Salted Wounds

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She crushed the grains of salt against her body, imagining the gritty hiss they might make as they broke apart. The granules left long, puffy red streaks on her breasts and belly, as if someone, many someones, had tried to pull her apart.

The skin rose in angry welts, wet and raw. She looked wounded. Thin, stringy blonde hair was plastered to her skull, eyeliner and mascara smudged into a mask around her eyes, face splotchy from the scalding water.

She pretended for a second that the grains of salt were not grains at all. That they were blades instead. But blades took courage, and courage was just another word in a long list of things that she lacked.

She cut herself once, but it was an accident. She was shaving in a trance, combing the razor up and down her legs, enjoying the pleasant numbness when she realized that she had scraped open the skin. She moved the leg beneath the spray to rinse and water hit wound like acid, a stinging that soon became a full body burn. She watched the liquid run down her leg, red dripping from her foot, then pink, finally turning to pale rust.

It reminded her of the blood she saw spill from her brother’s body. The pale pink foam that bubbled up between his lips after he overdosed. Peroxide frothing at the mouth of an open wound. The angry red gloss of slashes across his wrists, forearms, thighs. The way his shirt sleeves stuck to fresh cuts on his arms, the dried blood melding shirt to skin.

She watched him once when she went to visit him in the mental hospital on Thanksgiving. His glazed eyes. The nervous twitch of foot. His knee jerking up, tapping out an erratic, nervous beat that gave a metallic echo when it hit the steel table. The nurse walking in with his cup of pills. As he reached for them, she grabbed his wrist and wrenched it over, looking for signs of fresh infliction.

Years later he would write her from prison. I did finish reading The Bell Jar. It reminded me of you at first because of the way the girl used drugs. By the end the book no longer reminded me of you because you don’t abstain. The girl gets clean and you aren’t clean.

She scrubs harder. You aren’t clean. Scraping now. Tearing at her skin. You aren’t you aren’t you aren’t you aren’t.

She bared her teeth, burning eyes squeezed shut. She ground the salt deeper into her bleeding skin.

***

When she was 12 she played a game of wolf pack with her cousins and their friends in the woods behind her uncle’s house. They split into two teams and raced through the trees, trying to attack their opponents and avoid being tackled. She ran too far and turned around, coming face to face with an older boy from the other team. He snarled at her, hands raised into claws, and began to run at her. She wanted to run but the open space of the wood seemed to vanish like one last sucking breath, and she stood paralyzed with fear and excitement.

He rushed at her, knocking her down, still playing wolf as he snuffled into her neck, her hair, his hands grasping at her waist, her ass. She tried twisting away, pushing at his bony boy chest. When he finally let her up, he growled again. You better run, he said.

She ran.

***

The summer she was 19 she rode on the back of a four-wheeler, a man 10 years her senior at the wheel. They made ruts in the yard, turning sharply so the tires kicked up clumps of earth in their wake, laughing, drunk on wine and whiskey. Her boyfriend and his wife watched from the porch, easy, affectionate smiles on their faces.

But then the two of them took off, turning right onto the dirt road at the mouth of the driveway, heading to the overgrown patch of land where all the kids played daredevil and chicken on their bicycles.

He headed down the dirt path to take the final jump and she tightened her arms around him, pressed her breasts to his back, tilted her head forward to rest in the cradle of his neck and shoulder.

The next week she lay naked on a cot in his friend’s trailer, watching him as he spread her legs and put his head between them. She closed her eyes and listened to him make vague, liquid sounds, then began to twitch and move, the universe closing in on them, the stars not static but moving in circles around her, flowing beneath her, holding her weight. She thought God no God no oh my God God God and a thousand tiny atoms burst, keeping perfect time with her spastic legs.

Her brother wrote her again from prison. The difference between you and the girl in “The Bell Jar” is she admits to having an addiction. You are far from ever saying such a thing.

She drove home along Route Two, over the long stretch of bridge. It didn’t really seem like a bridge, it being so low and the water so high. You are far you are far. She felt like she was driving through lake, through glassy water that carelessly tossed light off its waves. You are far so so far. Summer had ended early that year, choked off by a vicious frost that forced the trees bare. On land she saw them standing naked, their limbs creeping across the brightness of a full white moon like ominous black lace, set to strangle.

Such a thing, she thought. Such a thing.