Her right hand was bent inward in a way in which she couldn’t use it, like a permanent lame half fist but the fingers were straight. She could use it by shaping it, like, to hold the sponge she used to wash her body in the shower or masturbate with it. Her fingers were basically numb so as she rubbed it back and forth over her vagina she could really let go as the only thing that told her in her head that she was doing it was the motion she felt in her arm. She hated her hand.
His left foot was like a worm as in he didn’t have any toes and the foot tapered off into a point but he could move it at will like a foot, or more like a foot with one large toe so it could basically squirm which even to himself looking at it was gross. He could wear socks and shoes and appear normal, he could walk around and no one needed to know it looked or acted like that. He had sports days in high school and instead of making an elaborate story to excuse himself he tried to quickly change shoes in the change room so as to get away with it and it worked for over a year until one boy saw the foot. Then he was lost amongst the crowd.
It was a malnutrition thing from his parents that left him with a tongue that looked like it had huge gashes out of it, basically if he poked his tongue out it would look like it had chunks missing from the sides. He ignored it when eating or denied himself the temptation to chew the bits that were exposed until when he met a girl and she kissed him for the first time he kept his shameful thing inside his mouth and after a few weeks of this she actually asked “what’s wrong” and he said “nothing, I just don’t like kissing like that” and she thought “ok” but it was weird from there on. They stayed together and after a while (as it turns out) he went down on her and she didn’t notice and he felt good to be using his tongue and was also eating properly now and wanted it to go away like his doctor said it could. The damage was irreversible.
She trained a lot, her natural talent for gymnastics meant she could maybe be in the Olympics and over the years she got so good and thin and flexible that as her friends all got their periods she didn’t and after a two years of this she asked her mother what was happening and her mother said “it’s because you are training so hard” and she thought that she was elite and different and so grew further and further apart from her friends who she now thought of as animals and so progressed closer towards gymnastic perfection. At fourteen she fell pregnant and her mother was crying and her father was yelling and she didn’t know how it could happen. Her parents aborted the child with a signature.
In the bathroom he kept masturbating using the wash cloth over and over and over in his teenage years so before he was fifteen he developed a hard callous growth under the head of his penis and even though he saw it growing and knowing he had to scrub harder he kept going until the day he felt regret at growing such a thing. It was when he met a girl and kissed her for the first time and felt his penis grow in his pants that he realised he would have to reveal this hard growth to someone at some point. Three evenings later he tried to cut the hard callous off.
I wanted to kill my mother because she had cheated on my father and I was now living with her and her lover and I felt sick and alone and was crying a lot for my Dad who I could only see on weekends in some clichéd modern sharing court based ruling. I took a kitchen knife out of the drawer and practised and imagined how I would plunge it into her chest or belly and took it with me down the hallway and opened my parents’ bedroom door and saw her on top of the guy she was cheating with moving up and down and really fucking him. I closed the door before they knew it was opened.
In her hand she held a letter that professed a type of undying love spelt out in a very basic kind of poetry but because he had written it for her it felt real and pure and better than anything else ever written. She went to bed with it next to her having read it ten or twenty times, imagining his face as he wrote it, remembering his face after they’d kissed with his doe-eyed love and blank expression. She started to drift towards sleep and her phone buzzed twice with an SMS. It said: omg Clive is pashing some slut at Empire bar! Where are you?. She read the poem again and cried herself to sleep.
Her grandfather was dying in the next room and there were so many family members everywhere that it seemed so strange to know that he was dying and she had to smile or nod or do things in acknowledgment of the situation like it was an event. She stood up and walked towards the room he was dying in and was stopped so many times by people crying or talking to her or hugging her and maybe it was ten minutes from one side of the room to the door. She pushed her way between her aunts and was at the foot of the bed and by that time he was not breathing and had died. She felt that she had been held back and denied the final goodbye she wanted by selfish role-playing family members who didn’t care as much as she did.
