Belly Up Read online

  “I don’t understand why you think I have an attitude,” said Mary.

  “Let me explain something to you,” said Mr. Flavin. “You are at a point in your life where you may not yet be aware that, to men, you are sexually attractive. Men want to have sex with you. And your outfit is encouraging men, your male classmates, to want to have sex with you, to think about having sex with you, when they should be thinking about school.”

  Once Principal Flavin finished speaking, he opened up his office door and Mary was allowed to walk to her next class, which was Algebra. Lucky for Mary and Ainsley, the whole Algebra period they were supposed to collaborate with a partner on a problem set, so they could talk to each other while they were working, and fill in each other on the details of their separate experiences during the last class period in which they had been apart.

  “Do you think Principal Flavin wants to eat himself or other people?” asked Ainsley.

  “Definitely other people,” said Mary. “Mainly me.”

  “That would be terrible,” said Ainsley. “His mouth looks like a catfish. I would not want my leg in his mouth.”

  “Neither would I,” said Mary.

  “What about Señora MacDonald?” said Ainsley. “Does she want to eat herself or other people?”

  “I think she wants to eat herself, but only in the sense that she hates herself and is therefore looking for other people with which she can displace her own self-hatred. Or, maybe, she is just not very smart, and acts out some kind of perverse reflection of Principal Flavin’s want to eat us? Like, she is controlled by him in some way, and therefore acts out his impulses for him?”

  “Do you think it is really Principal Flavin who controls Señora MacDonald? Or is she controlled by something else?” said Ainsley.

  “You’re right,” said Mary. “Who knows who controls Principal Flavin! He certainly isn’t smart enough to control himself. He doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I think my father might also be in Mr. Flavin’s vacuum.”

  “I think my father might be, too.”

  Mary and Ainsley finished their math worksheets and turned them into Mr. Lockney. Then they exited the math classroom and went to lunch. They walked to center quad of the school where there was a small green. The four tall walls of the school rose around them, blocking much of the natural light. They put down their jackets on the lawn and sat facing each other with their legs crossed.

  “I read a story once,” said Ainsley. “That is kind of like what happened to you in Señora MacDonald’s class, only, of course, much more explicit. Have you read the story of Daphne? That woman who got chased by Apollo and then turned into a tree?”

  “Of course,” said Mary. “We’ve read it together at my house, in my book of Greek myths.”

  “Right,” said Ainsley. “Well this story is like the story of Daphne, only better, because you get more of the woman’s thoughts and how exactly she escapes her pursuers. It’s about a woman named Norea who lives in Egypt, who is being chased by a man who is a king, but some say he is the devil, and he has, with him, some of his other devil friends. The king and his friends run after Norea, and say, ‘Norea we are going to rape you.’ And then they come upon her and it looks like they have got her, like they are going to rape her, but then she wins. She turns her spirit into a tree and watches, from her tree-spirit eyes, as the kings rape what they think is her body, and she laughs at them because she’s tricked them, because she’s no longer in her body at all. Her real body, at that point, is the tree.”

  “It sounds like they killed her,” said Mary. “And now the kings are just raping her dead body. I don’t think she won. Dying doesn’t count as winning.”

  Lunch ended and Mary and Ainsley parted ways for their respective Study Hall and Physical Education periods. After their last class, which was Mrs. Tulli’s Honors English, Ainsley walked home and Mary went to soccer practice.

