I’m in love with a moon girl who smells like lunar dust, sharp and charged. Every night, she studies me, reverent as church quiet, then fucks me feral. Every morning, I wake undisturbed, to a husband who treats me like a haunted doll he was bewitched into buying at an estate sale. Like I’m display-only. Like if I ever animate I have the capacity for ruin.
***
My dream self pockets cheap red pharmacy lipstick and leaves without paying. Dream me savors room-temperature pizza alone in bed, wiping cold grease off her fingers with high-thread-count sheets. Dream me sates the ache between her thighs when moon girl kneels like a devout parishioner at her altar.
***
I was nine the first time my mother told real me she looked up to me. That I was just like my father. My body, swallow small, braced for impact, knowing that this praise would come with punishment, that I had been forged to withstand the pressure of both in equal measure. I’d close my eyes, float like a balloon to the moon, its pond scum light pulsing on/off like a faulty streetlamp.
***
In public, my husband rests his hand, tomato season hot—all burn and yearn and blush—on the small of my back. An act of pride, of sweaty possession. In private, he secretly tightens all the jar lids in the house so they rib a sharp imprint on my palm when I try to open them. When I ask for help, he snares me in the negative space between his highbeam eyes, sighs what would you do without me.
***
When marriage-counselor-number-three asks real me what do you want, I gape like a wound, weeping, speechless. Dream me knows exactly what she wants. To possess and tempt and consume. To feel seen enough to surrender, safe enough to like it.
***
I was twelve the last time my mother told me that I was selfish, just like my father. Needy. Greedy. Twelve when she tilted on her axis, and my father’s work days lengthened, and I learned that to survive I had to be stabilizing, strike-absorbing. To desire nothing. To only come alive in the waning crescent between dreaming and waking where my moans had the power to crack headboards, and rattle cupboard doors, and tremble silverware indecent on the floor.
***
In the beginning, my husband liked that I was hard and flexible as a pin bone. I didn’t cower when he ripped the fridge cord from its outlet because I picked the wrong make and model—it was too loud. I didn’t flinch when he split the drywall above my head with his fist because he forgot to plug it back in, and all our cold food spoiled. Because I knew this wrath that blistered blue, the undulating syncopation of it. Knew how it flashed like a flood, quickly receding but steeping the shifted landscape in a queasy calm. The only tangible evidence my tremoring pulse, my rabbit heart. Marriage-counselor-number-two called this a red flag.
***
We spent our wedding night in a field, the air twitching with lightning bugs, the sun melting crayon-like across a paper sky. He tucked his belly in the hollow of my back, his arm crooked around my neck. Dream me tapped on the curved hull of my skeleton, sing-song begging for me to let her out.
***
I want to be a final girl, to cross-stitch shadows into my laugh and run primal through a darkening forest, solitary as a god. I want to offer the soft belly of my wrists to the sky. I want to gnash my teeth, and unhinge my jaw, and devour the world. I want to crack my skin suit slant and let the loamy moonlight cradle the dripping, tiny, ancient thing inside of me. I want to behold all of my dark and all of my light and see that it—that I—am good.
***
In the end, marriage-counselor-number-one asks what we liked about each other when we first met.
I layer our memories like earth until I sag and creak under their weight. In the beginning, we had picnics in the park, traded dog-eared copies of our favorite books, drank sun-warm wine out of plastic cups. In the beginning, we halved red velvet cupcakes with bare hands and then stumbled sticky down yawning avenue blocks to see La Traviata. In the beginning, we were friends, and I liked him. I loved him.
He says he doesn’t remember those things, they never happened. That he liked me for my face and body.
And now? What do you like about her now?
Nothing comes to mind.
His answer wiretrips my doll eyes into motion, spinning them like twin owl heads in my skull.
