I’m in the restroom at the doggie daycare taking pictures of my ass. The window’s stuck cracked open and I got goosebumps from the cold. It’s New Year’s Eve. We’ve been playing jangly chimey holiday music all day for customers but between songs all I hear are muffled barks and the echoes of my own movements bouncing soft against the tile. 

This one never responds right but because I got a lot of what you call spiritual generosity I’m sending my ass to him anyway. He just don’t know what to say. He’ll act real interested in what’s in the background, like a book on a shelf. One time I sent him a video and he said some mess about aspect ratio. I don’t know but I know he likes my ass in person. 

I’m clothed and back out on the floor looking for Pippin and Big Boy, who’re hiding in a Playland doghouse shaped like a cowboy hat and matching boots. In Playland we got a whole scene: plastic trees with green spongy shapes for leaves, and a winding river painted on the floor, its little splashes frozen in time. I’m singing to the dogs about how they’re fixing to go home and then I’m going home too, to get ready for a party. Pippin’s yapping away but Big Boy’s setting his ears back, looking at me with those stubby white eyelashes of his. I’m telling him that Brianna, the one who trimmed his nails for him last week, is trying to set me up with Derrick, the one who gave him the extra treats, which means we better get a move on so I can go shave my stomach.

These days I shave my whole body but as a child I was just about covered in hair. When I’d pick up a tray in the lunch line my sleeves’d slide down and the boys would say “Look at her arms!” and everyone would scoot back so as not to stand beside me. From far away I looked a little rough and blurry, like some paper after all the pencil’d been erased, and up close you’d see a light coat of dark hair on my face. Mama stopped bathing me when, at just six years old, I’d grown long, coarse and curly hairs around each nipple. From then on out, it was up to me to clean myself. At seven I was given “special dispensation”—really more like a soft command—to shave my legs in summertime, on account of having become a spectacle. I’d put on my shorts, not wanting to shave naked so I could still call out for help in case I died, and I’d sit on the edge of the tub, folding over first to shave my toes, feeling sick in the deepest pit of me. It wasn’t nicks or burns so much as a raw kind of nausea from losing what once had covered me, from smoothing myself down, like I was the sculptor and the sculpture waiting inside the sculpture. Afterwards the room would seem brighter, now more and too much a part of my skin, and I’d run back to my room to shiver under a big pile of blankets and cry. I cried not because I missed the hair, but because it had ever been there at all, because now I had to take up battle, shed a curse. The hair scared everyone, even my own mother, and I didn’t want to scare anyone else ever again. 

I’m walking Pippin and Big Boy out back in their bright red bowties. Their owners are late picking them up and the sun’s long gone. I keep a boxcutter on me for protection since I’m so short I probably still got a child-size skeleton and child-size organs. I don’t know how well I could fend for myself. One time I was walking down to my car after my open mic and here come some wild-eyed character barreling toward me but I just stood there staring like a dumb old cat. Sometimes I get so shook up I don’t know who I am or where I am anymore. But Miss Tina from the Life Line told me to focus on my feet and feel my feet on the ground. She said if you rest your hands palms up, the backs of them in your lap, you’ll sit up a little straighter and breathe a little calmer. I don’t always remember to do it but when I do I feel like a plant turning towards the sun. 

