“Buffalo” by Jennifer McCartney, page 3

         It was a fake wakefulness, an absence of feeling, only doing--a hand to the cheek, the knowledge of something there. A mirror. A white boil, massive, cone-shaped like a hive and dilated at the top and in bursting it—standing in front of the mirror in her childhood bedroom—a small bean, erupted forth. A hard, green bean. She brought it to her mother, that safe bastion of reason and sense and calm who told her it wasn’t a bean, it was a porcupine’s quill. She looked at the bean, confused. Her mother was wrong, the most terrifying thing. Naming, misnaming. She looked up at the wound on her face, wiped away the wet pus afterbirth. She woke up.
         He couldn’t know what came next, how searching the internet in wakefulness she found the bean of her nightmare represented her soul, and the porcupine’s quill her ambition. Her soul had been mistaken for ambition, and with no other symbol in her dream to redeem this interpretation there was nothing else to think. No oranges, or wasps or airplanes to decipher. Was ambition a deadly sin? Pride. Pride yes. Pride, and punishment was hers.
         But now that her soul was outside her body, extracted, birthed through the skin of her face—she could hold it in her hand and she was free. The dream was an explanation and a solution.
         Everything else must go though, with this interpretation, this prophecy, she knew she could no longer be mistaken for ambition, for pride and—where was her soul now? In her dream she held it, but in wakefulness, she did not know where to look. She should have known this leaving of her soul was why she was lost. That was what happened, with violence. A sliver pushed to the surface. Insides damaged, needing extraction. The purge would be necessary for recovery.
         Kotter could not know about her frantic project, the trip to the post office, the mermaid carving in her arm that said simply, OUT.
         She hadn’t been pushed, in the end. She had jumped willingly with only a nudge, but the result was the same. Being too far down to reach.
         A chosen cliff was different. One could judge the distance from top to bottom and probably know of people who’d jumped. Leapt after marriage, children, cubicles and mortgages and mutual funds. Such cliffs came after high school, university or the end of relationships (in order to move on one had to descend, and climbing the ladder was really just another form of lowering). All peers all on the same footing, jumping at different times, but in the end all reaching the bottom. Everyone on a race to the bottom.
         But Bea had been lifted and dropped, alone—and though many other women had been airlifted and dropped by the mechanical vehicle of violence—there was never anyone else there upon landing. Different cliffs and different heights—but the bottom was reached through fog and made of rock for everyone equally. She cracked both ankles when she landed, and Kotter never saw her stand again.
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