  Waiting for practice to begin, Mary sat on a hot aluminum bench with the other girls in her soccer gear. Mary wore thin, plastic running shorts and a large T-shirt that had her father’s college’s name on it. She pulled on her shin guards, one by one, and then her big tube socks that had the pair of black stripes at the top, and then her cleats. The cleats smelled strongly of sweat and dirt because Mary had worn them while doing laps around the field over the summer. She had wanted to prepare for varsity tryouts and break in the shoes. Mary liked the feeling of running alone in her spiked footwear, and she felt that same feeling of euphoria now, at practice, as she ran around the goals at either end of the field and warmed up. After all the athletes were present, the team did many drills together, mostly where they had to run in lines in a relay and touch the grass with their hands to signify their completion of an interval. In between intervals they did drills with a ball. They bounced the balls on their knees, and controlled it, back and forth, between their feet, and took turns returning the ball, from a mid-flight throw with their head. Mary put her brow to the center of the ball three, four times, and then twenty. Her head got light and she could feel the dark at the edges of her eyes fuzz. Again, Mary said, again, and she headed the ball into an arc far away from her. Her dark brown curls bounced up and down and she pulled her arms back and plunged her chest forward, as she stiffened her neck and returned the throw. Mary could feel her blood hardening and her arms and legs growing stronger. This is what it feels like to turn into a tree, thought Mary. This is what it feels like to use your body hard enough that you leave it. I have to tell Ainsley about this feeling, thought Mary. Maybe then Ainsley would want to run.

  Back at home, Ainsley read alone on her sofa. Ainsley had one sister who was six years older than she was, so the sister didn’t live at home. Ainsley’s mother watched television, which was Ainsley’s mother’s main occupation. Ainsley’s father was a fireman, and thus was only home on and off, now being the off part, so the only people in the house were Ainsley and her mother. On the television was a reality TV show about girls from evangelical families who got raped and were made to keep the baby. On the screen was a gaggle of Ainsley’s-age-looking women, who scooted around the TV set and yelled at their moms. Their bellies rounded slowly throughout the show, so that by the end of the episode Ainsley thought they looked like bloated dead bodies, their abdomens stretched so tight they looked plastic and as if, at any moment, they might explode. While watching the TV show, Ainsley had a vision of Señora MacDonald touching Mary’s stomach and then Mary’s stomach immediately expanding on finger impact, ballooning in a matter of seconds so that by the time Mary got to the classroom door she looked like she was just about to give birth. By the time the episode ended, it was late in the evening. All the lights in the house were off except for the blue light of the TV. Ainsley’s mother was sleeping, her head tilted on the back of the couch, her mouth gaping, releasing a steady stream of hot, gaseous air. Their dog, a white toy poodle named Roofus, was licking Ainsley’s mother’s arm raw. A soft pink patch of skin appeared on her forearm where Roofus had licked. Ainsley turned off the television and put a blanket over her mother and Roofus and then went to sleep.

  During the night Ainsley dreamed of summer camp. She saw her eight-year-old self clad in her camp uniform. The camp was all girls. All the girls made lanyards and learned about owls and the contents of owl pellets. Ainsley saw herself picking apart owl dung with a pair of tweezers, pulling out snake bones and rat hair and what looked like a venomous fang. Then she saw herself on a hike with her cabin unit. They were traversing the side of a mountain, going straight from the bottom up to the peak. Their unit leader was a college-aged woman. She had a tanned leather face and crooked teeth and black hair underneath both of her arms. She led a group of around thirty campers, Ainsley among them. As they climbed up the mountain they periodically crossed a winding road made for cars. When they came to the asphalt they would have to look left, checking for oncoming vehicles, and then right. The first couple times they crossed the road there were no cars in either direction. Then, they came to a
crossing, and the unit leader spotted a car. The unit leader turned to them, her herd of little girls, their little red bandanas sticking to their wet little necks. She halted them with her hand and said, “Be a tree!” as she raised her arms in demonstration, putting her arms over her head bent at awkward angles as if her arms were branches about to spring leaves. She rooted her feet to the ground and stood perfectly still. And then there was silence. The mass of little girls faced her like well-trained warriors, their arms raised overhead in imitation. There was not even a hush. And then, the car was upon them, a red truck speeding fast around the turn where the campers were foresting, dangerously pummeling up the mountain to wherever the driver was going, possibly his home. “Good work, campers,” said the unit leader. “When you a see a car coming, what’s the safest thing to do?” The unit leader put her hand to her ear to mime her want for the girls’ collective response, “Get off the road and be a tree!” The campers all yelled in unison, their little-girl voices echoing in the mountains, their little-girl chatter and giggles bubbling back up into being, their plant forms leaving, their girl forms returning to their little girl heads. Eight-year-old Ainsley stomped her hiking boots in the dirt path of the mountain and looked down below at the lake far beneath them. She was looking forward to reaching the peak of the hike. She wanted so badly to see how small the lake could get, if one could get high enough up where the lake actually turned into nothing. It was a very big lake, so she didn’t think it could ever, actually, turn into nothing. But she thought it was possible, even probable, that, viewed from that high up, what the lake looked like would change.

