Petite Mort
It’s the kind of thing you know without knowing. A thing so self-evident it doesn’t need to be said, or even thought. The first time she thinks it—consciously, in words—is when a man is on top of her. It’s their first and probably only time together. She already came, and now, reinhabiting herself, her eyes focus on his face above hers. His eyes are closed, his tongue barely sticking out the corner of his mouth. He is sweaty, they both are. They’ve been fucking for over an hour. She watches a bead of sweat travel through his close-shaved hairline and down his temple, and she thinks: Someday this man will die.
She watches a vein pulse out from beneath the damp skin of his forehead, his eyes widening, looking beyond her, into something else, a place she can’t access. Then his body loosens, dropping its weight down onto her. He lets his breath slow before getting up to fetch her a hand towel.
In the bathroom, still naked, she looks in the mirror, wipes the sweat from her hairline, her running mascara, the spermicidal residue between her legs. She washes her hands with clear soap from a brushed bronze dispenser, which matches the toothbrush holder, the kind of bathroom accoutrements typical of single men in their late thirties, along with the charcoal-gray towels, the plug-in air freshener, the half-full bottle of department store cologne, and the tied-off condom nestled pitifully amid tissues in the wastebasket. Someday he’ll die, she thinks again, and I’ll never find out.
Whether she too will die someday is an open question. When she was twelve, she was biking home down a quiet road when a black SUV came speeding around the bend, clipping her at a speed great enough to send her flying. In that midair moment, she noted that she was not wearing a helmet, rarely did, why would she on these sleepy suburban roads, where you could hear the flapping of birds’ wings on the breeze? She hit the ground with a decisive thwack, her temple making swift contact with the pavement. She lay still for a long time, thinking no thoughts and hearing no sounds.
Then, out of the blackness: Is this death? Is it this stillness, stretching into eternity? She lay with this thought for a long moment before sitting up. She looked back at her mangled bike in the middle of the road, its wheels still spinning. Her head ached, but when she touched her hairline, her fingers came away clean. The SUV was gone. There were no witnesses. No one to confirm what had happened. She stood up, rattled but apparently uninjured.
Upon closer inspection, her bike was not so badly wrecked after all. The frame could be hammered back into shape. The basket was a little smushed. But she was able to get it upright and walk it home in a daze, convincing herself the crash must not have been so bad, since she was fine. She was fine. She kept stopping to examine her unscraped bare limbs. The birds trilled. The sun shone through the trees.
It is still early, four o’clock Saturday afternoon, as she walks to the train from the man’s apartment. Their first meeting, at noon, had been a lunch. She had a glass of sauvignon blanc, he some Belgian beer that came in a bulbous goblet. They silently sized each other up as the server brought menus neither of them picked up. He was a bit redder than he’d looked in his photos, recently sunburned. Shorter than he’d said, but not by much. How far did you say you lived from here? she asked.
She realizes she needs conditioner and stops at a CVS. She takes a basket, already ticking off a mental list of things she doesn’t know she needs until she sees them: nail polish remover, face lotion, mints, hair ties. There was no line when she walked in, but now there are six people waiting and the two self-checkout machines are out of order. Settling in for a wait, she begins to rate every man she sees on a scale of fuckability. Looks are not the main criteria. She doesn’t know what the criteria are. She just knows at first glance whether she wants to fuck someone or not. A pulsing jaw, a veiny forearm—these are easy things to notice. She is drawn to all kinds of details: the fit of a worn-out T-shirt, a wild sprig of gray in a beard, a too-tight watchband. It would be more modern, she supposes, to rate the women as well, but she doesn’t have the same immediate reaction to them. She likes and respects plenty of women, but from an attraction standpoint, they might as well be furniture. She wonders if this is another character flaw.
The character flaws she’s already aware of: she is lazy, vain, bores easily, lacks a sense of urgency in her life, doesn’t care enough, in a general sense. Maybe these are all the same flaw.
