“DESIGN”: “If this child is part of the Plan, then the Plan was that I would be raped. If this child is not part of the Plan, then my rape was a violation of the Plan, in which case the Plan is not a Plan at all, but a Polite Fucking Suggestion.” Benson reaches out for the survivor’s hand, but the woman looks down at the water, kneels from the railing, and is gone.
“Look, it’s just that I’m walking around feeling like I’m going to vomit out my own toenails, and I want to die, and I want to kill someone, sometimes, and I feel like I’m on the verge of dissolving into a puddle of organs and slop. Organ slop.”
“SCREWED”: The DA calls in sick, again. “The sixty-fifth story,” Henson whispers into her ear, “is about a world that watches you and me and everyone. Watches our suffering like it is a game. Can’t stop. Can’t tear themselves away. If they could stop, we could stop, but they won’t, so we can’t.”
“LUNACY”: Benson doesn’t think about the moon very often, but when she does, she always undoes her top four buttons, tilts her throat up to the sky.
“SELFISH”: The medical examiner can’t bring herself to admit that sometimes, she’s the one who wants to be cut open, to have someone tell her all of her own secrets.
I have dreamt of inhaling underneath water and this is what it feels like: panic, and then acceptance, and then elation. I am going to die, I am not dying, I am doing a thing I never thought I could do.
I was freezing and buried myself in my blankets; I was roasting alive and stripped naked, the sweat crystallizing on my skin. At the very worst of it, I reached to the other side of the bed to feel for the contours of my own face. I believe that I cried out for my wife many times, though how loudly (or if I did so at all) is something I will never know. I believe it rained, because outside the window something wet smacked the glass in waves. In the height of my fever, I believed that this was the sound of the tide, and I was sinking beneath the ocean’s surface, dropping out of sight of heat and light and air. I was thirsty, but when I tried to sip water from my trembling palm, I vomited again, my muscles aching from the heaving. I am dying, I thought to myself, and that is that.