. Squirrels in the trees. All that is wants to take from her. All that is wants the salt on her skin. The moisture under her knees. The crumbs in her satchel. Blood red dye of her dress. She is gravity as her eyes droop. Control as she breathes. The danger of her awareness is reflected in every creature that passes. They would destroy her, with pleasure, on varying harmonic planes. So she has become sharp, so sharp, so aware, heavily armed, a knife on her belt, a poison dart in her hair and so when she yields

and she does yield

the weight of those defenses is, at first, pure gravity. Force. She lets it hold her down. She is exfoliating granite. She is the mountain. She is bedrock as the water percolates down. She absorbs the glorious attention of the sun. All that heat.

She moves. Groans. The earth quakes and she is torn, shattered. The fish, birds, and deer dart, fly, scatter. For what is more terrifying than a woman firmly in her power?

Gold are her tears. She can only give them away, and she loves to give them freely. She leans over the rushing river when she cries and drops them there as she sings. She leaves them for the dredgers to find among the quartz and magnetite. And for all she gives, it is never, never enough.

Thanks for reading!