Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner Read Free Book Online Page A

the anger that I’ve been stoking since I got here, go AWOL. And all this time he’s leaning in close, flashing these teeth like he’s a game-show host, and then he asks to see mine.
    It’s just him, his camel, and me—and a circle of his men on their horses eyeing us from a distance. My “translator” has wandered off to take a piss. I lift my shroud flap up over my eyes and he makes this sound in his throat, almost like poor old Knob-Goblin’s purr used to sound when we snurffled her belly, and puts his finger, which smells like smoke and blood and goat, right into my mouth. He runs it back and forth and back and forth, from molar to molar, while muttering something I take to be, “Nice, nice.” I think, I do actually think this, I could bite his finger right off right now, bite down as hard as I can, trapping his filthy child-raping finger and then spitting it out at his feet.
    He just keeps running his finger back and forth and so help me god I start to get hot and almost come right there standing in the dry wind stink of him.
    What does this make me?? And this whole time I’m in my chador like some black ghost. How can I even tell you this? How can I not?
    These are the things we do when we’re no longer ourselves. When the self disappears. The self—dear Knob-Goblin, I’d almost forgotten about her.
    
    The clinic doctor walked in, tapping a pen against her teeth. She looked about twelve. There was a polished bone (quail? ferret? human fetus?) protruding through both sides of her nostrils, and starting at the top of her hands and scrolling up under the sleeves of her lab coat, some tattooed script, “ μνυμι πóλλωνα ητρ ν, κα σκληπι ν, κα γείαν, κα Πανάκειαν, κα θεο ς πάντας τε κα πάσας …”
    Alex, perched on the examining table in her crackling blue-paper wrapper, had the urge to ID the doctor before she let her slip her child-size hand inside her. She wondered if the girl had even gotten her period yet. Maybe it was bring-your-kidto-work week? Her own GP, a wiry-haired woman she loved who had seen her through a devastating bout of post-traumatic stress disorder, was away on a Doctors Without Borders mission in Haiti.
    Alex stared at the girl doctor’s hands to avoid looking directly into her face. “The Hippocratic oath,” the doctor said, pulling up her T-shirt to reveal more of the script spiralling across her taut belly. “In the original Greek.” Tugging her shirt back into place, she asked Alex a stream of straightforward questions, then snapped on a pair of green-and-white latex gloves embossed with the Starbucks logo, the mermaid with her tail split at her crotch. “We’ll have to run a few tests to make sure, but if I’m going to hazard, like, an educated guess? I would say premature ovarian failure.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œEarly menopause.”
    Alex heard herself shrieking. The sound of the big ginger tom next door happening upon a raccoon clan in the back alley. Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween . A B-movie screech in Dolby Digital 5.1. On the wall behind the child doctor was a calendar featuring anthropomorphized bacteria engaged in Winter Olympic–style sporting events with an assortment of antibiotic soaps.
    â€œIt happens,” she told Alex matter-of-factly. To who— whom? To whom does this happen at thirty-six?!
    Walking home from the clinic, clutching a referral for a geriatrics specialist and a pamphlet on the pros and cons of estrogen replacement therapy, Alex felt the elasticity in her skin giving way with each step, her uterus a dried gourd inside her, rattling like a maraca. She spotted a guy who looked like Rufus putting up a poster on a telephone pole outside Dream Cycle. Staple gun in