  The next day at school Ainsley told Mary the story of her childhood summer camp dream remembering.

  “Did you actually go to summer camp?” asked Mary.

  “Yes,” said Ainsley. “The dream was more night-time memory than fantasy, actually.”

  “It sounds like it was fun,” said Mary. “I wish we had been friends then so I could have asked my mom if I could go.”

  “It was fun,” said Ainsley. “In any case, I think I have come up with a plan of action.”

  “Really?” said Mary. “I think I have a possible plan of action, too.”

  “Well,” said Ainsley. “I think this all has to do with eating. Right now we are being actively eaten but we aren’t eating anyone.”

  “Exactly!” said Mary. “It’s about consumption. We have to consume so we’re not consumed.”

  “Now, I know we could look at this all in a larger context,” said Mary. “But I kind of get the feeling that the idea of a larger context is a dangerous notion that denies the injustice of what has occurred. If we focus on justice at the local level, I think it will imply justice at the larger level, and that is, I think, what we need.”

  “But it is a web,” said Ainsley. “A sticky film certainly connects everything. Especially in this situation, in which, I fear, everyone who lives within a thirty-five mile radius of our school is implied.”

  “OK,” said Mary. “I think you’re right, but we can’t kill all of them.”

  “We can if we can kill a symbol of them,” said Ainsley.

  “What about my little brother?” said Mary. “We could kill him.”

  “He is disgusting,” said Ainsley. “But is he implied?”

  “Have you seen his small little dick?” said Mary.

  “No,” said Ainsley.

  “All he wants to do is consume,” said Mary. “Sure, he can’t yet yell at us from a car, and he doesn’t yet have the dexterity to molest, but the intent is there. If he knew what sex was, that’s what he’d want from us. It’s like the Japanese cannibal. He knew he wanted to eat someone before he knew what anything else was. You can see it in my brother’s eyes. He’s the same way. And he’s a symbol that extends to all of them: the men in the car, Señora MacDonald, and Mr. Flavin. They’ll be very sorry when my brother is dead because they see something of themselves in him. It’s the most powerful way to kill all of them.”

  “I guess you’re right,” said Ainsley.

  “I was thinking it would be best to boil him,” said Mary. “Like they do with lobsters on TV.”

  “Do you think his skin will fall off?” said Ainsley.

  “Probably,” said Mary. “Maybe then we can see the meat of him, that man meat he’s made of. We’ll take pictures of his meat and send a note to Mr. Flavin with the picture and write ‘Who’s eating who? Beware! We’d like to eat you.’”

  “Will Mr. Flavin get it, though?” said Ainsley.

  “Who cares,” said Mary. “I don’t think it’s our job to make his brain work better. He’ll be scared, which is the important thing. Maybe it’s even better if he doesn’t put two and two together.”

  “You’re right,” said Ainsley. “That is always the scariest part of any movie—when things are unclear and hard to understand.”

  “Really though,” said Mary. “I think we have to kill someone. What else is there for us to do?”

  “We could keep watching,” said Ainsley. “Until we know exactly how everything works. Like our ouroboros we could try being ‘active and passive at the same time.’ ”

  “That sounds really painful and boring,” said Mary. “And what if they eat us first? It is eat or be eaten, Ainsley!”

  “Be patient,” said Ainsley. “We’ll eat them. We just need to figure out the best way how.”

  In Honors Science, that day, Mary and Ainsley were tasked with doing a partnered research project on their choice of phylum. They sat at their lab station, sink, Bunsen burner, and a fat science textbook between them.

