Candice M. Kelsey
Prick
I found a place that will do it, Manhattan Beach Nails on Artesia.
We drive our son Mikey in South Bay traffic, a four-wheeled needle passing like thread through two-lane fabric. He’s thirteen and wearing a thousand microscopic glochid spines—fine hair-like spikes embedded in his arms. One of Westport Heights’s shirtless skaters, the youngest disciple of the Westchester Skatepark’s stair-sets and hubbas, Mikey lost sight of the prickly pear cactus by our front curb and found himself in its arms.
Nature’s acupuncture, my husband tries to lighten the mood.
The women at the shop will know how to wax them out, I reassure him. The concept of hot wax being torn from his body intrigues his inner thrill seeker, and he quiets while repositioning in the rear seat of our Kia. I turn and mime a kiss to his forehead. My husband navigates the road with speed and skill like the night our son was born, the sunset SigAlert on the 405 Freeway as we willed ourselves to Cedars-Sinai Hospital.
It’s a boy, the nurse announced, offering my husband the honor of cutting the cord. Two clamps and a swath of gauze awaited his grip on the sterile scissors, but he refused, shaking his head without speaking. The nurse cut the cord. My husband bristled like she had removed his foreskin, or like he was forced to read a pamphlet on vasectomies. It will be okay, Dad, the nurse reassured.
Scissored, and just like that something existential, even holy, had happened to us. My body, my son—we were separated for the first time. He now took oxygen from the world instead of my blood. Moments later, I birthed the deflated disc of dying tissue and watched its lifeless tail wag in umbilical triumph. Dr. B. held it up, ran a rubbered finger inside the wet membrane like a dentist examining gums. Such a fine line between intimate and clinical.
Someone get Dad a cup of water. I got my baby.
The weight of the bundle, the first kiss on his head before my husband accompanied him to the scale. Wrapped in blue and topped with his first beanie, my son left the breast, entered life’s symphony of leaving.
The women at MB Nails place my son in an elevated massage chair, the only boy in the salon, the only shirtless client. Perched on the edge of his seat, feet straddling the pedicure basin, avoiding eye contact, he appears helpless, uncomfortable among walls of glossy cosmetic posters, kaleidoscope shelves rainbowed with polish, women whose toes are woven with paper towels, spread unnatural and open. I see his father in him, want my son to skate above the separation of men and women—past the sharpness between what women find beautiful, transcendent, but men view as hideous, repulsive.
His father waits in the car until we emerge successful, my son throwing a thumb up in one hand and waving the wax removal tape in his other, needles now fossilized in pale green like memory. Like a badge of masculinity. Theseus with the head of a Gorgon. His aesthetician waves her purple-gloved hand, laughing.
Dr. B. laughed, his warm hand on my stirruped thigh: I’ve made you a virgin again. Stirrup is a funny word, one that conjures a sense of power, a hot-breathed steed controlled by a rhythmic kick. Stirrup also rhymes with kick flip, the trick my son was attempting when he landed in the cactus. But I was not some lady in a legend riding from responsibility, alone on the moors, hair pirouetting in North Sea mist. I was prostrate on a table under medical grade lighting with an oversized mirror trained between my legs.
I’ve made you a virgin again. As if that prick were God and had just rewound two thousand years of Eve. Without my consent, he had stitched my vagina extra tight. Because he could. Couldn’t you just make me a good mom, I want to ask him now.
Those were the days when obstetricians considered episiotomies necessary. The days when male doctors could say whatever the hell they wanted to female patients, women whose bodies were fatigued, numbed from the waist down, riddled with IVs. Stone-eyed mothers whose legs trembled from hours of being forced open by cold metal and latexed hands. Women whose husbands refused to watch the miracle of life emerge from the geography they desire to enter. Women who nonetheless know birthing a child is an act of power, even resistance, the stirrups a symbol of control, the labor a Pegasus freshly dappled with the Gorgon’s blood.
It’s called the husband stitch, Dr. B. laughed again as he cut the thread. A man’s pleasure is always at the forefront. Like the introduction to one of those popular guides for new mothers, the irreverent edition, when the author describes giving her husband oral sex in their hospital room moments before being wheeled into delivery. Or like how the word Gorgon auto-corrects to virgin, a word that confounds me, a word that has shamed women for centuries and empowered men as champions for stealing it. Like that.
Like that send-off as I began learning how to raise a boy. Teach him to be comfortable in his skin, watch out for life’s glochid spikes, and not become a prick.
After Dr. B.’s hands had passed the needle through, repairing my two-lane flesh, it fell to the floor, spun in a splash of my—of all women’s, even Eve’s, Medusa’s—blood before quieting. As if in shock that this is how it goes.
Leaving the nail shop, I wave my husband out of the driver's seat. Mikey tumbles into the front of the Kia a little more confident and a lot smoother. The traffic has cleared. The marine layer is setting in—softening the sharpness of the city.
Midnight: BeAufort, SC
I go to imaginary therapy. After tonight’s pseudo-session, my insides fold like wet origami. Or the wings of a common barn owl.
I tell my invisible therapist I am not ready to talk about the car accident. I run it through my mind over the next few weeks until I feel ready to tear up the paper of that memory, pick its feathers clean.
Tonight we meet. So, what should we tackle?
I’m ready to talk about it.
Before you begin, sorry, your card declined for last week’s co-pay.
