Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “The Speck” by Ashley Pattinson Scott. Ash is a writer based in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and teaches creative writing at Close Reading Studio. In her free time, she discusses language and the laws of the universe with her dog, Flower.
I offer my forearm to my dog’s open mouth and bared teeth.
“C’mon girl, take it.”
We want to see how much pressure she can apply before something tears. Apparently, not much. She clamps down, playfully tugs, then the top layer of my skin curls like eraser shavings around her teeth.
“Okay. Okay, Flower.” She releases my arm before she draws blood, but she’s not going to let me get away. Balanced on hind legs, she wraps her forepaws around my waist as she tosses her head back into the sunlight. Every ridge and wrinkle and muscle is lit in her hot, pink mouth. Her wild tongue, stippled with purple as if she was born bruised, unfurls, drapes, then eventually retracts back into its hiding place.
We sit on the concrete slab in front of our converted garage studio, and we dip our feet into the dirt yard as if it were a pool. Cradling my forearm, I wait for the constellation of broken blood vessels to appear while Flower raises her nose, sniffing out the edge of the atmosphere. The sky is so big and broad and blue today it feels like at any moment, the tension holding it up could snap, leaving us all to fall from paradise forever.
A faint click. Gate. Latch. Flower is up and charging the gardener, and I am chasing after her. Part of what makes me love her is that she acts on every instinct. My fingers slip under her collar before her muzzle pries the gate back open. Dragging her away, she growls, and I apologize.
Inside, the garage is dark and cool. Our paws are soothed by the smooth tiles that cover the concrete floor. Flower leaps onto the bed, shoved into the corner of the room, and watches the gardener through the fragments of wooden blinds hanging crookedly in the window frame.
I open the fridge, and a triangle of white light cleaves the apartment into dark and less dark. There’s a plastic bag of bulk pretzels, a yellowed bouquet of kale, a three-dollar bottle of rosé from Trader Joe’s, and an empty jar of almond butter that I’m keeping to trick myself into not buying more. In the freezer is a plastic baggy with a sheet of LSD on blotter papers featuring the Rugrats.
Bored, I seek relief and privacy in my studio’s small bathroom. It’s the only room without windows. And it’s the only place where I feel like I can cast my imagination far and wide without being seen, which makes it my ideal place to masturbate.
I think of last summer. I wasn’t supposed to be fucking my boss – he was my boss, my boss was an asshole – but I simply wanted to know. What would it be like to listen to that whisper of flame in my belly? What would it feel like to obey my instincts? What would happen if I pursued what I wanted with the same fearlessness of a man?
My boss invited me over to help him with his homework. He was writing a paper on Plato’s Symposium and wanted to discuss Aristophanes' speech with someone. Maybe he’s flirting with me. Like, he’s calling me his other half. My thoughts wandered as strands of my hair got sucked out the car window, screaming as they rode the wind.
As soon as I placed my Mason jar of water on his coffee table, he picked me up from his couch, carried me into his bedroom, and threw me onto his bed. I was scared. I was thrilled. His pillow smelled like salt. He lifted my foot into the air, slipped his tongue between my toes, across the sole of my foot, down the long road of my leg, then plunged into my asshole.
The sex was good, which was mysterious, considering I couldn’t feel exactly when or if he was inside me. He muttered something about “my little hole” while dripping sweat into my upturned mouth. I lifted my hips to his thrusting body.
The thought of that mysterious potential made me come in my windowless bathroom. Orgasms can feel like a tidal shift, like an epiphany, like waking from a dream with exactly what you need. When my mind comes back to my body, I feel distinctly absent.
A blade of light reaching under the door reminds me that the outside world exists, and it wants me to be doing other things. I gather the parts of myself reverberating across space and time, turn on the light, and wash my hands with my reflection. The hollows under my eyes rhyme with the new contours on my stomach I’m supposed to want. Four hours of dance class each day is doing what it’s designed to do.
The garage seems brighter than before. Flower lifts her haunches into the air. She’s more powerful with her weight behind her. Her tail waves ferociously above her body. It’s the gardener again. He blows leaves that drop from the neighbor’s trees into the air, raising a cloud of brown dust that hovers in the air like smog. Under Flower’s bark, something metal tumbles across the threshold, ringing like a bell, or a silver jack, or a nail.
“C’mon Flower, what’s so bad about a leaf blower?” I coax her onto the bed, and we sleep through the afternoon.
The next morning, Taylor arrives to study for our Physics midterm. Whenever we get together, we spend most of our time sharing stories because we both ask a lot of questions and like to listen for the answers. Besides, having a friend over made the garage and the dirt yard feel like a small Eden.
I set my black Physics binder filled with photocopied pages of the universe next to a pot of hot coffee which feels cool relative to the day. The tattered umbrella is trying to fight me, but it eventually opens, spreading a dappled shade over the table. Taylor opens the gate and walks through with open arms that Flower gallops into.
