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CW: Bodily harm, abuse, death/dying, gendered violence.
My foot is hidden under a pile of fallen leaves in a ditch near the highway. My hand, a mile or so away, buried under a shallow layer of dirt in what will be someone’s tulip bed next spring.
My head—I don’t know where it is. Strange. Surely it’s what I’m using to think?
I focus and my hand lurches, shakes off a coating of soil, lifts onto its fingertips and straggles into the driveway, makes its way into the shadowy street. I do not know how it got there. I do know that it does not feel pain, even when the nails chip on the concrete sidewalk.
I will it to find my arm. It does, in a park. Alas, it’s the right arm. The hand is left. How annoying. I will the two sides of my wrist to rub together. There’s a tingle, spread out across miles, and I see a brief flash of light.
Good. My eyes are somewhere, then. Hopefully, they’re in my head.
Wherever that is.
My left breast is lying exposed not too far from my reunited hand and arm, nipple pointing skyward. It can’t travel of its own volition, and so it only quivers in place. There’s nothing to attach it to yet, so I make my hand drag my arm over to it, balance on my elbow while my fingers search for dried leaves and throw them over the wobbling dome for a little privacy. We’ll come back once we’ve found the rest of me.
I focus.
It takes a while. My legs are akimbo; one is in a dumpster behind a convenience store on the edge of town and the other has been hacked in two. The thigh is in a graveyard, lying beneath a bush, the shin in a discarded cooler in a junkyard. My pelvis has been snapped in two, and each hip is in another, different cooler, spread out across the city.
I will not say where my labia have been left. Only know that I got them, and all adjacent parts, back whole.
Slowly the pieces of my body twitch and struggle together, rolling, creeping, hunching across the miles to find each other and knit together again.
My midsection is the hardest. It’s been hacked into a dozen pieces and sown into the river like seeds. I fear my belly button is irretrievable—some water creature has eaten it, I think. I have to wait until my other hand comes creeping in from the suburbs, then send it down to poke and prod and gather everything together.
It takes almost all night.
Then I make my arms lower the bottom of my chest carefully towards the water until it all connects.
That tingle again. I hear mumbles, swearing, heavy breathing—ah, my ears are working. Where is my head? Is it nearby? Is my ear attached to it?
My arms pull my torso out of the water, and my hips and legs amble over, the toenail on one foot missing. At least it’s matched up to the correct leg. My hands are still backwards. Once put together, I can’t take myself back apart.
Someone else does that.
At last, my twisted body is whole. Except for my head, which is still missing. To be honest, the rest of me isn’t exactly pristine. One leg is shorter than the other due to a shattered knee. My shoulders are uneven, and one calf is ragged. Perhaps a rat nibbled at it while it was waiting for the rest of me to find it. I truly will miss my belly button.
Still, I am all together at last. My skin can feel the air changing, but there’s just enough darkness left to go and find my head, I hope.
I focus. Oh. It’s close.
My parts, collected, lurch across the city, holding to the waning shadows, haunting alleys, staying away from the open spaces, the cars. I am a naked, headless woman’s body. I’d never make it out of the city morgue without my face attached.
Finally, I come to a studio apartment in a shitty part of town, even for me. A rat much like the one who must have nibbled at my calf runs across my toes as I approach the doorway. I feel its scaly tail as it slithers away.
My hands reach for the door and encounter shapes. My fingers trace them—delicate, many armed and pointed things. Religious symbols. I hope my eyes are on the other side of the door they are trying to protect.
I raise the foot on my non-nibbled leg, kick the door down easily, lurch behind its momentum into a room alive with movement. Something hits me across the back and I fall, reversed hands outstretched. They brush against something round, fuzzy hair at the top, the proud bridge of a nose protruding.
Ah. My head.
I have no idea why they kept it, and whole at that, but I’m so glad they did. They won’t be.
There is a blindfold across the eyes and hasty plugs in the ears. I snatch them away and will my body to stand as I raise my head to my shoulders, match up the edges of my neck.
When it snaps into place, the tingle rushes through me like a live current, shooting from my fingers, lifting my hair straight at the roots. Sights flood my eyes, sounds my ears. There’s screaming, wailing, too many words. My eyes take in a small huddle of young people, sweating scared.
Oh, I remember now. Medical students and PhDs, one in philosophy, the other theology. At least they were before the ethics violations. Before me. There were more of them when we started this dance. There will be fewer, after tonight.
One of their screams coalesces into words, festooned with sobs. “Oh God! Oh God, she’s alive! She came back!”
I always do.
Author note:
The only thing worse than the constant theft and subversion of the rights of women to bodily autonomy is the assumption that we will never find the power to snatch them back, and don’t even innately have that power. I wrote this after a long walk I took to cool my blood after a particularly infuriating instance of this.
