THINGS NO ONE EVER TOLD ME BUT I FIGURED OUT ANYWAY — JACLYN GRIMM
/8. When I turn eight I skate figure eights in garden soil and bury my baby doll four inches under.
10. My best friend’s baby brother cries and vomits and and I tell her mother she should’ve bought a pet lizard instead. My mom and her laugh and tell me one day I’ll understand.
13. My older sister starts babysitting the kid next door and can’t stop talking about babies and babies and babies and at night I hear her say baby, baby, baby real quiet in her room.
14. My mom tells me about sex but all I can think of is how this compares to the other advice she has given me: stick a wire in a light socket and you will get stung; catch a bee and get electrified; bite a bottle and it will break your teeth and slit your throat from inside out.
16. I am a chicken scratch dancer, drunk on cheap beer and cheaper dreams. My skin is short short and blood red and the girls call me a whore but the boys don’t call me anything. The steak knife stares make my hands skim my waist and stick-out ribs and when we play cards someone else’s hands skim my left breast, but all I think of is my hand of cards. Ace of Spades.
18. When he leads me to his room he wraps one hand around my wrist and I think how easy it would be for him to break it. It’d snap like a wishbone, a part to me and a bigger part to him. He wins. If this was Thanksgiving he would get the first piece of turkey but it is February and freezing so I give him myself instead.
20. I trace my handprint on a map and drive to the tip of my pinkie. I end up where I always do. My mother confuses sex with love and children with happiness and isolation with loneliness and I don’t think she understands and I don’t know if I do either.
Jaclyn Grimm lives in Orlando, Florida and is a rising senior at Lake Highland Prep. Her writing has been published in the Adroit Journal and decomP. She likes using lower case letters way too much and thinks she's funnier than she actually is.
