Mud Vein

Three weeks later, Isaac removes my cast. He uses a kitchen knife to cut it off. It’s the same knife he carried around on our first day here. We are both wide-eyed and short of breath as the fiberglass falls away. What will we see? How much more broken will I be? In the end there is just a hairy, skinny leg that looks a little off. It reminds me of blood in a cup, a sweater in a bathtub, a rock in a mouth. It’s just visually off and I can’t tell why.

I still have to use my crutch, but I like the freedom I feel after all those weeks lying in bed. Isaac still won’t speak to me. But the sun has returned. It rises again. We stop using the lights to save the generator from burning gas. I read all of Knotted, but surprisingly it doesn’t hurt as much as the nameless book my mother wrote. I see Nick a little differently; less glimmer. It’s his best work, but I’m left unimpressed with his love note.

Isaac carries the rest of the supplies up from the well at the bottom of the table. He fills the cupboards and the fridge and the wood closet. So we don’t have to climb down there anymore, he tells me. It takes him all day. Then he puts the table back together. When he goes to his room I come down from the carousel room and creep into the kitchen. I’m still in my robe and my legs are cold. I feel naked without my cast. I press the back of my legs to the lip of the table, and hop up. I scoot back until I’m sitting, my legs hanging over the side. My runner’s legs look spindly and weak. A scar runs like a seam across my shin. I trace it lightly with the tip of my finger. I’m starting to look like a stitched-up Emo doll. All I need are the button eyes. I reach up, slipping my hand into the opening at the top of my robe, running my fingers across the skin on my chest. There are scars there too. Ugly ones. I’m used to being disfigured. It feels like parts of me keep being taken; eaten by disease, hacked off, snapped in two. I wonder when my body will become tired of it and just give up.

I’ll never be able to run like I used to. I walk with a limp. I haven’t told Isaac, but my leg aches constantly. I like it.

It’s dark in the kitchen. I don’t want to put the light on and risk Isaac knowing I was in here. If he is trying to avoid me, I’ll help him. But when I look up he’s standing in the doorway watching me. We stare at each other for the longest time. I feel anxious. It looks like he has something to say. I think he’s come to fight some more, but then I see something else in his eyes.

He takes the steps to reach me. One … two … three … four.

He’s standing in front of my knees. My hair is wild and unruly. I can’t remember the last time I brushed it. It’s grown past where my br**sts used to be. Now it’s sort of a shawl across my upper body, so that even when I’m naked I don’t have to see myself. I don’t even bother to hide my white streak behind my ear like I usually do when Isaac is around. It curls in front of my eye, partly obscuring my vision.

Isaac pushes my hair over my shoulder and I flinch involuntarily. Then he puts his hands on my knees. Their warmth stings. He pushes outward, spreading my legs, then he takes a step forward until he’s standing between them. He bends his head until our mouths are almost touching. Almost. The fingers on both of my hands are splayed on the tabletop behind me, balancing myself. I can feel the grooves of my carvings. The carvings Isaac helped me make. He doesn’t kiss me. We have never spoken about the kiss we shared when we thought we were dying. He breathes into my mouth as his hands run up the length of my thighs. His hands feel like warm water running across my skin. I cold shiver. My robe is hiked up to the top of my thighs. When his palms leave my legs, I want to cry out, No! I want more of the warmth, but he reaches up and grabs both lapels of my robe, pulling it open and exposing my chest. I’m frozen. Numb. He touches my scars. My barren womanhood. Frozen … frozen … frozen … and then I break open.

I gasp and grab his hands, pushing them away. “What are you doing?”

He doesn’t answer me. He lifts his hands to my neck. Wherever he touches me there is heat. I roll my head back and his thumbs graze my jaw.

“What I want,” he says.

I roll my head to the left to try to pull away from him, but he pushes his hand into my hair at the back of my head, and kisses the side of my neck until I’m shivering. He has me at a disadvantage; I’m trying to keep myself upright with one hand and push him away with the other. Eventually, my hand slips out from under me and we collapse on the table.

He kisses me. Hard at first—like he’s angry—but when I touch his face he softens. It’s when his lips drag slowly across mine, his tongue darting in and out of my mouth that I relax. My legs lift off of the table and my feet cradle his waist. Heat; heat on the arches of my feet, heat on my mouth, heat pressed between my legs. He reaches down and pulls my robe open all the way. I lift my arms out of the robe and wrap them around him. Then he rolls me until I’m on top of him. I sit up and he lifts me at the waist until I’m hovering above his erection. He’s right there; the tip is touching me. All I have to do is push down and he will be inside of me. And I want him to be. Because I need to touch and be touched.

But Isaac is hesitating. He doesn’t want to let go of my waist. He’s thinking of his wife; I’m thinking of his wife. I’m about to tell him, forget it, when he abruptly releases his hold on my waist. Without him suspending me, and with no warning I slide onto him. I suck air loudly. It’s a gasp if I’ve ever heard one. One minute I’m empty, the next I’m full. A deep, slow panic. He does not belong to me. What am I doing? I try to climb off him, but he grabs my wrists and rolls on top of me, pinning me down. He kisses me slowly with both hands pressed against the sides of my face, all the while moving slowly in and out of me.

“I want to be with you,” he says into my mouth. “Stop it.”

So I stop it. I let him kiss and stroke and touch and I don’t fight him. We’ve only had sex once; in the rain, on the carousel, with me on top. Now, it doesn’t feel so much like sex. It feels intimate. I’ve never done what we are doing. Not with anyone. Not even with Nick. I’ve never laced my hands in a man’s hair and breathed into his mouth with abandon, and wanted him to be as deeply inside of me as he could—because it felt more real that way. And a man has never buried his face into my neck and moaned, like every movement inside of me is worth a reaction.

But we are here on the table, rocking against each other and having the kind of sex that is breathless and tender and hard all at the same time. He is touching me everywhere. His fingers roving over my chest and back and thighs. It makes me feel like I am something beautiful rather than this atrocity that life has turned me into. And while Isaac is inside of me I forget everything. I forget that I am a captive, and that bones have been broken, and that we’ve almost died. I forget that he has a life with someone else. I forget that I was raped and that I have no br**sts. I forget that I fight so hard not to feel anything. Isaac is making love to me, and all I feel right at this moment is valued.