At seventeen, she was home alone one summer afternoon, her parents at work, little brothers at martial arts camp. She was in the kitchen slicing a bagel when it occurred to her to test a notion. In the five years since the hit-and-run—she’d never told anyone, had hidden the bike under a tarp behind the lawnmower, pilfered her father’s tools to fix it herself in stolen moments over many days—she’d begun to notice things about herself. For instance, whenever she caught the cold that was going around, that would cause her peers to miss a week of school and leave her family bedridden with balled tissues littering their nightstands, she herself would only get a mild tickle in the throat that would pass in a day. She’d force an occasional cough to dodge suspicion, as if her confounding good health were a crime she hoped to get away with.
Injuries, too, were never notable. Bruises seemed to fade by day’s end. She’d scratch her leg on the fence at school, and by the time she made it to the nurse’s office to request a Band-Aid, she’d be unable to find the wound.
But on that hot and stagnant July day, on which she wasn’t scheduled at the coffee shop she’d been working at since school got out at the end of May, there was nothing but her hunger to pull her out of bed. No one would be home for hours.
She stopped the knife mid-bagel, pulled it out and held it above her hand. She could nick her finger. But she’d done that plenty of times before. She could go much further if she wanted to test this notion for real. She could slice a vein in her wrist, though she couldn’t remember which direction was most deadly, if she was really going to do this. Unable to summon the nerve, she simply pressed the blade down into her palm, deeper, just a little deeper, until she saw blood, and the pain triggered her to release the knife and drop it. She wrapped a big white mitt of paper towels tightly around her hand, then ate the half-sliced bagel at the counter, untoasted and unbuttered.
The pain faded quickly. In a ritualistic impulse, she stepped out onto the back porch to unwrap her hand, slowly, layer by layer, holding it aloft in the sun. Underneath the final bloody towel, she found a slim dark line on her palm. She used the garden hose to clear it of the remaining blood. The cut was there. It had bled a little. It had hurt but this wasn’t the day she’d find out if she could be hurt worse. It would come from elsewhere, some object acting upon her, not her own nervous hand.
She gets a text as she’s approaching the stairs down to the train.
“Come use me.”
She recognizes the area code but has not saved the number in her contacts. This is a man she met two weeks ago, slept with once, after which he’d confided in her via text that his greatest fantasy was to be treated like a sex object, used and discarded, maybe by her, if the idea turned her on.
“I’ll objectify you,” she’d replied. “I’ll use you up till there’s nothing left.”
Now she ponders. She’s on the opposite side of town from his apartment. Her lipstick is chewed off. She smells of sex. And she’s carrying a groaning plastic bag full of grooming products. She decides to continue her homeward trajectory. Will respond later, once she’s showered, and the man from this afternoon is less fresh on her body.
Waiting for the train, she’s already forgetting today’s man. Now she’s remembering the night she spent with the man who wants her to use him now. The genial, almost prim way he’d offered her a glass of water as she set down her purse, and minutes later, the hard, desperate way they’d kissed, his Roman nose jutting into her mouth as he reached his hand down into her panties. She remembers the beginnings and endings of these encounters, but the middle parts are somehow all part of a greater whole. Each time is a return to a place she alone knows, a world in which her body is the only thing, ecstasy its only aim. And after she drowns, after she resurfaces—gasping, blinking—only then is she able to notice the world again, and the fact that she is in a strange room with a strange someone.
On that night, she’d let the man come inside her against what might normally be her better judgment. As they’d kissed, and as he drove his fingers deeper inside her, he’d asked in her ear if he could go bare. By then she was too close to the edge to refuse; the only word she could utter was yes. Afterward, sitting on his toilet as his semen dripped out of her, she’d stared into his glass-doored shower. A capless bottle of three-in-one shower gel, shampoo, and conditioner. A bath puff, charcoal gray in defiance of a bath puff’s inherent femininity. Nondescript tile befitting a nondescript apartment in a nondescript building. No there there, she thought, not recalling the context of the quote. No here here. Wiping with cheap, gritty toilet paper, she thought: There’s no here here.
