Inside this woman lives a version of herself three years ago, alone in a high rise with wall-length windows, posing in lingerie. At times, she stands nude in front of a stranger’s camera.
Inside this woman is an aunt and nanny to her infant niece and toddler nephew, walking them around the neighborhood in a stroller to count ducks. Feeding meals and snacks and putting them down for naps. Calming tantrums.
She lives in a van and doesn’t like sleeping in hotel parking lots, hearing the sound of drunk men urinating on retaining walls in the early morning. She’s single, then not single, then single again, then not single.
Inside this woman is a late-twenty-something year old Office Manager for a real estate association. An old realtor yells at her at the front desk about something she can’t remember—something so unimportant but he lets his rage explode from inside out through his entire body. She bottles this explosion inside her.
She’s the landscape gardener, planting annuals, pruning boxwoods, weeding in the heat of the day on her knees in rows of perennials. She gets three tattoos in the span of a few months, covering fresh ink at work to avoid infecting self-inflicted wounds. In winter, she pushes wheelbarrows of mulch up Shenandoah hills, spreading debris in its new form back to the earth.
She works at the front desk of a medical spa, selling Botox, facials, and skincare products to women who believe they can conjure collagen, return to youth. She’s asked how many units of Botox she get’s because her forehead is perfect, and she doesn’t say but thinks what is perfection?
Before, she’s a ballet dancer and teacher of ballet, instructing large studios of teens and adults. She’s a hostess at an old inn converted into a restaurant. Single, then not single, single again, then not single.
She’s graduated high school and lives in Nashville, working at an upscale French bistro in between long days dancing at the ballet, writing poems on post-it notes meant for take-out orders. Her boss instructs her to keep the homeless man pushing the shopping cart away from the front door she must repeatedly open for customers, and she struggles to talk to strangers. Her ’91 Honda Accord’s engine dies on the way to work, and a fellow dancer walks by to say hey, how’s it going then keeps walking.
Inside this young woman is a seventeen-year-old hair model. She’s told to wear more peach to bring out the rose in her cheeks. For America’s Beauty Show in Chicago, she auditions in a hotel lobby full of young women standing like a herd. She’s placed in a line. She holds laminated prints of her face, composites of her body, a single paper of measurements. That weekend she puts on the see-through booty shorts and crop top , she lets them cut and color her hair. A fire-engine-red fringe flames down the runway.
In high school she’s a dance student in an arts boarding school near a lake. She’s Princess Florine on stage in Sleeping Beauty, her costume glistening blue beneath spotlight, her toes burning in pointe shoes. Here, she cries herself to sleep, homesick for the version of her life before:
a girl of fifteen who only dreams of being a supermodel and a ballerina. Two very realistic dreams, she thinks.
Whose body at twelve flips off the top bunk at church camp, tumbling down to land on her friend’s suitcase feet away, only breaking one foot in the fall.
A girl who believes it was an act of God—the suitcase across the room cushioning her landing, nowhere near the shelf she leaned her weight onto. Below, concrete floor. The plank of wood gave way. She wasn’t taken to the hospital but given her great grandma’s old walker to hobble around in for the rest of the summer.
There is a version of her dreaming in ambient music. She plays with Breyers horses in the yard, running their fragile legs through the mowed lawn. At times, their limbs break off and her father hot glues them back together. With her best friend, they pretend the horses have sex, merging the horse’s plastic private parts, giggling and hiding behind the spruce tree. The woman lays on her belly in the grass as a girl, and is the closest she will be to earth, to this feeling of sinking, as she moves backward through herself, reaching in to pull something out of the dark.
The thing she is reaching for has no body, no shape. The nameless non-thing. A wind sweeping through the field inside her body. The woman is no longer girl or human, she becomes terrain. She is both the echo of the canyon and sunlight as she becomes river and rock. She carves her way through mountains, channeling like veins branching down and out. She can no longer be contained by a body, but becomes part of all bodies, bleeding out through wilderness.
Sam New holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Old Dominion University. A Best of the Net nominee, her work appears in Portland Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Watershed Review, Glassworks Magazine, Reverie Magazine, Birdcoat Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her work is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Prime Number Magazine, South Dakota Review, and Mantis.