by Dana Jerman

Polly stands in the men’s room. The feeling of being revolutionary and hungry for every possibility is not abating. It is a deafening exhilaration containing within it a permission to go on without restraints. If it never stops it will be too soon. There had been so much control, before. Everything bound. So many rules on how to live and think. Now the full dizziness of liberation had seized the wheel.

It’s been one week since she left the back door unlocked. Unintentional. And it was just that simple. A non-gesture that equaled rape. He appeared and covered her mouth and she did them both the favor of squeezing shut her eyes. Opening them once again nearly an hour after he was gone.

Now something has broken, and her vision is brand new and it feels amazing. Little more than a week past eighteen and really in her own skin for the first time. Like he gave her something that would always be hers.

This is the first time she has let herself look in the mirror since then.

She leans in and licks the mirror and tosses her long hair loosely around. Refusing to think that she has to fix it. That there is anything to fix about this person she is becoming.

The small white calcium deposits in her cuticles are pretty now. Almost sexy, with a little dirt under the untrimmed edges. Purple paint just starting to chip. Dirty/beautiful. Without fear of getting dirtier because dirtier is just more beautiful. She’s got something hidden now like a list of celebrity phone numbers or a fist-sized roll of C-notes. The floor under her feet might not as well have been there at all.

To think of how she put on a fake smile all nervous for the boys standing around outside. Older than she always-was-always-will-be. That person wasn’t ideal and won’t be coming around ever again. The person she was passing by like the people she isn’t.

She hasn’t told anyone. She doesn’t want anyone else in on the secret of how good it was. “Thank god I don’t have a boyfriend” had been a thought. And also “I wonder if he has ever been in here.” Being alone has never felt better.

It’s good to have a plan. She decides she’ll leave this busy-getting-busier crummy karaoke bar she’s snuck into and go stay at her pal JB’s house up on the hill for one good night of sleep out of her own bed and to be closer to the moon, which is making a whirlwind tour through her zodiac sign.

On her way here she passed the neighbor who is always mowing his pocket of a front yard. “Your grass is dying you neurotic jerk.” She nearly yells. But he is old and this is clearly all he has.

She catches herself then having a fantasy- going over to his house and smoking him up and letting him touch her for money on the couch over bad TV. A nervous buzz starts in her stomach over it. The sort of sensation she would have if she would be getting ready to do drugs with complete strangers.

She looks around. This can is gross but it’s like the inside of her mind now and she wonders how long she could make herself stay.

She looks back again at the mirror. Her eyes. Her neck line. No bruises to watch fade. The thin spit film on a streak from where she licked. This new girl brought some strange kisses with her. The deviance inspires a smile deep as a reflex. She doesn’t have any lipstick now but she tries at a thought or two about what she would do with any in here if she did. Maybe draw hearts on the toilet seat. Or on the mirror with the words “I got raped, then I peed here.” Maybe something else clever with the F-word.

The night before the dark angel came in fast wearing jeans and a dirty grey t-shirt, she’d had a dream of sky and airplane. The laws of space and speed utterly without application. In this dream she observes a woman move from inside the plane to the wing through the window. The long red garments on the woman pull at the corners of the window but do not tighten, only lengthen.

The wind moves her hair and dress but she does not fight the wind and the wind does not make her naked. Instead she walks with a steady pace toward the tapered end of the wing and once there she steps out but does not fall. She keeps walking.

It is simple and necessary and of nothing. Like blood. Like air.

The once-beautiful things are dead. The now-beautiful things are back to stay with the certainty of true love. Polly uses the mirror to see someone worth loving amid the tortured wellspring of destruction and accident.

Finally, she leaves. Someone’s knocking now and besides there is nothing to steal in here. The time for boosting up more of what already belonged to her was soon enough in coming.

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