Boom

When I see our President-Elect on the news, my body reacts first. My palms tingle, and my feet sweat. I taste the metallic tang of fear. I curl my knees towards my chest like I am a child in the hallway, preparing for a storm. My hands cover my mouth, as if the body naturally falls silent to avoid danger.

I once read somewhere that covering one’s mouth with her hands is an innately feminine trait. Men don’t often do it. I could believe that. Women are told to shield others around us from witnessing our displeasure, our fear, our pain. We are told to even shield ourselves.

Don’t look. Don’t see. Don’t think. Above all, don’t feel.

Smile. I have been here before. I know the way a man speaks when he believes I am his rib, and he alone holds the power of my name.

I go back to last year.

It is a Friday night in a small Midwestern town, and I am at a bar with friends, drinking bourbon on the rocks. We are sitting at a table near the door. Two men come inside. They walk past us, facing forward, and each kicks my foot, which barely juts out from beneath my chair. Kick, kick. They don’t look down. They don’t apologize. They don’t even break their strides.

Four years ago, I would have said something. And if they’d still ignored me, I would have yelled. Now I know that my voice will be swallowed in a din, flattened into a monotone noise no louder than the sound of wind through shorn grass. My body has become furniture to be pushed aside, blank as a slab of wood.

When was the moment exactly that I became part of the décor? That I could be touched and not seen?

My house in Missouri is an extra part to a machine. Hidden from sight yet visible from all sides, it’s a trick of the light, a Rubik’s cube with one square sticking out, a broken elbow.

The first winter, I catch twelve mice in one month’s time. Because I have been in dark woods and the gravel belly beside roads, I know from the smell that another mouse dies in the walls. How can the rotting body of something so small fill this whole space like invisible gas? The stench drills my temples and curdles my stomach. I place bowls of vinegar on top of cabinets and bookshelves. The landlord says I must let the decomposing take its natural course.

Just wait it out.

The first time I set a trap, my hand fumbles, and I snap my thumb. I gasp into an empty theater. Ow! My thumb becomes a balloon animal, has its own pulse. I understand how the spring could break a tiny neck and crush a tiny skull.

Soft bodies hold blood. Soft bodies flatten and pop.

The day everything changes I come home at 6:30 p.m., after being at school all day. My house’s front door is splayed open, and immediately I am to blame. I think, I forgot to close it when I left this morning. How could I have been so careless?

Then I figure my landlord must be there, but I don’t see his red truck. I go inside like a fool, and this is my house turned over: dirt clods tracked on the blue carpet; my furniture pushed aside; my bedroom drawers thrown open (underwear flung to the floor); my television missing from the wooden stand, its absence a gaping wound in the living room. Wires that once hooked it to the DVD player hang back like black worms. I didn’t realize how much space it took up before.

I walk farther into the house and notice my kitchen window is opened. The windowsill was once full of succulents, but now they are all smashed into the sink: shards of pottery, clumps of dirt, green spikes and sponge-like leaves. Bird shit splatters the counters. In the back bedroom...