For my 12th birthday Mama, proud as could be, handed me a gift certificate to get a full face wax at a spa the next town over called Beyond Beauté. I spent the rest of the day crying in the bathroom, embarrassed and scared and wishing I’d been born pretty so I’d get gel pens instead. Daddy banged on the door just one time to shake me out of a hiccup and said it don’t get more spoilt than a child who’d squall like that over a present. But Miss Denise at Beyond Beauté told me fathers ought to be obligated to pay for every girl’s waxing since it’s all their fault anyway. She smelled of tea tree oil and would tap to check the hardened wax on my chin like she was playing delicate little notes on a piano. Waiting for the wax to cool was the part I hated. The anticipation of it made me forget my breath, like just before you jump off a merry-go-round. But when she finally ripped it all off for me—it hurt of course but it almost didn’t matter because I felt so solid and free, more inside all my edges and borders but more free to leave them, like being rerooted in a fresh new pot, like being reborn. Miss Denise passed me a hand mirror so I could look at myself as she stood above me massaging my face like she was prepping a turkey. I could see myself, what I really looked like, because I knew the hair wasn’t me. My face still wasn’t the face I wanted but that wasn’t Miss Denise’s fault. All she could do was try to help me move the boulder out of the way and see what could be found. On the way home I begged Mama and Daddy to drive around as long as we could so no one’d see my raw red face. They got me some peanut butter fudge and a whole towel to cry into while I sat in the station wagon staring at the seawall and listening to Faith Hill on the radio. In wintertime the water is gray and full of junk, like the inside of a whale. 

I can feel the magic floating in the air 

Being with you gets me that way

Sometimes I sext a man who’s married and trying to have a baby. He used to fuck his wife all the time to try to make the baby though they knew he probably couldn’t because of his sperm. But now he’s into breeding, as a kink. I’m glad he found a way to enjoy it without getting down on himself about his sperm. Some men know how to make the best of things. He’s always talking about breeding my fertile cunt and I don’t particularly want to be bred but I appreciate the compliment, I like that he gets so horny he says whatever’s on his mind. One time he suggested something else specific enough to be memory and it was, he used to fuck another girl on top of picnic tables at campgrounds. They were driving across the country together and he’s still in love with her though they’re married to different people now. 

I’m locking up the daycare and the lights are low in Playland. On account of Pippin and Big Boy’s owners not getting back till now I won’t have time to do a good get-up-close-and-touch-me kind of shave. But I might go to Brianna’s party anyway instead of sitting home alone at midnight and feeling something awful. Every time I ever called the Life Line they asked if I had a plan to keep myself safe. The call was my plan. One time Miss Patti just sighed real heavy and said Honey I wish I could help you. We’d only been talking eight minutes. 

For Christmas I bought Mama and Daddy a big wooden sign that says Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. The letters are carved and painted pink like frosting. They like it. They like having scripture all around the house. What I like is when country songs contradict themselves on purpose. You say it best when you say nothing at all. That feels like some kind of scripture because it makes a circle. Or the songs about things that have happened and keep happening “again.” I’m at the bar again: I’m drinking again: I’m loving you again. “Again” always comes after a big pause, like we’re at the place where the world catches before it turns, the place where all the joints and seams meet. 

I’m driving to Brianna’s and looking for the big old friendly trees that meet in the middle and make a canopy overhead. It’s the prettiest thing. When I drive under them it’s like being inside and outside at the same time. I’ll drive down a street like that to settle myself like I’m my own baby. It always sets something right in me. And I’ll think, I could die here. Not a scared what-if, not any kind of plan. Just calm and steady but lit up gentle, thinking how it might be okay after all if it’s like this. 

I’m at Brianna’s party and Derrick brought me a glass of water. He just brought it to me. No man’s ever wondered if I needed water before. I’m always standing naked in kitchens, dehydrated and still tasting the cum I’d long swallowed, rifling through half-empty cabinets looking for a clean cup and banging my footbones on the bottles they’d left on the floor. I don’t mean to complain about cum, it’s fun, it’s just that some cum tastes better than others. Less like glue gone bad and more like a new glittery kind of water bursting warm and salty in your mouth. I know something’s going to happen with Derrick because when he talks to me his eyes get all twinkly and he smiles with his mouth open. His whole face goes soft like he’s a little boy. Like he’s in his imagination. It makes me feel like I need to sit down even though I’m already sitting down. 

