I liberated her from her body, trespassing on her self-inflicted inner wound . . . doing her the favour of pulling it to the tangible. She hated her body with the spite a mother saves for an unwanted child—because her body, in its arrogance, never fit the carefully purchased fiction of her life. She punished herself for being fat, though she was translucent-thin from a lifetime of shifting physical hunger to trinkets she could buy and people she could control. With one thankful stroke (thankful, in that only one stroke was needed), I rewrote the fiction she’d so foolishly bought. New, red words defaced the Sex and the City calendar that hung in tribal-mask adoration over the Norwegian pine table in her breakfast nook, blurring calligrapher-precise notes made in peacock blue fountain pen. Rude, thick words, darkening, rewrote the still-life tableau of the lone espresso she’d made for herself just before my arrival, marked the perfect twist of lemon rind resting beside it on Italian porcelain that she’d first shown me years ago, when she’d theatrically unpacked the set to which it belonged.
