Her Vicissitudes by Racheal Walser

My girlfriend struggles with creation. She fights it out, like a beast separating from her soul it causes her to writhe, moan and some days I swear -  ovulate.

“Nothing else quite feels like it,” she tells me. Still fighting it, always fighting it. Letting it come out is too easy, too painless. “I write better with suffering.” When she is mad at herself it gets worse, bundling into one implosive energy. She rejects herself - however possible. Drowning in the bath; going down, staying under. Sometimes I wonder if she even realizes it’s happening.

Instinctively, she avoids things. She locks down, claims it’s easier this way. She refuses all help.

She needs feet again, she tells me, sitting up in the tub. Legs to go with her limbless body. The water rolls down her face, dripping from her hair to her shoulders, to her tightened breasts. Legs, then wings. “Arms,” she says, “have always been optional.” As a lesbian, I wonder how she feels about fingers...

I try to imagine her winged without arms while she’s getting dressed. An angel,or harpy; I’m not really sure. I don’t want to consider it. So I focus on other things; texting, chat, whatever I can find. I’m not ready to lay down yet, but it’s getting late. She keeps trying. She listens to dubstep and channels the residual chaos into her notebook. It takes hours for her to write half a page. Give her a chance and she’ll tear it out. So I call her away. I hold her tightly in my arms while she shakes with the after effects. “April the sixteenth has never been your lucky day,” I say.

She smiles at me with weakness.

“Maybe the twentieth will be better.”

 

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Racheal Walser is a literary fiction writer living in Southern Ontario with her girlfriend and their three dogs. Her short fiction has appeared in publications across Canada and the United States.