Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi

Author:Ananda Devi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781941920411
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Published: 2016-06-21T04:00:00+00:00

EVE

The body is lying naked on the bench, like it’s ready to be cut up. But this isn’t an autopsy.

Lying, naked, on a bench in the biology room, I try to imagine myself wherever Savita is, spread out under the gazes of policemen and doctors, waiting to figure out her secrets. Waiting to splatter red on the white earthenware. But no, a dead body doesn’t splatter. Only a living body gushes red.

Saadiq wrote, on the wall: Your mouth in red memory opens for the sovereign man’s blood.

What did she, Savita, get from the sovereign man? Punches. Cuts. And maybe something else.

And for me, it’s not blood I’ll be getting, but a male’s sperm that invades and drowns the female, that disperses within her millions of his potential doubles.

But I’ll never carry his doubles. My body won’t be colonized.

My body is lying, naked, on the table.

A thin body to treasure or tear apart, they say.

And right now he is treasuring me and tearing me apart at the same time. He struggles and staggers under the force of his urges. I have never seen him so destroyed. His shadow on the wall is gigantic. That of a monstrous creature overlooking me. It doesn’t look like anything human, this stooped, wavering shadow emitting guttural, sucking sounds, the sounds of inhuman suffering.

Why did I come tonight? After what happened to Savita? I don’t belong here. But I don’t belong anywhere. I can’t mourn Savita in my home, or in hers.

So I do it here, with all the force of my hatred. I hate your death, Savita, and I hate this man who relieves himself in me without caring about whether I’m alive or dead.

Afterward, when he’s done slobbering, I’ll get up and, the better to destroy him, sit on this table to do my work in the silence of the room, in the bodily smells all around, my clothes rumpled, my hair still wet, my mouth dry, my body emptied out, my soul worn out, my memories dirtied, my days paid for, my pride ripped open, my sex loosened, and the letters and words of my knowledge like lead on the page but still meaningless, without any illumination, displaying their powerlessness and indifference because Savita will not be out there waiting for me like always to tie the rope of my life together again within my body and without that, I don’t have any life, anything to hold me up over the emptiness, anything to keep me from letting go.

Like her. But she never let go. Someone else did it for her. Someone thought she wasn’t worth any more than the trash he threw her into.

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