“Hey!” I call as she scratches behind Flower’s pointed ears.
“Look what I found…” I hadn't noticed her hand folded behind her back, but her arm unfurls into the air, holding a softball she had plucked from the gutter like a trophy. Flower leaps into the air.
Taylor’s eyes tell me to go wide. She tosses the ball, a streak across the baby-blue sky. My feet shuffle backwards, my arms reach to catch the ball. Flower’s tail brushes the front of my thighs, then something pierces the side of my foot.
“Fuck!” Sitting on the threshold, foot in face, my eyes try to find the hurt. “Do you see anything?”
Taylor grabs my foot, brushes the dirt off my sole, then studies it inches from her eyes. Her waterproof, solar-powered, watch reads 11:13 a.m., the same time I was born. After a thorough examination that only a lifeguard could give, she proclaims “Nothing there!”
Dragging one foot behind me, I dump the pretzels into a bowl, tuck the rosé under my arm, and pinch one wine glass and one mug between my fingers. Taylor lays out a band aid and Neosporin on a clean spot on the table, which she uses to close my wound. Pouring her a glass, we settle into studying the natural laws of the universe.
x
I’ve always loved making my body do what I want, even when it can’t.
In Modern, we study Horton Technique: the practice of making the human body into the letter T. Balanced on one leg, we stretch our arms and legs into a flare plate, transforming our bodies into endless horizons.
“Imagine two people tearing you apart,” our teacher with a half-shaved head tells us. “Your bodies can take much more than you realize.”
My right foot will not obey. It is hot to the touch, busy sewing itself back together where I felt the sharp thing the day before. My thoughts make me wobble.
“Try spreading your weight evenly across your foot,” our teacher calls to me.
I’m going to use you, pinky. I tip towards the swollen edge of my foot – bolt of pain, my body’s revolt – I crumple in a small heap on the floor.
Hot with shame, I limp out of class and catch the bus home. Fever spreads over my body. Perhaps a new manifestation of artistic failure, I think, pushing sweat into my hairline.
Faint click. Gate. Latch. In our little Eden, Flower stretches out in the sun with a severed bough between her forepaws. Behind her, the shredded window screen waves in the breeze. I peer through the dark hole that holds my life. Flower blinks at me through the sunlight as I hop on my one good leg past her languid body.
I collapse into my unmade bed in my leotard. No shower. No food. I think I am dying, and I have no evidence to disprove this suspicion. My foot takes the pillow and my head takes the mattress. My body shivers and sweats. It is trying to kill something and me along with it. I'm not sure I can take it. I disappear as a means of survival. The moon rises as afternoon gives way to dusk. Flower finally cracks the bough in two, then I am asleep.
x
In the dream, I was lying in the road next to my boss again. We were holding hands. My head rested on his shoulder. His body was a soft and comfortable place, but he burned like a furnace. The second and last time my boss and I had sex, we ordered quesadillas from a food truck, and he told me a secret.
“Don’t tell anyone at work,” he commanded me. “I wouldn't do that,” I said, pouring a bottle of apple juice into a half empty bottle of whisky. He looked at me skeptically. His preferred drink was fernet. “I call it a sippy cup” I said, shaking the bottle. “It’s good.”
We drank until we felt like we could do anything— like fight cars and love each other. I don’t know how we ended up drinking in a park. The night was damp. We watched dew appear on the grass. We talked and drained our stories of all meaning. I peed while leaning against a fence beneath a Eucalyptus tree, which made my urine smell medicinal. I felt less ashamed about doing what I wasn't supposed to.
In the dream, my boss asked me how I knew what I knew. In the dream, I peeled his arm from around my shoulder, dropped it on his chest and said “Fuck you, Jason.” In the dream, I kept walking down the long, dark road of our second and last date. In the dream, I kept walking until the yellow lines became yellow stars and the yellow stars became smears against the black sky. In the dream, I couldn’t answer my boss’s question. In the dream, I was flesh and sweat and little more than that.
x
By morning, my foot has doubled in size. My body doesn’t want to come out of the dream, but Flower’s tongue lapping against my foot coaxes me earthside. This is bad, I think while trying to curl my inflated toes. Flower seems to agree. After a few long licks, she stops licking and starts chewing. She’d tended to her paws the same way. Get the poison out, her mouth seems to say. My leg jumps into the air as her teeth gently nibble at my burning flesh, but Flower doesn’t flinch. She waits for my foot to return to her mouth, eager to act on instinct.
Taylor gives me a ride to Kaiser in West LA, where nine months ago, I peed into a cup to confirm that my boss had gotten me pregnant. As I bounce up and down on one good leg, I remember the abortion at Planned Parenthood that followed my positive test.
