|
Elizabeth Coletti
On Using Your Childhood Bathroom at Christmas
I don’t know how the showers in my house work anymore. I’m turning handles and twisting knobs like a spacecraft from sixties’ television to travel back to who I was and was
supposed to be. Still waiting for muscle memory to return from its lost wandering in cracked earth parking lots, classrooms where the board is filled with writing in a hand I can’t recognize. I have never been one to face the world without armor. But now
every inch of skin reflects. I am home and the impact crater in the front yard no longer matches my shoeprint. Eyes pool in each window hung with false holly, a noose of red ribbon to dissuade neighbors from raising scorn at a stitch of a girl with runs in her plans like old stockings. I am home and I want
to be home. But I am naked in the mirror of the future. I am scalded by yesterday’s love. I have chance of drowning on the square foot of tile where I first took a razor
to my legs.
Elizabeth Coletti is an editor and writer from North Carolina now living in New York City. She is a recipient of the Louis D. Rubin Jr. Prize in Fiction and a finalist for the James Hurst Prize for Fiction, and her prose and poetry has appeared in the Pomona Valley Review, Panoply Zine, Cellar Door literary magazine and elsewhere.
|
