Cute

     “You are not cute” he said, in the Bend, as though I were a vain girl. Or as though I needed to be reminded not to touch. It will not do to give the wrong impression. Unless, of course, that’s fine today. Unless it’s one of those rare days when I should take every word into account.
     And (can you believe it?) for years I said it was the best compliment I had ever received.  Those words in the Bend, a lead pipe I carried around in my shirt sleeve. They made me something different, special, touched. Fey and alien. And cute. What a thing not to be.
      Sometimes I didn’t know where exactly they had come from, those words. Waking up, unreachable and cosmic, I couldn’t tell you why, but I’d be asking where the letters he had written had gone. Habits grow fast in me, and I took to the habit of being unreachable. Or perhaps just unwilling to leap. Blame an inferiority or superiority complex, you can take your pick. I’m still unsure.
      And after he was gone, man oh man, I traveled inward. I lived in my head. Made my own furniture and painted the walls scarlet. I could dance there and sing too, belting. I could say biting words and speak in front of a crowd of hundreds. I could jump across rooftops in the moonlight. I could play guitar.
      It is embarrassing, the list of things that I could do in there. I kept the spyglasses trained out the window, of course, let’s not be silly, but I stayed safely inside. Safe, sound, and talented, and never cute. Never, never. How droll, to be cute! How very demeaning!
       A lead pipe in my shirt sleeve, kept close to my veins. A perfect gift from a boy like him. And in my head I learned to embroider and make a perfect cup of tea. I learned karate and the bassoon. I took ballet. I read so many books and wrote many, many theses.
      If one should come too near, with mal intent, I had my weapon.
      But curiously, as of late, something happened. Like the prophetic advice of my mother said. I was in the car, driving down the highway in the rain, buried under coats, when I realized, that somewhere along the line, I had lost them. Those words were all gone. Excised. And maybe they’re on the side of the road. Maybe I lost them on my porch, near the door.  Maybe they rolled up against a streetlight. Maybe they fell underwater. Perhaps I lost them in the morning, where my heart stopped from joyful causes. Or maybe it was when I stumbled through the door and made tea at one o’clock in the morning. It might have been when I heard, so quiet, at my ear, “You are so cute,”
        And I know it’s rude to disregard a gift by losing it, but, this time, I think I’ll let it slide.

Beetle Girl, Again

    At the lesser window, she props her chin against the sill. The old wood is prickly against her skin, and she fears splinters. She can feel the phantom shatters of cedar under her jaw. But a bend creeps up her chapped, changed lips anyway.
   The lilies are waking up, surprisingly hearty and waxy flowers, even as the rosy daisies falter and the Queen Anne’s Lace is robbed of its posture. She will press the petals soon and keep them forever. She will keep them in the cardboard, so that the beetles cannot eat them. They would devour them if they knew they existed. They would not rest, as they do now, in the closet.
    She almost thinks they have been drugged. They sleep that deep, unnatural sleep of coma patients and very, very old women. Their bodies move imperceptibly, but every once in a while, one stirs in its slumber and the girl sighs in a combination of relief and anger. They are alive, but far away from her.
     In the field outside, it is raining. The sun does not cast its maddening shadows, and does not spin the silhouettes. But she is in a state of accidental ignorance, and didn’t even notice, even as a figure moves through the skunk cabbage and sinks into the wet of the field. She does not notice as it approaches the house. She is at the lesser window, with her chin propped up against the sill.
      Earlier she sat, with her knees draw up to her sickly happy sternum, and traced the new footprints, which the beetles haven’t found yet, with her index and middle fingers. She sought them out in the planks of wood painted sage, and found them easily enough.
      The lights stray onto the porch now and the key turns in the ignition and the vehicle makes a high keening sound. The girl fights against her reflection in the glass, trying to see out, trying to make out details in the dark and the rain. But all she can see is the lights, and the light of a better day.