CW: Sexual assault

I know the real story would bore you, so let me try to make it interesting. Instead of saying I was molested at eleven, I’ll say a boy with laser-red eyes opened a rat cage in his grandmother’s cellar, and the rats ran all over me, nipping and scratching my skin until I had none left, and when my skin grew back it was transparent and permeable as water. Instead of saying I was assaulted at nineteen, I’ll say I awoke one night to discover my tangled bedsheets had become boa constrictor coils, and the harder I fought, the tighter they squeezed, and I survived only by breathing the thin straw of moonlight between the curtains until the first rays of sunrise shot through, turning the vampire boa to dust, which my waterlike skin soaked up hungrily, hardening and scaling a bit as a result, but remaining transparent. Instead of saying I surrendered my whole being, at twenty-five, to a man who was also a boy—the same kind of boy who’d molested me, the same kind of man who’d assaulted me—I’ll say I walked naked and barefoot into the wilderness, believing I wouldn’t be hurt if I gave myself willingly this time. But the beast I met wasn’t a rat, nor a snake, nor a lion, nor a bear, nor any cutting or strangling creature, but a handsome-faced, limpid-eyed parasite who pushed his way down the slippery slide of my throat and opened up inside me, flattening my essence against my body’s walls until it bonded to the bone-and-blood bricks, until I was little more than a container in which the beast could hide himself, looking out with my eyes, smiling with my lips, speaking his words with my voice. I’ll say it was years before I realized what was happening. I’ll say that just before the parasite absorbed the last remnants of my self, just before he discarded my useless husk to move on to a fresh host, I began, with my mind, to tell him “no”—just “no”—and didn’t stop telling him “no” until, repulsed by the newly-bitter taste of my atoms, he shrank up and withdrew, and my skin grew back as it had been in early childhood—fresh and soft, but opaque and strong, providing a safe home for my heart, my soul, and my secrets. The real story is that I’m here. The real story is that I’m free. The real story is that I’ve learned—finally—the difference between being loved and being consumed.

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Francesca Leader is a self-taught, Pushcart-nominated writer originally from Western Montana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Wigleaf, Fictive Dream, Barren, the J Journal, Bending Genres, JMWW, Drunk Monkeys, Bright Flash, and elsewhere. Learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com.)