In April I leave my womb unguarded and ghost my gynecologist. I walk to the ATM, letting the worn plastic of an almost-expired debit card try to pull something out of a metal void. I catch myself trying to imbue feeling into a machine and remember I wasn’t always like this.
When the sun begins to set I realize sentimentality has always failed me. I wander towards the psychic on the corner, passing by a bird’s nest resting in the clutch of a powerline. The palm reader tells me I need to moisturize.
I tell her that for ten dollars I expect to learn something new, so she diagnoses me with primordial impatience. She promises me I have a holocene body buried in this new skin. I imagine what a meteor feels like to the dirt. She guarantees my memory is disingenuous.
She keeps interrupting the heartwork to spray more rosewater onto the skin of her tanned chest. There is a fading tattoo of a mermaid in the clutch of her collarbone that reminds me of how it felt to swallow sand.
She asks if I fake my orgasms, I confess every single one. She tells me to keep bleaching my hair, and says I’m getting close to what I want, that she can smell it through the echoing cologne of a jacket that isn’t mine.
I request a better answer next time. I drop a crumpled bill into her silvery paw, her palm is the texture of a fried fish. I yawn and her crystal ball rolls onto the smoked out carpet. She turns into a mouse, chases after it beneath a gold-coin curtain.
I head home with an ache between my legs and a car crash burning out of my throat.
Gwendolyn Hanson is a fiction writer and poet currently getting her MFA in the former at the University of Maryland. She works at a grocery store and writes about the end of the world.
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