Jar

By Alexis Bradford

Your heart is beating in the doorframe, oak paneling and glittering brass pulsing in time with the blood rushing through and behind your eyeballs. You’re afraid to blink or even to breathe and break the stillness in the room. So you remain, frozen and throbbing, perched on the end of a leather sofa with the jar containing your body squeezed tight between your knees.

“Are you scared?”

The voice at your shoulder makes you jump, the tension snaps as you turn to look at her, the tiny girl next to you with round glasses and a body that is smaller than yours.

#

“I’m scared.”

Standing in the pantry some time last year, you spoke into the church-like quiet as you stood between long aisles of shelves. Late-afternoon sunlight cut through the square window high up on the wall, passing through the rows and rows of jars. Their colours lit up like stained-glass, casting rainbow shadows on the ground at your feet and falling across your mother’s face as she filled an empty shelf with pickled beets.

“You shouldn’t be,” she’d said, and her voice was hard, “We gave our lives so that you could give yourself to him freely. We didn’t bleed for you to be afraid.”

Mother gave herself freely. You could see the evidence of it right then, purple dapples on her neck, partially concealed by the dark hair curling at the nape, and by the spots of pink shining through jars of beetroots but you knew they were there. And the long gashes where he’d torn at her with claws and the black holes left in the hollows of her throat by devouring lips.

#

“No,” you answer the girl whose jar of spiced flesh is smaller than yours. “Why would I be?”

“Why would you be?” Another, who you hadn’t seen, speaks from an armchair that you hadn’t noticed. Her voice is hard like mother’s. “We’re free. He used to just take, you know. Whenever she wanted. Now we get to choose, if and when and how.”

“If?” the first girl says quietly, “Do we get to choose if?”

“And if you don’t,” laughs the second girl, “If you don’t you go moldy, you get old on your own and you stop caring about how you look and how you smell and how you taste because there’s no one to taste you. Or worse, even worse, you do care. You preen and powder your body up all nice and pretty in the hopes that he’ll come looking for you and you’ll be able to tell him no.”

With a smirk, she adds, “He won’t come looking.”

You smile at your neighbor, even though she’s smaller than you, “It’s better this way, really.”

You don’t say it, but you think his way we’ll be put on display. We’ll be admired and savoured in bites and it’ll all be worth it, then.

#

You pull yourself apart in the rusting bathtub, separating sinews and tendons from muscle and bone. Preserving yourself the way mother taught you to do with those peaches last summer, whose sweet odor hung in the air with the dust and the warmth for days as the fruit stewed.

Now it’s your body that is stewing.

Becoming not-yours.

Becoming his.

#

Comparing jars. You try not to but how can you not?

The other girls are.

Comparing flesh-containers, the shades of the skin, the marbled fat or lack thereof. And they are multiplying, entering softly and taking their seat around you. Some looked nervous, some defiant. Some looked angry or righteous.

The door opens then, the pulsing door and your name is called from the throat of the dragon you cannot yet see.

You stand.

#

Home to the rising sun and the first shivers of birdsong.

Mother, sitting at the kitchen table eating homemade raspberry jam spread over a slice of white toast takes in your tired eyes and your limping walk and yesterday’s dress.

“Morning.”

She gives a knowing but tired smile and there’s a red seed caught between her front teeth as you go through the motions of making a cup of tea.

You hurt everywhere from the pain of ceasing to exist and you’re still not sure if you were good enough.