Spine

The end of the hall at the end of her world confused. Stone legs unable to move faster than a slow march. She was called to the office. Didn’t know the whys or the whats. Not yet. Only knew she was headed towards the inner chamber to be examined.

Her other memory from that day was the nurse. Hands moved slowly over back pressed unnatural rise and fall. She touched the floor or as close as she could. Left the office carried an envelope of paperwork for her mother who hemmed pants for months amazed that two legs were never the same length twice. Measure once, hem twice.

The lateness of fall a flurry of activity and absences. Josephine went on trips to exotic cities captive in the backseat of a green stationwagon. Her flesh seared with touch and cold hands inside dimly lit exam rooms. Ottawa and Montreal. She would find herself back in those places, less then ten years past, sipping tea with photographers wanting her to undress wanting her to have sex with them from the lens of a camera. Her transformation had begun never fully cured of corseted restraint.

Josephine came home exhausted with her new outer layer. Maladjustments to her new enclosure. In the embrace, the curve was still unstable, deferred, but never omitted. Three years a flash at the onset of thirty, but at ten, three years the better part of a life.

This malady, an uninherited violence against genetics heldover from travel over open water the rush to leave rotten potatoes west coast ways of life years falling short. A mix of green and red making brown. Spine holds upright but twisted, ribcage tightened against lungs. Body curved in on itself an ivy vine growing inside a jar.

Cotton covered skin pressed tight against interior twenty-three hours a day. Rotted slowly with age and afterglow. Pull. Pull the straps. Bring them in close to the ribs. Feel the push of skin lack of breath. Washing the deadness everyday she discovers she loves the feel of water. Subtle pushes and penetration. Her pores tub soaked with the scent of pre-teenage girl.

She feels nostalgic her molted layer found on an expedition in her mother’s basement at twenty-one. She can’t understand how it was ever that small how she was how imposing. Surely it remained hidden beneath loose sweaters and cotton pant uniforms. This cavity looks much smaller when the eyes grow and weaken memories that merge and collide inserting themselves into one anothers’ pathways.

The news she receives before her coming of age execution she did not like or want to make a decision against. Her prescription was a quick bloodletting to ease the transition. Medicine men performing an addition a subtraction. She let the blood flow for as long and as hard as it could not even flexing at the last watching it collect a weakness in the belly.

Her last pre-op dinner held with family in the small apartment her grandmother shared with her offsprung daughter. This might be the last why do you think those things she says inside her breath because I think that way and I don’t want to know what the outcome will be. Her grandmother hugged her goodbye and touched an aging palm to Josephine’s pale skin. No chancing that things could go wrong.

In the early light of the hospital’s sixth floor, Josephine’s navy eyes watch as the nurses sedate her. The walls are collapsing am I dreaming is this happening even. She was loose, her mouth in motion with laughter rolling past.

Her back was ripped open; morphine addiction recovery. Josephine lay awake turning every two hours two days in a bed too small for the frame not wanting to use the bedpan suffering visits from holy men and women at her sickbed with cloth too thin to cover her breasts. The tug and scrape of tubes brings her insides through her nasal cavity. Tiny wounds of flesh gather themselves at her wrists.

Touching the scar, she reminds herself that all of this is true. Dull memories and the fusion of metal rods to delicate shafts and ball of bone. She remembers by the build of fleshy pain, the men who see the violent slipcover of ivy vine.