by Vaibhavi Kerkar
Your roommate’s voice is as tender as a fresh wound when she offers to pay you two favours in exchange of accompanying her to a funeral. When you ask her whose funeral it is,she hooks her fingers on your collarbones and presses down until your knees buckle. Shepoints to an ex-lover’s name scalpeled in the nook between her heel and her ankle, the woundhaloed red around the deep incision like a neon sign. You ask her how he’d died. Instead of answering she runs her thumb over your temple and tells you to breathe. You stifle an inhaleout of spite. The offer doesn’t really surprise you; she’s made a deal like this every few dayssince she’d moved in three weeks ago. Traded a nickel for three puffs from your cigarette during the week that she tried to quit nicotine. Or the time she said that if you stitched the laceration that had unzipped across her forearm after she collapsed onto the serrated edge of ashoe rack, she would let you hurt her in the shape of your name. She said she collected scarsthe same way you collected glass animals the size of your thumb, both so fragile that they’d fracture open at the slightest negligence. You tell her that you’ll only go to the funeral if you can think of a favor alluring enough, something chemical-sweet. A favor that will melt on your tongue, sizzling like a cube of acid. Her roommate application had been written with such strained intensity that the strokes across the t’s unstitched the gauzy fibres of the page. You’d accepted, expecting her to possess the same jittery habits as your old roommates –knuckles cracks and evening walks to jog off the anxiety. Instead, on the day she’d moved in, she held a cigarette between her teeth as she unpacked nitrile gloves and dainty surgical equipment from her duffle bag. You had asked her whether she was a nurse like you, and shesaid she was a tattoo artist of sorts. Scarification. Rings of smoke spilled from her mouthwhen she spoke. She warned you that her work required her to leave town every once in a while. A fissure cracked red on her lower lip. Silver stub piercings snake-bit her clavicles.She had a Roman nose. And eyes that glistered like iodine. She’d stretched to dislodge a twinge in her shoulder joint and her shirt had lifted and you hadn’t asked questions about theC-section scar bitten across her abdomen. Now, your knees numbed cold against the floor, you trace your lips across the ridges of someone’s birthplace, her skin cool and bitter as acetone on your tongue. That night, your head throbs with the word – favor, how she’d sounded it out like it was something vulgar. At first, you think of the bare skin of her belly, how it’d tasted like anesthetic syringed into your veins before a surgery; the way you wanted to unpick the stitches with your teeth. The way you hadn’t scarred her with your name even when it was your right. The way you thought it obscene: To incise instead of suture. You’d tried to imagine the surgical blade, sterilized cold against your palm. You’d prefer the knife to be see-through instead of steel. As she lays next to you now, the moonlight nips at the silver of her piercings and the splits of her eyelashes. She was wrong about why you still collected glass reptiles and beetles and moths that glinted like prisms at their edges. You never told her why you sheathe them in gauze and newspaper a week after you’ve had them. The first one had been the size of a clenched fist: a cottonmouth, coiled in on itself, mouth unfurled, teeth and tongue both bared and needle-sharp. When you were 13, you’d severed the glass snake’s head from its jaw, half-expecting it to bleed. You want to tell her how you’d pretended you’d killed it even though you knew it was never alive. How you were the only one that bled, yourpalm slit open into a smile. You straddle her hips and you’re not sure whether she’s only pretending to sleep. Scar tissue blooms across her limbs like camellias; a half-healed cut curls open at her bent knee. All you can do is pray that she’s taken the temazepam and can’t hear broken glass clink against the newspaper as you try to pluck out the largest fragment. Pray that she doesn’t feel its graze as you trace the tip of the shard down her sternum. Pray that she stayed this way: inanimate and silent, breath stilled. You wanted her heart to pulse in your hand. Flesh-pink, sinewy. Tendons and blood-vessels exposed. Tomorrow, you will go to the funeral with her, and on the car ride back she will speak to you about sex and masturbation like it is a drug she takes. Back at your apartment, her back arched over the steel railing of the seventh-floor balcony, her hair drizzling down rain onto the pavement below, she will only listen, never speak after you ask for your favor, after you tell her that when she talked, she skinned you alive, that her words made you feel pink and raw inside, made you want to cauterize your own lungs. No, only you will speak until the moon scalds her irises into teardrops and menthol cigarettes sizzle on her tongue and fill your lungs with her smoke.When she leaves town, she’ll stub out her cigarette on your tongue, and you’ll wonder whether it’s a parting gift or a payment. Until the day she returns, when she’ll cuff her wrists in satin and steel above her head to expose the bands of her ribcage. You’ll tell her that you want to turn her into something as fragile as her scars. You will puncture her lungs breathless. You will play wishbone with her clavicles. You will carve her heart into a rosebud.
Vaibhavi Kerkar (she/her) is an aspiring author and avid reader from Goa, and is currently a student of St. Xavier’s Higher Secondary School