This piece was originally published in Quarto’s 2022 Spring Print.
Illustration by Watson Frank
Content warning for sexual content and self harm
- Begin with the idea of books collecting without realizing and how she was able to find herself doing this when sitting up in a tree - reading Esperanza Rising and feeling her fingers harden from turning pages in the cold. She opens her mouth and something glowing and sticky comes out, the size of a crabapple. She holds it in her hand and runs up to her room, hiding it in her piggy bank.
- A second moment – it’s the prom afterparty and she’s in her childhood bedroom with her best friend to burn needles and dip them in plastic cups of vodka. The friend with Herbal Essenced shampoo stick and pokes a sunflower on her thigh and it’s lovely in here and she feels the light again. She pretends its puke from cheap booze and Taco Bell - runs to the bathroom to look in the mirror. The glowing orb comes out of her mouth, this time the size of a lime. She reaches for the piggy bank next to her friend, sleeping soundly, snuggled against a Build-A-Bear. Cross legged on scratchy carpet, back against the opposite side of the bed, she opens the pig’s belly for the first time since she was little in the tree - the ball has become leathery and cracked, waning beams of light try to push through the deep crack down the middle. The next morning, she finds an empty pickle jar, fills it with vinegar and honey and salt and puts both orbs inside.
- Then a sad and fucked feeling. Smiling family photos lay broken on the marble floor. She opens her mouth and prays the orb will come to stop this feeling from washing over, it does.
- The boyfriend questions the pickled orbs lining the bookshelves in her apartment – she shrugs it off as Tsundoku.
- Her roommate gets drunk one night and won’t stop after she asks so nicely - she pries the orb out of her throat and burns it.
- She goes to a reading downtown, and after too many too minerally glasses of white wine someone asks if she wants to go home with him. She politely declines and calls the boyfriend and he asks her to meet him at the University center and they step into the red stairwell where he tastes her - “Smoking makes you taste like metal.”
- The picnic blanket comfort.
- Then going to brunch the next morning and finding out he's been dating her the whole time. Her with the kind eyes and the self-crocheted bucket hat. She drinks more and stares at the slut walk protesters - wishing she had a reason to be proud too. She goes to the bathroom and forces herself to puke, letting another orb slip out, leaving a content smile on her face. She rinses it off in the sink and wraps it in a silk handkerchief she keeps in her backpack.
- She keeps her feelings pickled away, it’s Christmas at some shitty apartment and George wants to give Mary the moon and she laughs hard at her dad’s weeping face.
- Two years later, with the same boyfriend with a girlfriend who fucked her anyways, but then left said girlfriend for her and they’ve been together ever since asks for more than she can give and they’re on their roof, and they’re both staring at her fraying shoelace. So she tells him about the pickles, what they are, what she does.
- He responds: “You have to strengthen the muscles around your heart.”
- She looks at the freckle on his earlobe: “I don’t want to. I don’t want them now, I want them when I’m old and have nothing else to do. Maybe you’d like them.”
- They break up that night, she doesn’t want kids, she doesn’t want to settle down yet – she’s always scared that he’s fucking someone else anyways.
- “I can’t get you off my mind... I can’t get you off in general...” singing Japanese Breakfast and driving in a car alone – she’s laughing and crying and it’s sunset and the sun is so perfect it makes the car feel like it’s swimming.
- She drives to the old hookup spot in high school and watches the sunset. The pain hurts so much and she feels the orb rising, how easily all of this can slip out into her hands– but this time she doesn’t. She covers her mouth with her hands and swallows the orb. She screams in sobs, holding her shoulders and rocking back and forth in the car seat. She hits the steering wheel, the roof of the car, slaps herself. She breathes wet and heavy sighs, looking up into the veiny branches of the trees. She wonders if this is what building the muscles around your heart feels like. She laughs and laughs wiping tears and licking her fingers like it’s Thanksgiving. She feels numb. Cranks the car and drives back home.
- End with every birthday after that. After blowing out a candle, she takes a pickled orb from the jar and eats it – fully feeling every morsel of memory. Her life hurts more but she tries to swallow everything. She stays single. She grows old and happy there – lets friends and young ones be safe there, she keeps eating memories. The last one left smells of Herbal Essence and ink and she laughs, watching the sun move across her living room.
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Ginnie House (she/her) is an actor, playwright, and Dolly Parton enthusiast from Atlanta, GA. She is now working on her Bachelors in American Studies at Columbia School of General Studies. She is honored to say this is her first published work, and is looking forward to sharing more of her work in the future, wherever that may take her.