short story: Are You Still Hurting? (3/7)

3

Inside Mina’s house, through a thin screen window, the musician still watches the pond where the duck has not returned. It is nearly sunset and the sinking image of the sun with its life-giving symbols is reflected on the pond's surface. The musician felt at her body when nobody was looking. She felt the curves and flats and beneath her armpits, realizing how sticky she felt. Her hair and fading dye job, as her fingers ran through it, were greasy.

"I feel disgusting," she announced to Mina while they stood in the kitchen barefoot.
The larger woman shooed the musician from the sink.

The woman washed her dishes and responded to the musician in a tone that could not be placed. It was somewhere between condescending and pity, "well, you can bathe, you know."

Minutes later they stood outside, safe from the peering eyes of the city. In a place this isolated the two of them were offered the security to shed their clothes without the judgment of strangers. The musician had no qualms with being seen naked, although the pond water frightened her. She said nothing. Mina, on the other hand, was a large woman and self-conscious of her body. Yet the singer saw nothing wrong with her appearance.

The two young women dived into the pond with the ducks, fish and the not yet infant dragonflies who had not yet shed their aquatic abilities for wings. The moment the singer submerged herself was the moment she felt their soft bodies all around her, soft skin on soft skin, despite the difference in texture. The sounds they would someday make, that serene buzzing of their wings, already in her imagination. Her brain seemed to swarm with the images of their future as she allowed herself to sink for those fleeting moments, suspended, white and brown hair spread out in the mucky water.

Just as quickly the singer resurfaced for air, the admiration melted back into disgust.

She coughed up pond water. "Mina, this is in no way getting us cleaner."

"Yeah, but it's fun," Mina replied, bobbing where she had waded in. She did not dunk herself the way her friend had. Her hair was still dry, everything from her large shoulders up, clean of the pond.

"You tricked me. You told me you were going to dive with me."

"Oh, well. I changed my mind. All the tiny fish and bugs creep me out. Don't want them in my hair."

"But it's alright if they're in mine?" the singer laughed.

"Yours is already ruined with all of the dying."

"Thanks. Now I know what you think of it."

"I like it. I like it when you do red streaks on white. It looks like icing on a cake."

"And the pasties. I've been afraid to ask you what you think of my pasties on stage."

"Eh..." Mina captured a small fish between her hands. The tiny bait fish could not escape and the singer wondered how it was possible for Mina to cage and torment something that 'grossed her out' so much.  "Well, I think they're a tad ridiculous. But you look great in them."

"Thanks. Plenty of people think they're ridiculous."

"I think you're too smart to run around in pasties."

"Funny. My intelligence goes down if I wear pasties. I think I've proven my point."

"Uh...no. It makes you look like a slut."

"Uh...yeah. You follow the patriarchal way of thinking and--"

"Can we not do this?"

"Do what?"

"Fight."

"This isn't fight. This is debate."

"Take your medicine, god." Mina waded toward the edge of the pond, as if to climb out.

The anger that churned within the singer felt hot enough to boil the water and kill the life around her. She called after Mina, "You don't have to be a twat to me, Mina. You've been on medicine before too. You know what it's like to be told that."

She realized she was standing on tiptoe now, her shoulders and breasts above the water.

"Look. I'm sorry. Are you still hurting?"

The singer did not think about the question. She did not have to. "Yes. Always."

"Your tooth, I mean."

"Yes, it still hurts. I don't want to take this medicine. I don't want to lose teeth and have to wear fake ones on stage and adjust to the feeling. I'm going to be thirty, not ninety. Losing teeth shouldn't be a problem for me. And I realize what I did was stupid. And maybe I belong in a mental ward for a little while but I still don't feel I should be punished for what I tried to do. What I tried to do was not selfish. It was an act of self-defense. My own mind turned against me, was destroying me. My way of escaping it. It had nothing to do with the ones I love. And it's my life. My decision. Nobody has a right to punish me for trying to make that decision. Which I will not do again, mind you."

Mina was looking downward into the darkening surface of the pond. Perhaps absorbing the singer's words. Words she had to pull from a dark and angry cell to share with a friend.

"I'm pissing in the water," Emma laughed. "I hope you don't mind."

The musician's eyes glazed over and she swam backwards, crawling onto land. She collapsed on the grass and curled into an infantile position, she heard Mina call after her. "Why don't you throw away one pill a day instead of taking them? You shouldn't have to take anything you don't want to."