K!SS THE SCARS ON HER SK!N

our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt. if there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery. and therefore no need for faith. let us pray that god will grant us a pope who doubts. and let him grant us a pope who sins and asks for forgiveness and who carries on.

What if I broke my spine forever? My sister would come into the room to draw her portraits in charcoal, of two bulging eyes in a sea of haze grey. Each portrait is no bigger than an index card, arranged on a piece of rigid stock paper, tessellated and horribly consistent. All those dead eyes staring out at her as she renders them incapable of telling her anything. “I hate you” she would say to me, every time she would finish another. “You’ve ruined it. You’ve completely ruined it.” She would storm out the room, echoing for complete lack of furniture, and I would be left alone with them to watch over me.

I would ask you to pick me up and you would do so carefully, my limp body soft and complete. Can you carry me, lay me on the mattress in the back of the house? Or on the ground, it doesn’t make a difference to me. Sometimes I think you don’t believe I can’t feel anything and most of the time I don’t believe you can imagine what that’s like.

“Crush me” I tell you. I can only blink my eyes and move my mouth. I could probably wiggle my ears if I tried but I never feel up to it. You would gently press down on my breasts and my rib cage.

“Can you feel that?”

I slowly move my head left to right and back again.

I think about outside and what it feels like to be there. The treetops and the june-bugs and the hatred I feel for summertime. Everyone has gone on without me.

“Hit me.”

You look at me like you don’t want to but I know where your wonder hides, in the small places like a boy afraid of his own shadow.

You punch me in my side, my arm, my stomach.

“Can you feel that?”

I smile so big like I’m at the circus.

“Cut me.”

“What?”

“Cut me.”

You look down at me on the mattress. Here I am, unmoving and so horny.

“Please, baby, if I never ask anything of you ever again, just cut me.”

Wonder-boy takes his buck knife and carves a small canyon on my upper thigh. I wouldn’t know if I hadn’t watched him do it.

“Again.”

He looks me in my eyes as he separates another layer of subcutaneous. It is pink and red and yellow and blue and disgusting. I am butter and cottage cheese inside.

He stands there over me, belt unbuckled, denim undone, sweating, afraid, wonder creeping out for a closer look. His eyes are wild, so far from the fog of mine. Yet, we both want the very same thing. He removes his penis from his clothes and his clothes from his body and he slides it, hard as stone, back and forth through the gushing flesh of my upper thigh. I can’t feel a thing but I could cum just from watching. I have my own wonder too. The air in the room is hung from the ceiling unmoving like a puppet sleeping on his gallows. I am so lucky that he loves me, I am I am I am. He fucks my butchered leg like a stray dog and I cum over and over and over again watching him.