And then in the silence of this strange bathroom, there was too much here, some muscle memory of sitting in the same posture, spent over a toilet, bleeding too much at fourteen weeks, listlessly wiping at the blood until she crawled to the shower to wash it away in water that was too cold, then too hot.
She’d lost track of time, she realized at some point, imagining the man on the verge of knocking, everything-okay-in-there style. She composed herself, externally at least. Washed her hands. Smoothed her hair. Told her body to relax and it did, shoulders dropping, limbs fluid, a neat trick afforded her by thousands of hours of pilates. She dressed and found him in the kitchen, where he was arranging a plate of meats, cheeses, almonds, and purple grapes. He opened a bottle of wine.
“I wanted to do this before you got here, but I didn’t have time. And then once you were here, well…” She was flooded with tenderness for him in that moment. She took the glass from him but immediately set it back down. As he stood before the counter adding a few more cubes of cheese to the plate—an already absurd amount of food for two people—she came up behind him and nuzzled the back of his neck. He must smell like me, she thought, and I like him. She breathed him in. He had no scent at all. She reached around his waist, playing with the hairs just above the band of his underwear, underneath the jeans he’d put back on, but he took her hand away softly.
“I’m not gonna be able to go again,” he said. “Sorry. If you don’t want to stick around, that’s fine.”
She shrunk back. She forgets sometimes that not everyone is a creature of pure instinct. That some people can behave with intention. She reached for the plate and took a few almonds, biting down hard on them, like wood pellets in her mouth. As she swept herself down the hallway to the elevator, she tried to remember if she’d said goodbye, or anything at all before she walked out the door.
She hears the train coming. There is always this moment when she has to hold onto something to stop herself. Not from jumping. She doesn’t think she’s brave enough for that. But if she doesn’t grab something—a bench, a post, a standing subway map—she will step right up to the edge, until her toes jut out over the lip of the platform. She does not want to die. But something in her is still dying, dying to see.
She was engaged once. It feels strange to say it. She almost never does say it. This was in a different city, over a decade ago. She had fallen for a neighbor, a man who lived in her apartment building, where she’d moved just after college. After their meet cute in the laundry room—she needed quarters, he had some—they began spending all their free time at his apartment, nicer than hers, because he was older. They never went out anywhere. Why go out for dinners and drinks when they were already where they were going to end up?
It felt like love, though it didn’t feel like fate. It felt like the present. To come home from her entry-level, dead-end job—all the jobs she was qualified for were entry-level and dead-end—to take off the ill-fitting Payless shoes that left red semicircles across her toe-line, and sink into the embrace of a man who didn’t know anything of her place in the world, or she his. It was both comforting and disorienting, to be a hair’s breadth from living with someone with whom she’d never been seen. She forgot to do basic things like shop for groceries—he was always making her dinner. And take her birth control in the morning—she never woke up in her own home.
When she got pregnant, she expected she’d have an abortion. She had no means to support a child—she was barely supporting herself—and she’d been seeing the neighbor only a few months. But when he reacted to the news not with despair, but with elation, she decided to think about it a bit longer. He’d never held her so fiercely as he did that night. No one had. Maybe, she thought, as he stroked her hair in his lap, she’d just go ahead and mull her options until the options dwindled down to one. She bathed in the glow of the TV like sunlight, his fingertips tracing her back underneath her work blouse.
She doesn’t think about it often anymore. And then something happens that makes her think of nothing else for days. How he’d gotten down on one knee in his kitchen, and she was distracted noticing that they were both in stocking feet. They’d still never left the building together, had never had occasion to wear shoes in each other’s company. She said yes, but the ring was a little too big. She still wore it sliding around loose, always walking with her hand cupped in front of her as if she were carrying a palmful of sand.
