Tell Me I'm Worthless(21)
The stain on the wall has spread, and in the stain is a face, with wide eyes in immense pain and a mouth open, silently screaming. Hannah’s face. We went with her into the House, and she never came out. Now she’s here. In my wall. Motionless. Looking right at me.
Ila
Sissy porn produces transwomen like a factory, a great industry which takes insecure men and pushes them through oil-slick machines until they fall out the other end, confused and clutching pink frilly panties to their chests. Ila has watched sissy porn before, out of perverse interest. She’s seen a lot of it. Know how thy enemy thinks. She put a piece out on Medium about the ways in which it enforces sexist visions of femininity. All of sissy porn, she wrote, is about trying to produce a particular kind of feminine ideal, one with huge breasts and a petite waist and big, anime eyes surrounded by long lashes. So much of it is about trying to convince the people consuming it – men – that if they want to be ‘fucked by cock’ then that means they’re a woman, because a woman is only defined by her relationship to ‘taking cock’ in the mouth or vagina or rectum. That at the end of it all, the only thing a woman is, is a hole. The piece closed with a quote from Dworkin, in her speech about prostitution: “I ask you to think about your own bodies – if you can do so outside the world that the pornographers have created in your minds, the flat, dead, floating mouths and vaginas and anuses of women [...] I ask you to think concretely about your own bodies used that way. How sexy is it? Is it fun? The people who defend prostitution and pornography want you to feel a kinky little thrill every time you think of something being stuck in a woman. I want you to feel the delicate tissues in her body that are being misused. I want you to feel what it feels like when it happens over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.”
She thinks a lot about Joyce. In her memory of the event, which feels like it belongs to someone else, the moment Joyce stepped towards her, pushing into the stall, her face changed. In the image it twists to become Alice’s face. Looking down at her. That fucking jawline, the ones she knows so well, that, when drunk, she would trace her index finger across, sharp enough that it could have cut her hand open. Alice was so much taller than her, tall like a tower, like a pillar holding up the earth. Too tall to be a woman but… those thick eyebrows that Alice always refused to wax. Alice’s brown eyes, Alice’s brown curly hair twisting at her shoulders. It’s hard to even accept that it was the old woman instead, in that moment. Looking down at her, and her a piece of ripe fruit, plump and juicy and ready to be bitten.
She didn’t know how Joyce got her email address, but, a few days after the bathroom incident, there was an email from her there, jabbing at her. Is this how Alice feels when I message her? Ila thought, before disregarding it. No. That’s completely different.
Hey love, wrote Joyce, I hope you’re okay. I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot the other day. I promise you I’m not usually like that at all, I’d had a bit to drink and the stress of the day had gotten to me.
Fuck you, she replied. How did you get my contact details? Fuck you, and never come near me again.
She covers herself in warm things until she feels cocooned by knitted fabric. Ila leaves her flat to get the bus, which arrives on time out of the greying evening and loops to the outskirts of the city - the other side of the city, nowhere near where the House is waiting, trying to grab at her with its brick-and-mortar nails. The bus shakes with every turn. It’s an old bus. There are no USB phone chargers or LED screens telling her what the next stop is, but she knows the route intimately so that doesn’t matter. Her parents live at the opposite end of everything, in a fancy little two-bedroom place situated up a hill which is spotted all over with other fancy little two-bedroom places. When people from the city got money, this was where they went. Away from the rabble. Up above the city, so they could look down on it from on high. Up here, as she gets off the bus, the wind is strong. It comes in from the ocean, rolling over the buildings below until it meets her, here, and gets tangled in her hair.
Just outside her parents’ front door, she looks down, as long as she can stand. The chill stings her face, but she looks down, seeing the sea as a grey flat desert, and the faded image of an oil tanker passing far out on the other side of a strip of rain. The shore is an irregular line, and then the buildings come thick, the roads a confusing mess of car headlights and streetlights in the rush hour of early evening. She finds it strange that American cities are structured with intention. Grids of right angles, impossible to find yourself lost in, surely. Here the cities are mistakes, towns which grew too big and so conjoined with other towns, swallowing all the villages and the countryside around them whole in their desperate need for more space. She looks down the hill. She follows the line of a main road which winds from the city centre out, pushing its way through estates, parting them like the red sea. Then, it split into two. One of the two new roads rises up and joins the motorway leading away between the hill. She looks to the other fork of the road. Once, a long time ago now, it led to a train station. Now, it does not. The tower block is visible. The lights of people’s kitchens and televisions are flickering on as they get home from work. And on the other side of the road, a black splotch. She can’t actually see it, not really, just the darkness and the forest around it, but it’s there, drawing her eye to it. And across the distance, it calls to her.