  “I want to research parthenogenetic snakes,” said Mary.

  “Like the ouroboros?” said Ainsley.

  “It was unclear to me if the ouroboros is capable of a virgin birth,” said Mary.

  “Sure, it is,” said Ainsley. “We know it ‘weds and impregnates itself, that it is both man and woman, begetting and conceiving at the same time.’”

  “That sounds more like a hermaphrodite,” said Mary. “Like it still needs something else, another snake to mate with.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” said Ainsley. “It does the begetting AND the conceiving. It’s a one-woman job through and through.”

  “I guess you’re right,” said Mary.

  “But which snake species are parthenogenetic?” said Ainsley. “I thought it was something female snakes only did, rarely, when kept in captivity, like a last-ditch biological feat to keep their species alive because they are alone in a box and think the world has ended and there are no more males anywhere with which to mate.”

  “Didn’t you watch that TV episode with me?” said Mary. “The one where they revealed that that hypothesis was a fallacy, and that snakes and other reptiles have been reproducing asexually in the wild for ages, and that it is possible that some species could become all female? Why would they need males, after all, if they could do the whole job themselves?”

  “I must have fallen asleep,” said Ainsley, looking disappointed.

  “What a bunch of numbskulls,” said Mary. “Assuming something could only be done in captivity, when their only test subjects were in captivity.”

  “Are we in captivity?” said Ainsley.

  “Of sorts,” said Mary, as she smiled.

  “You know who else, besides certain types of snakes, are capable of parthenogenesis?” said Ainsley, slyly, her eyebrows raised in giddy anticipation.

  “Who?” said Mary.

  “Plants,” said Ainsley, as she dug her hand deep into their science textbook, flipped the page and read aloud.

  HUNKER DOWN

  BY THE TIME MY DAUGHTER came of age, the economy was so bad that it was cheaper to hire someone to hold her breasts up than it was to buy her a bra. We put an ad on Craigslist and decided Mark was the best fit for the position. We set him up in our backyard with some water and a shack. He would get up every morning at the crack of dawn and stand outside her room and wait for her to rise. When she left the
house, Mark hunched over and slid his hands underneath her shirt, cupping my daughter’s small breasts gently. He scurried behind her, head tucked down, providing the best support that any parent could ask for. He was an older gentleman who, if the times were different, would have been just over the age bracket of a young professional. I believe he sent the money he made working for us to his parents.

  Mark’s solitary flaw as a breast holder was that he was only useful short-term. The hunching and cupping gave him severe back problems that eventually prevented him from working all of the necessary hours. In our family finance meeting, we reasoned that the lifespan of a breast holder was similar to that of a laptop—after four years their efficiency slowed until inevitably, they crashed, and were no longer of use. Mark crashed the day his riddled arthritic hands formed tight fists that couldn’t hold anything, let alone my daughter’s precious breasts. We replaced Mark with Evan, but kept Mark on for a short time so he could train our new hire. The two of them, Evan and Mark, could be seen before dawn in dutiful practice—hunching over in the dark, cupping air and pacing the length of our lawn. They walked in long lines and then stood still for fifteen minute intervals, testing their conversation support stance, and would finally end their predawn training session with a brief cupping jog meant to simulate my daughter’s commendable routine of exercise. After Evan’s training was complete, we brought Mark back to the place from which we had picked him up—a small hillock several miles outside of town. As we drove to drop off Mark at the hillock, my daughter’s new breast holder, Evan, sat in the back seat, reaching around the sides of the front seat to put his hands under my daughter’s shirt and support her. When we arrived at the hillock I had to put the car in park to let Mark out. His hands had become so clenched that even pulling open the door handle was beyond his capabilities. Once outside the car, Mark dropped to all fours. As I climbed back into the driver’s seat, Evan voiced a heartfelt request to briefly lapse in his responsibilities. I gave him permission to do so, and he pulled his left hand out from under my daughter’s shirt and waved to Mark as we drove away.