Kelly Gray

“Sure likes to bang a lot.” That’s what Dad says about the mama cat my mother harbors in the small rooms of the house. It makes sense, right? A lot of problems can be solved with banging. People like to say violence doesn’t solve anything. But if you ask me, that’s not right, it doesn’t take much to look up over your cup of Starbuck’s coffee to see that violence is solving lots of things. And maybe it’s just semantics, but you could call banging a type of violence, too. 

I like acquiring words. Each one is a little window in a big house with a bunch of different views. We’ve had cats for as long as I can remember, but we didn’t properly acquire them, they just kept getting born. When they come out, their heads are too big for their bodies, and they make squeaky pinprick sounds. All they want is titty. Once they get it, you can hardly get them off. Mama Cat looks miserable. Laid out flat like flies should be on her. The kittens come out crusty too, eyes sewn shut with eye-junk. I don’t know if there is a medical word for eye-junk; I haven’t found it yet. There are words for too much fluid in the kitten’s heads and too much fluid in the kitten’s bellies. If Mother Nature sees a problem she might just drown you out of it. Hydrocephalus and ascites, says the internet at the library. When you don’t have a vet to stop it, that’s a type of violence. 

My mother listens to NPR in the kitchen when Dad is gone. Even when she knows he won’t be back till after dinner, she keeps the volume real low on her radio so that Terry Gross is at a murmur, even though Terry Gross isn’t whispering. There’s a lady who can’t whisper. But my mother can. She can pick up pregnant Mama Cat and lull her to sleep with all sorts of secrets that nobody else is privy to. 

I don’t tell my mother too many secrets. I don’t like the idea of her sharing them with Mama Cat. She refuses to have Mama Cat fixed but she started taking me to the doctors when I was eleven. The doctor is one of those women who knows everyone in town. I can tell she suspects that I want to hang out in the baseball field, but she asks me anyway, just to be polite. She poses her question as she moves the cold stethoscope up and down my back so I can’t see her face. I take three big breaths just like she says to and then I tell her the names of the all the kids who do go there to get felt up, just to set her straight, but also show her that I can be polite, too. The girls arrive each night and spread out like fingers on a hand, then they find a place to lie down and look up at the stars. The boys show up later and walk across the dark field to find a girl to be with. That’s how you get a jacket that smells like cheap mall cologne, and that’s how everyone knows you have a boyfriend. That’s why all the girls can tell you the names of the constellations, but the boys know nothing but dirt. 

About a year ago, I heard my mother listening to a show on epigenetics. Apparently, your parents can leave traces in the parts of your body you can’t even see, and your parent’s parents in them, and so on, until the inside of you is filled up with a map of trauma pathways. If I get real quiet and close my eyes, I can see the pathway to all the people who came before me. I use this quiet time to imagine that I have family, and that they’ve each given me something special to keep inside of me. They said on the radio that women giving birth who had watched the buildings collapse on 9/11 had smaller babies that year. Each time our cat has a litter of kittens they get smaller and smaller. I wonder if when I have a baby, will it be as small as a kitten? Could I fit in my mouth? I ask the doctor how small babies can be, and that’s when she puts me on birth control. 

When I go to the hardware store, hardly no one will help me. I can hear the radio blasting out from shitty speakers screwed into the exposed pipes running along the ceiling, and a man’s voice talking about people eating pets. The men who work at the hardware store listen while they rearrange the drawers of screws, and I wait like a dummy at the counter for no one to come. I only heard it once, but two summers ago, Dad said, “Don’t even look at her twice.” So.  

Outside, I sit on the bench facing the mechanic’s garage and enjoy the effects of being invisible. The sound of bikes going by but not worrying about who is on them and why they haven’t felt me up yet. Across the street, the sound of handheld valves pushing air out so fast it hisses. I pick up the newspaper and read a story about a man in France who raped his wife with seventy other men and a celebrity who has a job as a sex trafficker. 

There is a five-dollar bill left from my errand, so I walk down to the deli because they sell soft serve on Tuesdays so that more people come in on the weekdays. While I wait in line, I think about how words can pivot in meaning. There is a hinge on the word consent and I see it in my head like a hinge on a door. Depending on what you say yes to, the door opens in different directions. There is a door in my head connected to my legs, but I am walking down main street with melted vanilla flavor in the palm of my hand when I remember my mother slipped me a Free Kittens poster to hang up at the Trading Post. Usually, Dad kills the kittens by drowning them in the creek but, even so, my mother refuses to have Mama Cat fixed so, in this instance, you can see how violence is solving a problem, even though it isn’t a problem for everybody. 

Dad stands in the hallway facing fat Mama Cat and says, “Sure likes to bang a lot,” but he looks through my door at me while I sit on my bed. “Sure likes to bang a lot.” 

When I get to the Trading Post there is a brand-new T-shirt wrapped in a crisp plastic bag on top of a stack of donated books. You’re supposed to hang items up in the clothing section (duh), but sometimes people are in a hurry. The T-shirt is folded in such a way that, once you unfold it, it’s never going back in the bag. A picture of that man’s face is on it. It says Free — something, but the text isn’t visible. He is staring at me from beneath the plastic. There is a washed out can of pinto beans that someone’s left as a place to leave tools. It’s all Bakelite screwdriver heads and, next to that, a jar labeled Splash RV Anti-Freeze. I pick out a screwdriver and slide it in my underwear’s waist band. 

It's one day before the Fall Equinox and there is a group of women at the local bookstore hanging strands of marigolds and gold signs that read Fuck the Patriarchy. The marigolds are orange folded into orange in the hot sun. I think about the amount of energy it would take to fuck the patriarchy. The women are thick-bodied and wearing layers. They don’t look at me as I walk by, but as soon as I pass them, I feel them watching me. I know the back of my legs look spotted from mosquito bites and other things, but I wasn’t wearing the pants my mother left out for me that morning. 

When I get home my mother isn’t in the kitchen, but Terry Gross is. Her voice reminds me of my doctor who knows everyone in town and asks questions that she already knows the answer to. I imagine Terry Gross posing these questions while using a stethoscope to listen to the pathways inside her guests’ bodies. Someone is talking about how many people are abused by men every year and how hard it is to gather data. If I were Terry Gross, I would ask if each person gets one man to abuse them for life or do a handful of men do it to all the people? 

As I go upstairs the cat follows me. I hear Dad pulling up in the driveway. The radio turns off. Mama Cat is acting like she’s pregnant. Like she has energy to spare. She’s rubbing the length of her body against my bare spotted legs. I get into my bedroom and Mama Cat squirms her fatness between the hinging door before it shuts. I sit on my bed. 

In my journal, I draw house after house. They look like little kid drawings. An A-frame roof, windows marked by a cross, a front door, a chimney. Our house doesn’t have a chimney, but it has pipes that connect each room to the earth below. In each quartered window on paper, I keep my words. Sometimes they are organized by sounds. Pungent, prove, palette, palatable. Sometimes they are organized by meaning. Fruitive, encipher, underhand, sequester. 

There is a house where every window is filled with violence. Barbarity, which looks pretty in calligraphy. Ferity, which makes me think of fleas. Disturbance, like sheets being pulled back. Compulsion, like Mama Cat. The words go on, scrawled in some places, neatly figured in others, like relatives I don’t know in a family album.