Mom says it hurt like a bitch to push me out of her. My arm was broken and she took me to a glassblower who blew a new one for me. “You’re lucky I’m a good mother,” she says.
I’m upstairs with my boyfriend Andrew; he’s lying on my bed while I try on new clothes.
“So you could like go back to that glassblower and have him blow you bigger tits or something right?”
I throw a rumpled shirt at him, “shut up.”
He laughs and it’s so cute I laugh too.
“What’s wrong with my tits?” I ask, and I shake my chest but nothing moves.
“Nothing at all,” he says, “I like how smooth they are.”
“How does this look?” I ask.
He looks me up and down. “You shouldn’t wear light blue. The color fades into your skin too much. You need something…more…vibrant.”
I hold up a red v-neck with short sleeves. “This?”
“Try it,”
I do and he applauds.
Andrew and I are shopping downtown and before we leave I break off my pinky toe and leave it on one of the store shelves.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“I used to come here as a little girl,” I say, “with my grandma, every Sunday.”
“So?”
“I leave a little piece of me in places like this.”
I take his hand and we head down to the park. I bring him down to the duck pond and reach my hand into the brown water. I pull up a small piece of glass, my middle finger from when I was younger. “See?”
I don’t feel anything when Andrew and I have sex, and he cries because he says it hurts. I lay down on my back while he thrusts into me, but there are only tears. His crying leaks all over my chest and drips straight down onto my bed. “Stop it,” I say, “you’re getting my bed all wet.”
When he finishes, I look down and can see the pattern he left inside of me. One time he asks me, “why isn’t there any glass left in me?”
“What?” I ask. My head still down on the pillow.
“Glass. You leave it in those places, like your memories. Why isn’t there any in me?”
I sit up and look at him, “maybe because this isn’t such a good memory?”
He puts his clothes on and leaves. He doesn’t call me for a whole week.
I walk around town one afternoon and leave pieces of me all over. In the shops I used to visit as a child, in the diner I always used to eat at, in the yard of my grandmother’s old house, under the bridge where I used to throw rocks into the river. Maybe someone will find them and remember me. Then I leave a piece on Andrew’s front porch.
He calls me the next day. “There’s a piece of you in my foot,” he says.
“And?” I ask.
“I don’t want it there, I don’t know how it got there,” he says.
“Well,” I say, “what do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know…” he hangs up and doesn’t call for another week.
“Hello?”
“I’m turning white,” he says, “I’ve been bleeding for a whole week straight. Can you just come get it out?”
“Why can’t you just pull it out yourself?” I ask. I’m a little irritated.
“I tried. It won’t budge. It’s just sticking out. My shoes…they’re ruined,” he says, “I bled all over them. Please.”
“You just don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?” he asks.
“Forget it,” I say and hang up.
Now I’m crying, the tears just running down and glossing my body. I’m rolling around on my bed and kicking. My foot slams into the wall and my heel breaks off. I don’t want to remember this, so I throw it out my window. The sound of my heel shattering in the driveway, like sad falling icicles, it makes me cry harder.
I run down my stairs, straight out the door, past the pile of me in the driveway and all the way downtown. I’m still crying and people are staring. I run into the shops, into the diner, stick my hands down into the duck pond; I’m running across the yard of my grandmother’s old house and grabbing every little piece of me. Cradled in my arms are toes and fingers, a hip, a kneecap.
I take them all to the glassblower. He looks at me funny when I walk in and drop the broken body parts in front of him. “What can I do for you?”
“Melt all of this down,” I tell him, “and use it to make my tits bigger.”
His eyes widen a bit and his brows furrow, then he shrugs. “If that’s really what you want…” his voice trails off.
I stand there while he melts all the pieces down. He asks me to come out back and I lean down into the fire. It burns and I wonder if that’s what sex feels like. He blows and blows until my chest is bigger than my head.
I trudge all the way to Andrew’s house. I want him to remember me, I want him to miss me, I want him to see my new tits and smile. I want to rip out the piece of glass in his foot, the piece of me and say “see? Don’t you see?”
But his house is empty. I look through the window and there’s nothing inside. The furniture is gone, the walls are bare. I start to cry again and sit down on his porch. The tears fall onto my chest and wash away all my memories.
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