Sara Peters

I am walking through water with one of my sisters, the river banked with tiger lilies, the sun like having a lemon juiced into your eye, our senile dog ecstatic behind us, and I am yammering about my discovery — a chest deep pool, sentried by trees that caterpillars were killing with their yearly carnival tents. We reach then ruin the pool with oils and shampoos. We scrub too much skin from our heels, then debate whether to sunbathe naked: that is, who is hiding in the woods. We joke so long and rough the joke morphs, till we’re practicing for our future rapes: we both have numbers that we know are up. My sister’s ears are speared with porcupine quills and steel, but she’s placed her straw hat carefully over her stomach. As she talks I watch while dragonflies and other less showy insects land on her burning shoulders. The dragonflies present their stenciled wings. I can’t remember what the others do. My sister spits to clean each sunglass mirror. She wants me to hear how, when it happens, she’ll do this scream — but when the scream comes it’s just like she’s opened a shaken bottle of sparkling water: I am speechless only for the view of   her throat’s cushioned corridor. But when the scream ends her eyes have broken off from the rest of   her face. She takes our green net bag full of oranges, and slams it down on the baking rocks, beating the ground till the oranges soften and streak the air with the smell of   their breaking.

I was involved in the serious business of ripping apart my own body. I’d run my fingers over it, seeking but never finding the right point of entry, so having to tear one myself, though midway through I’d always tire, and let night enter like a silver needle, sewing my eyelids shut. This was not an original practice, but thinking, for a time, that it was felt like being able to choose when spring would arrive: engineering an April that opened like a parasol, even in thoroughest winter.