Exposure by Kathryn Harrison

Author:Kathryn Harrison [Harrison, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76599-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

I’ve been lying to Carl. I do remember. I just can’t talk about it, say the words aloud. Not yet.

I was scared at the dealer’s, Papi. When I saw those pictures, saw myself naked, when you showed me what I’d done to myself, I could smell the fear on me, rank, like a dog before a beating. When, when did you take them all? So many. I thought I had hidden what you learned.

How long had you been dead? A week?

Sitting there, considering my inheritance, I found myself referring to the girl in the pictures as “she.” “Her.” Not out loud of course, that wouldn’t have seemed normal. And besides, I didn’t say anything out loud.

You do have that desire to keep a person you love with you forever, even the ones that poison you, maybe even especially them—you want to drink that poison. I tried to hate you, Papi. It would have made everything easier if I had. But somehow, I couldn’t.

All those years it was you who threatened to eat me up, now I find I have swallowed you, kept you inside me. I went on, I made a life, I thought I wasn’t thinking of you. But now I cannot help myself, you’ve come back.

I wish I had been braver, had asked you more questions. All that I’ll never know about your past, all that I can’t remember about the part of it we shared. Were you really more mysterious than any other person? Was I? Did you take pictures of what you found mysterious as a way to try to know it?

Of course I didn’t pose for the pictures, not the ones about which everyone asks. And they weren’t faked.

I can feel it again, the way I did so many years ago.

Bending a Coke can back and forth, back and forth until it tore and made a knife. Cutting myself. Doing it carefully, very carefully, so that just a line of red opened behind my blade’s slow progress.

Or a little burn, perhaps, the edge of the iron as I was pressing a skirt for school.

It wasn’t masochism so much as a sort of drug. The small, specific sensation, the red color, was calming to me. That strange way pain can make you taste metal in your mouth. Not from licking the blood, that’s not what I mean: just a taste that comes into your consciousness along with a smell like ammonia, something you might be thinking rather than sensing. It didn’t hurt, not really, it felt.

I didn’t know why I did it, not then. But now I do. I longed for a wound that showed. I used to fantasize that you beat me—you who never touched me except to turn my head this way or that—I imagined that you beat me until I was black and blue. Because I wanted wounds, stigmata. I never spoke out against you—that was a matter of honor—but I wanted my pain manifest. And I wanted to feel it.

For almost a year after you died I stumbled, I stubbed my toes, I closed fingers in drawers, knocked my head.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.