The first time I kissed a boy was in a garage. He was an older boy showing me a big sculpture he’d made out of melted plastic razors and he stuck his tongue down my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I could only wiggle my tongue like a dead fish. He laughed at me with his tongue still in my mouth and it made my whole face vibrate. I wanted to leave to go cry but I didn’t. We were in the garage. And I thought it might be my only chance at kissing. Even if it was like this, it was kissing. And my face was waxed. He kept kissing and I kept trying to find some room for myself somewhere in it. It got better. Then he got down on the concrete floor and told me to lie on top of him. I didn’t want to, and I knew my shirt would ride up and he’d feel the hair on the small of my back. But I did it. We were in the garage. It felt just the way it felt when Mama and I were at an intersection once trying to turn into the HomeGoods parking lot and from the passenger window I could see some kind of sedan barreling toward me. He put his hands on my hips and I got sick to my stomach. But he didn’t say anything about the hair. Still that weekend I set up two mirrors in the bathroom and burned up the small of my back with Nair. It was the old pink bottle, back when it was still shaped like an octagon. 

One time Miss Tina from the Life Line told me I could type anything I was going through into YouTube and I could find someone going through the same thing. She said she did that when she was having an affair and most of the videos were as mean as she felt about herself but one nice gal gave her the heart to leave her husband. She said people say our wants can’t hurt us but she knows they sure can. She said sometimes you just got to honk your own horn. One time Miss Sheila kept wanting to know if I got rid of the hair and if it’d be like Planet of the Apes if I didn’t and if I work with dogs because they’re hairy too. After that I’d hang up whenever I got Miss Sheila. 

Miss Donna said everything can just lead my heart to getting bigger and bigger and she guessed a person would be hard put to do anything in life more beautiful than to realize that. Miss Janelle told me not to bother myself with those things where they tell you to breathe in patterns. I mean the ones with all the different numbers like 5 7 18 24 or whatever they come up with. She said it’ll all work itself out somehow. Miss Molly said there’s no sense in crying that the plant ain’t growing when you already planted the seed. She said worry’s like a rocking horse—it gets you going but it takes you nowhere.

I haven’t had one of them gaspy panic type dreams about the hair, like forgetting to shave or something. I dream different things, like I’m a cake that can think and people are slicing little pieces of me till just my head’s left. Sometimes I dream I’m about to go up and play some songs but the host introduces me as twins and I try to correct him saying I’m no twin but then another one of me is standing there on stage holding a mandolin, looking at me like Let’s get a move on. It’s funny how you expect bad dreams to shake you up but even the nice dreams can too if you’re stuck thinking they won’t come true. Sometimes I dream I’m walking with a nice man and I’m wearing his coat. I think we’re picking each other blueberries. 

I’m on Derrick and my hair’s hanging over him. I’ve got a warm beam feeling like when you feel a cloud move away and you remember the sun’s there, so quick and sudden you just about cry. Derrick’s saying oh fuck. I like him. 

Last night he made me cum from licking my clit but from behind which no one had a mind to do before and then I made him cum too and then we both laughed. And he said it’s funny how everyone always laughs right after he cums. I said oh no I’m sorry and touched his face and he said no, he knows because of the timing that I wasn’t laughing at him, he laughs too even though he doesn’t when he’s jerking off by himself, it’s something to do with both people feeling giddy together since they just did something kind of dumb but fun like letting go of a balloon. So I told him, my coworker Linda from before he and Brianna got there, she died, and right after they told us they took us out back to let go of balloons. They were for her somehow? The balloons. It was the owner’s idea. We were just standing out in the parking lot watching them go while the dogs were all barking up a storm inside. My supervisor was crying but trying not to bust up laughing at the same time and we didn’t know what to do. Derrick laughed or gasped, one hard quick breath like something hit him high up in the gut, and he said this is the weirdest date he’s ever been on, but in a good way. 

Morning’s coming in through the window and making everything too bright to see. Derrick’s kissing me. Derrick’s kissing me again. I could die here.