As the weeks passed and she let the decision go unmade, she began to have nightmares. In these nightmares, she was raising the baby alone in the building, which seemed to be abandoned. She wandered the halls while it cried on her shoulder, looking for someone to help her. Then she’d take a wrong turn and wind up locked in a room as the baby continued to wail inconsolably. Pacing the room in a panic, she’d then discover that this new room was shrinking. Ten steps across became eight, then five, then.... She always woke up before the walls closed in on her and the baby. She was rattled, but more than that, she was bothered by the lack of a conclusion to the countdown.
The neighbor, whom she’d never referred to out loud as her fiancé, couldn’t come to the first doctor’s appointment. He said he had a work thing. Because she was alone and so relatively young, the doctor treated her like a teen mom. The careful way she went over the brochures with her, talking about basic nutrition and biological functions as if she were simple. She felt, in her paper gown, like a patient, like someone who was sick. And with her legs swinging off the end of the table between the stirrups, her head bowed and listening, she felt like a child.
The doctor went on to explain how the baby would be sharing her bloodstream until birth separated them. And even then, she said, cells from the baby would cross the placenta and remain in her, so the separation would never be clear-cut. Even then, this seemed like too much to bear. She stared at her bruised knees, and she was unable to picture the thing swirling inside her, the thing she’d just seen on a screen.
She remembered all this later, as she sat under the showerhead watching the water take the blood down the drain. For years she’d believed it was possible she couldn’t be killed. But this part of her could. Was it her fear that killed it? The fear that caused her nightmares? She slipped into a dreamless sleep. There was no way of knowing how long it was before she regained consciousness with the neighbor shaking her by her arms. But she knew he was just the neighbor again.
She is thinking of it all again, and she doesn’t want to think of it anymore. She’s sitting on the train with her shopping bags slumped on her lap. If any part of her is killable, she wishes it were the part that runs memories incessantly through her consciousness until they’re threadbare, but still threads, passing through.
Seated across from her there are men. One, then another, and another. But none of them stirs anything in her. She thinks then of the last time she was with the neighbor, after the blood, after everything. How when he was on top of her, she took his hand and wrapped it around her throat. His eyes widened. He thrusted deeper, holding her throat like that. She reached up and squeezed his fingers in tighter. She pushed his fingers into her throat until she felt her breathing constricted, until she felt it would leave bruises, then suddenly he shook loose of her, pulled out, pulled his hand away.
“I’m sorry,” he said, breathing hard.
No, I’m sorry, she thought about saying, but didn’t.
When she emerges from the train, out onto the street with the sun low but unsetting, her phone buzzes with another text from the man who wants to be used. A picture this time: He’s lying in a hammock, phone pointed at his crotch, his hand reaching inside his black briefs, gripping his cock, with his long legs spread down the length of the striped canvas, languorous and ready. She’d noticed the hammock on the balcony the last time she was there. She wasn’t sure she’d hear from him again after her hasty retreat, when he’d made a gesture toward romance. He seems to have matched her energy now. Use and be used. Fuck and get fucked. Good.
She takes a long, hot shower. Shaves though she’s shaved, exfoliates though she’s exfoliated. She leaves the steam of the bathroom and lies on the unmade bed in her towel.
If she were to go out again, if she were to answer the call, she would have to decide what to wear. She has guidelines: Always dress like you will be getting naked. Never wear anything that will leave a mark on the skin. Never wear anything that doesn’t slide off like water. Consider the possibility that you can’t die and live accordingly. Consider that this is your body, and that it is the only thing you will ever have.
Anne-Marie Kinney is the author of two novels, Radio Iris (2012, Two Dollar Radio) and Coldwater Canyon (2018, Civil Coping Mechanisms). Her short fiction has appeared in Catapult, Tin House, Fanzine, The Adroit Journal, The Rupture and elsewhere. She was previously an editor of the literary journals Black Clock and Joyland. She lives in Southern California with her husband and children and is working on her third novel.