A Pound of Flesh

A pound of flesh is the price you pay to walk away alive

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

I’ve paid my pound of flesh, whether it’s a heft of breast or a fistful of crotch. A pound of flesh is the price you sometimes pay to walk away alive.

No one tells you that paying the butcher is sometimes the easiest way to free yourself.

I’ve played acrobat, contorting myself into the negative space of subway cars to avoid the press of a hard-on I didn’t ask for against my back, into my hips, in the hollow below my tailbone.

I’ve rolled away, pretending to be asleep when I woke to find hands mapping the country of my flesh in the quiet of the night, even though I never stamped a visa for you to tour the landscape of my body.

I’ve gone cockeyed reading the too-close words of a book held high enough to blot out the sight of flaccid dicks hanging out in the plain sight of day on rattling trains to Brooklyn.

I’ve stood still, in seventeen year-old confusion, to avoid brushing against the middle-aged man who cornered me in an office perfumed with machine oil and Old Spice.

I’ve used pools of streetlamp light to chaperone me block to block to avoid could-be, changed from heels to running shoes, skirt to jeans, fitted to loose to avoid would-be.

I’ve run, panting, past the dark spots.

I’ve studied the dim backseats of cars to make sure they’re empty.

I’ve kept my foot hovering above the accelerator pedal when the headlights got too close.

All to avoid the Boogeymen girls are taught to be on the lookout for, the prison of potential harm that keeps girls and women running, keys wedged in our fists, toward the light.

I’ve criss-crossed a rush hour crowd to avoid flashers, ignored their guttural moans as they touched themselves under the flanks of their coats.

I’ve gone blocks out of my way to avoid packs of frat boys and Wall Street suits roving the city like wolves on the hunt, humping street lamps and statues, braying in the city night.

I’ve removed hands from my ass, palms from my thigh, fingers creep-crawling up a skirt hitched on a barstool, pretended the lurch into my breasts was accidental, that copping a feel on the way upright wasn’t intentional.

Smaller humiliations swallowed to avoid the larger danger.

I’ve closed my mouth against an uninvited tongue probing like a wet slug against my lips, used the flat of my palms to brace myself against shoulders twice as broad as my own just to avoid the straining at the crotch bulge of a blind date.

I’ve serpentined out of the embrace of drunk friends, swatted away the hands of barflies, pried fingers from my knee where they left marks.

I’ve turned my head against the sandpaper bristle of a five o’clock shadow, hysteria rising into my mouth like sick as I tried to wriggle away from where I was shoved and pinned against the wall of a barroom bathroom.

I’ve paid my pound of flesh.

Photo by Ludomił Sawicki on Unsplash

Women know that monsters are real. They’re hiding in the bushes and in dark entryways, sometimes behind the mask of a friend. They’re hiding in board rooms and in offices, on subway cars and bus shelters. They’re lurking on social media waiting to call you a stupid bitch.

Someday, you’ll open us up and the stories will spill out, free at last, hissing and rising into the air like steam from manhole covers blown skyward from the pressure below. Our stories will rise, letters linking to form words and words to form sentences. Sentences will march until they form volumes, epics filled with the weight of a thousand tiny humiliations, a million aggressions, all the stories of what women have done simply to avoid you.

And the stories of how we’ve survived when we couldn’t.

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