I ignore her since imaginary debt is powerless and begin giving her the context for this traumatic event. I explain how my daughter had texted there’s a dober-Dane mix in Beaufort SC and he’s soooo cute. Can we get him today pls?
As we headed 114 miles southeast, I texted with Titan’s owner. Hi, it’s Mari. Titan is ok with cats. I also have 3 cats lol he never chased them or anything, he pretty much ignores them. She sent a picture of him in his camo harness and BEST FRIEND label stitched across the front. His eyes were grey and kind. What I needed most that day was kindness. Passing the Savanna River Site, we played Adam in the garden, contemplating his new name, relishing the power to impose identity. My inner critic rolled her eyes at the total lack of Petfinder smarts.
Let’s avoid negative self-talk, I like to think she reminds me.
When we hit the low country of Port Royal Island, the air became thick with a loneliness only the Southeastern coast offers. The saltwater bluffs, marshes, and inter-coastal iciness revealed cracks from the permeating military presence. The Marine Corps Air Station populated the town with grit, rank, and rage. Somewhere between the U-Haul dealer and the Urgent Care, we found a strip mall Mexican restaurant. With time to kill before picking up the dog, Rancho Grande offered the perfect diversion. Sitting in our Kia Sorento, eating wet burritos, the sky lisped an approaching storm. Marines coming out of Publix in their DCUs, kids in tow, were unfazed. This close to Parris Island, the prevailing mood was grief—as if the air still grieved its MIA.
Tell me more.
We had just left Los Angeles, where we lived for close to thirty years. The Kia had served us well over a five-day drive from California to Georgia, and here it sat on the opposite coast. We’d been in the South for only two weeks, and it just felt right to christen our move with a new dog. We chose Boone because it sounded the most Southern.
My mind wanders to the plates still on the Kia as we sat in that parking lot. The carefree, cursive red script of California—this street-smart car shuttled our family from soccer games to schools to the beach and back thousands of times, and now it will shuttle a new dog into the eye of our CA-SC-GA Charybdis.
Stay with me, I imagine she whispers.
Titan lived up to the cliché of his name; he was huge. As we pulled up to Mari’s house, three children ran out to tell us, He likes to fight other dogs! He bit my brother’s head once! Why do you want a mean dog? Washed over with the anticipation from a two-hour drive and the wagging of his tail, I became a mysterious barn owl emerging from the cavities of an abandoned rural church to slope down toward tiny rodents. I crouched to hear more.
Mari interceded and ordered the kids back to the house. What was I thinking, I ask the electric-blue void.
Use your wise mind, not your emotional mind. I want to use my poetic mind.
We were barreling down Route 21 with a hyperactive, ninety-five-pound Doberdane to the screeching of a toy squirrel lodged between his terrifying jaws. Each screech a celebration of his transition from Titan to Boone, each silence a chance to hear my emotional mind. I get lost in a word-ladder puzzle to pass the time.
The sun had set. The air was violent with bullfrogs and small-town accusations. This was Hampton County, where a father had recently murdered his wife and son. Where privilege danced with poverty. The two-lane rural highway offered an occasional Dollar General or Pizza Hut, but mostly we met headlights and train tracks.
And another driver, drunk. He swooped across the center line as if we were prey. The impact threw Boone’s head into mine and the Kia into a pole. The splash of iced tea gripped my arms and face as Boone’s paws slushed the cup holders, leaving a trail of Styrofoam and fur. The twisting of metal harmonized screams and barks. Like some warped lighthouse beaconing us to safety, the neon lights of the New Hong Kong restaurant blurred into police strobes. We unfolded from the road into the nearest parking lot. Everyone but the Kia was fine.
An elderly woman walking her white poodle approached. Like Tiresias, she appeared out of nowhere, prophesying the other driver would have no insurance. At the sight of her dog, Boone became more agitated, drowning me in his weight. I became a vole burrowing into snowdrifts, field smart to avoid the blood talons of a nocturnal predator.
Let’s explore dissociation. My imaginary therapist lowers her eyes, searching for something on her screen. I have some worksheets to send you. I tell her to forget the vole image and return to the strange woman approaching my car moments after the crash.
I was just walking beside the train tracks and heard the crash she spoke through our cracked window, unmoved by the thrashing of an oversized dog. After a long drag on her cigarette, she walked into the fog of night. In my mind, she is still walking those train tracks, an eternal, flawed witness of late-night accidents. Her face blurs to become the face of my imaginary therapist, the smiling headshot on the telehealth waiting room screen, the familiar eyes of email reminders that I owe thirty dollars.
I tell her how I wish I could reverse time, how I wish I had told my daughter, no, we are not adopting a new dog. How I wish I could fly away from the financial responsibility of a totaled car, a declined co-pay. I crave the safety of an abandoned barn to nest with my pathologies, little fledglings of mine.
Textbook avoidance, she tells me. I pretend to listen while rehearsing next week’s imaginary session. I mouth the words: That’s all our time for tonight and mime the closing of my laptop. The echoes of a train like an iron ghost wedge in my mottled chest, feather-sad and unprocessed.
Candice M. Kelsey (she/her) is a poet, educator, activist, and essayist who splits time between Los Angeles and Georgia. A finalist for Best Microfiction 2023, she is the author of six books. Candice is a mentor for incarcerated writers through PEN America and serves as poetry reader for Los Angeles Review. Find her at www.candicemkelseypoet.com.
photo by Jenny Miller