“You’re so early,” the RN spoke to the computer screen, “just a fuzz.” An IUD dangled from her ID badge, tempting me to ask What’s that? But I knew. It was my protection and my poison and my future. She typed quickly and wasn’t looking at me when I interrupted her intake procedure with a question of my own.
“Can I see?” My legs swung against the waxy paper covering the exam bed. Part of me wanted to see the suggestion of a head, the silhouette of a nose, a hand casting a shadow puppet on the walls of my body. I was resolved to know exactly what I was doing. That knowing would be my punishment and my reward.
The RN gripped the side of the monitor “Are you sure about that?” Flight Risk flashed across her forehead like ticker tape. I tried to reassure her by projecting my garage studio with its broken blinds, empty fridge, and overprotective guard dog. I tried to show her the unknowing boss, my photocopied textbook, and the UC Berkeley license plate holder I kept on my desk to remind myself that I had goals, which did not include a baby.
Look at me, I thought. “Yeah, I’m sure.” I said.
After a few clicks, my sonogram appeared on the computer. There was no face and no heartbeat, only a hazy white speck floating in the center of the screen.
“That's it?” I wanted to laugh. That was not a baby, it wasn't even baby-like, but there we were.
“That’s it.” The RN smiled in relief, then turned the monitor way from me. “Do you have any questions about Paragard?”
“It’s the copper one, right?”
“Right. The doctor will put it in after he finishes your surgery.”
As other women were plucked from the waiting room, my stomach growled, and I found it impossible to watch TV as a migraine bloomed behind my eyes I fantasized about leaving the clinic, walking into West Hollywood barefoot in a dressing gown, ordering a black coffee with my ass exposed, and dealing with the whole thing later when the door swung and light pried open the dark room.
“Ready?” A clipboard-holding human asked me.
I turned around and realized no one else was in the room. My surgeon was a fabulous gay man who asked me for my name and date of birth. “Very good. Are you ready?” I nodded. “Here comes your appletini, okay? Count backwards from 10 for me.”
“10.” I was asleep, and in 10 minutes the speck had been replaced with a copper T hanging in my uterus like an open umbrella.
x
In the ER at Kaiser, my foot has doubled in size, again. Sweat beads between my toes, which are expanding into one another’s territory. Heat climbs up my ankle. There is a strange taste in my mouth. The resident examines an X-ray of my foot. “It looks like there’s a tiny piece of metal stuck in there. Explains the swelling. We’re going to have to remove it.”
“How?” I ask, my foot balancing on a single stirrup.
“I’m going to numb the area, make an incision, then remove what appears on the X-ray.”
“Can someone hold my hand?” After a look and a gesture, a nurse walks in, grimaces at my foot, then slips her hand into mine. “Just breathe, baby,” she tells me.
The needle punctures my foot, spreading fire as it goes. Suddenly, my whole body goes slick with sweat. I am just a small hole, panting.
“One more big one, sorry!”
My back arches to put the pain somewhere else. The clock behind me says 10:13.
The Lidocaine never fully kicks in. The resident’s forceps dig through my foot. I hear them click against something hard. My mouth waters. I am hopeful that it’s almost over. But the resident’s focus gives way to exasperation, then to laughter. Am I laughing in the twilight of my pain? Am I smiling, just like I have been trained to?
“I can’t get it,” the resident sighs.
Like a fox caught in a trap, I consider chewing off my foot as I count thousands of black dots on the tiled ceiling.
“I can’t. I just can’t – have to call the on-site for this one.”
At 11:13, the podiatrist arrives. “Ready Ashley?” He grabs a syringe and pricks my foot all over.
I grip the edge of the bed. “Oh c’mon there’s no way you can feel this,” he informs me, smiling. He plunges the forceps into my foot, deeper than the last doctor, who now looks over her shoulder, a pair of blue gloves dangling from the corner of her elbow.
“Just cut it off!” I plead.
“Almost got it. Breathe.”
Something heavy rings out in a metal tray. Everyone claps. He places the metal tray on the side of the examining table with a chuckle.
“Look. It’s a boy.”
Inside the tray, a prism of clear glass gleams pink and white with my blood and puss. Its clarity fooled Taylor’s eyes, but not my body. “Souvenir?” The podiatrist asks, nudging the tray towards me with one hand, beckoning a nurse with the other.
As he stitches the small slit in my foot, I think of my mother, who delivered her first baby, completely blue; and me, her second baby, six weeks early. “You just wouldn’t wait,” she loves to tell me. “You were ready.”
The podiatrist fastens a boot to my foot with velcro straps. I shake the glass in the tray, watch it bounce off the metal walls as it leaves little spheres of blood in its erratic path. I imagine my mother panting as I wailed on her chest, her eyes wide as the doctor stitched her body back together.
I toss the speck into the trashcan next to the bed, then stand on my own two feet.
Whoah
Absolutely stunning writing - your balance of scene and exposition is perfect. Your descriptions are powerful and visceral. I loved reading this, thank you!