Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
(If you are reading this story out loud, force a listener to reveal a devastating secret, then open the nearest window to the street and scream it as loudly as you are able.)
Carmen Maria Machado • Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
I thought of my wife, the dark stain of her nipples, her mouth open and ribbons of sound coiling out.
Carmen Maria Machado • Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
“It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right,” I said. “It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, everything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt m
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As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world observed only by a single set of eyes.
Carmen Maria Machado • Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
My body was so cold it felt like it was disappearing at the edges, like my shoreline was evaporating. It was the opposite of pleasure, which had pumped blood through me and warmed my body like the mammal I was. But here, I was just skin, then just muscle, and then merely bone. I felt like my spine was pulling up into my skull, each vertebra click-c
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You wanted, he says. You wanted and wanted. You were like this endless thing. A well that never emptied.
Carmen Maria Machado • Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
One man. A boyfriend. Didn’t like condoms, asked me if I was on birth control, pulled out anyway. A terrible mess.
Carmen Maria Machado • Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
So my joints feel like the fat rubber bands used to bind broccoli, and my face is lined where I’d stupidly slept sleep-pressed against the seams of the quilt’s patchwork.
Carmen Maria Machado • Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
Only then did I understand. Only then did I see the crystal outline of my past and future, conceive of what was above me (innumerable stars, incalculable space) and what was below me (miles of mindless dirt and stone). I understood that knowledge was a dwarfing, obliterating, all-consuming thing, and to have it was to both be grateful and suffer gr
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Then the hazy buzz of summer saunters in, and the air screeches and hums. Cicada-killing wasps catch the weakest and stab them motionless, hauling the weight of their bodies and their glass wings up and up and somewhere else. Fireflies drunkenly dazzle the dark. The leaves are full, dark green, the trees dense and folded in on themselves, catching
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