Let me introduce you to a woman you’ve been sleeping with. Every so often for the last nine months. I wish I could say she’s pretty like she has soft lips, large, limpid eyes, or that she sways gently when she walks. Say some detail like that her nose crinkles when she smiles. But she’s not like that. It’s okay if you don’t know if you like her right away.
She’s sleeping now, lying on a thin gray pillow, cradling one wrist with the other palm. The light is early morning muddy. Her neck is long and rises far over her shoulders, her chin is fleshy underneath. You can see her collarbones and shoulder nubs and other parts you cannot name under the skin. At rest her mouth curves down like a rainbow, her eyes curve down, too. Inside she has a hollow space under her ribs, the pit of her, an empty-feeling crevice.
She’s waking up.
The mattress is swaying beneath you both as she shifts. She bows her head to your shoulder, so the fly-away hairs stand up, making your nostrils twitch. Your cat will probably start screaming for breakfast in two more minutes.
This woman starts scratching her cheek in a way that makes a soft rasping that is kind of irritating and kind of sweet. She lifts her face to you (someone she’s been fucking and just recently fucked) says good morning. Nudges your cheek with her nose.
After a pause, she tucks her chin in, scrunches her nose, draws down her eyebrows. Nudges you again and speaks from the side of her mouth saying, would you still be with me if my face looked like this?
Listen very carefully. What she means is will you stay with her even if her face gets chewed off by a dog, or she gains two hundred pounds, or her vagina gets stretched out from having four babies.
I know. What’s inside is what counts; but that’s more of her body. The slick organs pumping, that would come slithering out like a long live snake if a slit were made in the wrong place. Her body, the shape of her face, her bones, are who she is. Her brain and her face are wired together with an intricate system of the same nerves and blood vessels. Her sense of humor is the way her eyebrows rise, or how her face stretches when she laughs. She is in her eyeballs and how the lashes move and how her spine bends and how her breathing sounds. I know.
Turn toward the body in your bed, grab her padded hip bone, kiss her spiky shoulder.
Tell her you’ll love her no matter what.
Madeline Graham is a writer and Minnesotan. Her work is available or forthcoming in HAD, Southern Humanities Review, Redivider, Forge Literary Magazine, and Ghost Parachute, among others. Find her on Twitter @madelineRgraham.
Lost Balloon 