Let Live, Little Woman

She cannot get you pregnant - so she must change you, in some other way.

Understand the way the wind changes when it comes from the mountains, through the trees, then onto the plains where it has a great rushing sound like child holding its breath to stop hiccups -

Evangline called herself "Ev," shortly touched her mouth with her index finger before she spoke. Huge heavy dreads rolled down her back and shook with the weight of her: she was not a thin girl, so you loved her for it. All the girls in your dorm had exorbitant waists and beady, blackly line eyes. They looked furious and mistrusting. Ev had freckles and her eyes were always crinkled with happiness.

You were eighteen and you hated men. You had not yet learned to love and let live the way crocodiles open their mouths to let in tiny birds [finches are they?] who clean the speckles from even the most vicious of fangs.

If you could be tiny, extraordinary, like a filament, like a flash of white, then.
So tiny as to fit in her belly like a fetus with lily-white feet, unawares of the outsides' noise and booming, war furious and sticky raging across the ocean, the many oceans of change. You threw up because standing made you dizzy. Then your period stopped and you wondered where had it gone. You thrust two fingers inside you to fish out the blood ( Ou est ca, la sang?) So you grappled and dry heaved and then sobbed.

"Aidez-moi, s'il vous plait," mais comment?

Ev, Evangeline and her massive eyes quivering as with breaths her cheeks sucked in and the freckles round her nose, the freckles in a portentous garden round her nose.


"Everyday," she said, and looked over her large shoulder, the bone-looking earrings in spirals beneath small clumps of hair, "women are raped and molested and abused. You think you have it bad? You think you know what anything means?"

- they took you to the hospital.
you were on a saline drip and they took great pleasure in thrusting a long catheter down the length of your nostril, your throat, your collapsed little stomach.

When you screamed, they gave in, pulled you in white (like a wedding gown) and rolled you into the psych ward. There the nurses had mouths fluffed with flour and cheeks impaled deeply with time and other nuisances.
"I'm well," you pleaded earnestly. Evangeline showed up to visit you, Ev, her hands behind her large back. She seemed to take up so much space in that small hospital room. Her large eyes, blue eyes were narrowed.

"I could not get you pregnant," she said defensively. "I had to change you somehow, didn't I?"

They had your heart on a monitor; its speech read in little beeps. Barely thirty per minute. Who am I? Who are you? When the male nurse touched your rib to adjust the sticky plunger of an instrument you sneered and nearly bit his hand off.

Little woman, there are people here so much more ill than you are. I hear the little ones screaming down the hall; I can hear the sobs of the parents whose only children will not see twelve. Little woman, let live, your childish nonsense put to bed beneath those soft blue sheets, under which you perspire, under which you were absconded by the deep shroud of sleep.

She couldn't possibly have made you pregnant. She had to exact that change upon you, somehow.