Poisoned Apples (9 page)
Authors: Heppermann,Christine
T
rue, no one teases me now. My new friends
and I, we don't talk much at all, really.
It's hard to make conversation
while we're gliding back and forth across
the mirror, bowing to our majesty.
For a thrill I like to shut my eyes and pretend
I never left the reeds where I waited
out that ugly winter, survived the plain
brown autumn watching the hunter's hounds
charge past me on their way to prettier game.
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for Alexia
i
s even grosser than
Human Centipede One
,
my friend tells me
frequently
during third-period lunch
as I lift the bun to blot suspicious fluid
from Wednesday's burger
or Thursday's Sloppy Joe.
In the first movie the villain is a surgeon.
In the second he's just a guy with
a staple gun,
dirty knives to sever tendons,
and laxatives.
My friend lines up twelve chubby
Goldfish crackers tail-to-head to represent
the victims.
Did I know that most of the sound effects
were made with cuts of raw meat?
That at the premiere they put barf bags
on all the seats and stationed an ambulance
outside the theater for a joke, but then
a woman ended up needing it?
It's a mark of good horror,
my friend read online,
when it turns your own body against you.
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E
very edge and surface
in my darlings' cozy cottage
must be better than perfect.
So I whet one razor
after another against the stony
flesh of my leg until in barely
any time at all I have seven sharp
lines
as deep as the silence of my days,
as straight as the path I ran from
the huntsman,
as red as those three drops
for which my mother named me,
or so the story goes.
They say she pricked her finger
patching a hole in my father's robe.
Dangling her hand from the window,
she thought her own blood on the snow
was the prettiest thing she'd ever seen.
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S
hut behind these walls only the two of us
can see the loathsome creature I am nowâ
in truth, have always been.
Every night the sumptuous spread,
me at the head of the table, when I really
belong on the floor, begging for scraps.
Every night the harpsichord sings
the same cruel song about love
breaking the spell,
the skimpy rose sheds another petal,
and my kind companion gazes at me
as if I am not a monster in silk and lace.
Every night the same question,
the same answer, the same stumbling
from the room while he howls
the lie that has always been my name.
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I
might as well have wings.
My hands were never good for much.
Whether braiding rugs or bread or my own hair,
my work was lopsided.
The dust in the corners felt safe
watching me wield the broom.
Fumbling. Careless. Such taunts
do not apply to the creature I am now,
one without palms and knuckles
punished by scalding wash water.
In this cage, in this feathered skin,
I am born anew.
I stretch toward the golden bars
and sing.
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