How to Wrestle a Girl: Stories by Venita Blackburn

Author:Venita Blackburn [Blackburn, Venita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374602802
Google: 7BYQEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B08R2LW5NT
Publisher: MCD x FSG Originals
Published: 2021-09-06T23:00:00+00:00

Part II

Grief Log

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A whole life empties out like rice on the floor.

Fat

When the PA removed the cast, it didn’t smell as bad as I expected. The cast cracked off like a broken shell, my arm the tongue of a sea creature exposed, cold and vulnerable. As soon as it came off I slid from the noisy exam bed to leave, but there was more to do and the PA put up his hands in protest. I didn’t get it, really, the cage door had been unlatched and I could go throw my skin under the sun, maybe even join the softball team again, although my sister, T, wouldn’t let me. She waited by the car, so she could vape. Most bones heal well with treatment, I vaguely remember him saying when I was brought in. His breath smelled like red onions and honey-mustard salad dressing. After a bone breaks a blood clot seeps in around the halves. After a while a kind of prebone net grows inside the hematoma, slowly taking hold of the bone and pushing out the blood. Eventually the bone net solidifies into new bone and everything is fine. A seventy-mile-an-hour softball hit my elbow like cannon fire last spring. They gave me pain meds and surgery and pain meds and metal screws and more surgery and more pain meds and then nothing and more nothing until now.

“You’ve put on some weight,” he said.

The PA’s name was Paul or William or Paul William. I didn’t look at his chest because I didn’t look at people too often. Paul or William was white, with a spotty beard and shiny thinning hair cut close. He wasn’t a man in a sexual sense to me, but his energy probably was supposed to be sexual. I hadn’t gotten used to that thing that happens to people. I would feel it around Coach sometimes, not the desire to have sex but the reminder that it was possible, like storms are possible when clouds appear. Paul or William didn’t know a lot of things. He didn’t know why I was alone at the pediatrician’s when all the other teenagers had their parents dutifully in tow. He didn’t know my father died of sleep apnea the previous winter. He didn’t know my mother was so depressed she had cashed the life insurance policy for half a million dollars and spent every day high as shit while me and T managed the household, and I personally had to listen to a grown man comment on my medically insignificant weight gain. Paul or William was new, meaning he was a well-intentioned ass hat.

I quit softball like T wanted, sat around all summer, but I hadn’t noticed the change in my body. Perhaps a different kind of girl would’ve been hurt by that. A different kind of girl would’ve told her mother, who would have filed a complaint and exchanged letters with lawyers to feel all that could be done for her daughter’s emotional fortress had been done.

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