Kat Meads
The Hers
Say, for starters, you are a girl with a grudge, someone who has lived with a grudge (the cause immaterial) for long enough to self-identify as a grudge holder. And say you have this thing about people, total strangers, who feel free to eddy up alongside you in the grocery store or drug store or cut-rate clothing store or wherever to brazenly stare at whatever item you hold in your hands. And say one day, one of those days when there seem to be too many objects in the world but not the right objects, a ripe, old, bruised shell of a woman whom you fear you’ll one day see in the mirror edges up beside you and instead of staring at your pending purchase brazenly stares at you, trying (you’re convinced) with that stare to snatch your age and height and hair density and very life. And say to prevent that theft you start shoving the old woman and shouting “Get off me, hag! Get your death breath off me!” and say the old gal, as if you’ve yelled none of those hateful words, continues to press closer still, and just as you’re about to bolt the line, the checker asks “Will that do it for you today?” and say you, the horribly conflicted, compromised girl, find you cannot speak.
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Say, for starters, you are a woman who can’t recall exactly when you began to pick at your face but never mind since the picking is a private matter between your finger and your face. Say, nevertheless, you have for years been exceedingly careful about the when and where of separating one piece of your flesh from another and during your mid-morning break this day assiduously check sinks and stalls to confirm you are without company in the office restroom. Say the light, in the restroom, has recently been upgraded, a boon to picking, and when a colleague enters you surprise yourself and her by carrying on. And because your colleague does not immediately take herself elsewhere, you surprise yourself still further by digging deeper, drawing blood. Then she does depart, she and her pitying concern, and back at her cubicle will start the first round of Pass the Message. Soon your colleagues en masse will believe you are bleeding out on the restroom floor and wonder if they should “get involved.” Say you consider the entire episode wildly liberating and next day take less trouble covering the inflammation and divots and scabs with fresh makeup, eagerly anticipating the morning you will arrive in the office makeup-free, the first step in no longer disguising any private facet of yourself. Say you follow through.
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Say, for starters, you are a child weaned on the phrase “Let’s not get our hopes up.” And say, as a child, you infer that hopes (always plural), while possible to lift, are better off un-lifted, that any attempt to do so will be taken by those in your immediate circle as unseemly, an act of bravado, a show-off-y performance. To “come to grips” with that imperative lesson, say your strategy (at first) is to picture hopes as the equivalent of an immensely heavy beast, most likely a bear. Not even your strongest uncle has wrestled a bear, much less lifted it. Then, say a year or so older, still struggling to tamp down your natural childish enthusiasm/optimism/belief in magic, you reframe the imagery. Hopes = a very tall ceiling and you, midge-sized, beneath. A midge could fly within reach of a ceiling, sure, but lift it? No way. Say one rainy afternoon, stuck inside, ceiling overhead, you decide to share your midge and ceiling decoding. And say you imagine (i.e., hope) that when you reach the end of your little presentation, the mood around you will instantly transform and you’ll be celebrated with nods, grins and maybe even complimented on your ingenuity (a word you don’t even know yet) rather than told: “it’s just a saying.” And say this time they are actually telling the truth and all the while you were making up stories to control and comfort yourself they assumed you knew it was “just a saying,” assumed it was just you being you.
Kat Meads's flash fiction has appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Fairy Tale Review, Necessary Fiction, Hotel Amerika, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and elsewhere. She is the author of the flash fiction collection Little Pockets of Alarm. (katmeads.com)
