by Julia LoFaso
Art by Danielle Friesen
You’re a limb I can’t put weight on. Every time I test it, it still hurts.
Is it progress that I’ve started to think of you as a sprained ankle? It’s much less erotic than an exploded star, or a circular saw raining sparks. But fuck, that’s going to be the last part to go, isn’t it? How much I still want to sleep with you.
I went to an acupuncturist the other day but I didn’t tell her the real reason. Or I told her the reasons surrounding the real reason: I cry a lot. I’m not myself. I’m losing my hair and all the meat on my bones.
She twisted a thread-thin needle into my stomach. The muscle jumped. I gasped as if electrified, shallow breathing until the charge died. It’s okay to cry, she whispered. Soon everything that isn’t you will start to leave and make room for everything that is. She left. I closed my leaking eyes. I just listen to people now, I thought, I just listen to the things people tell me that I want to be true.
This is what it’s come to. I’ve taken myself on a date to be exorcised.
As I left, the acupuncturist told me to note my emotions and drink broth. I am following her instructions, but only I know why. I am doing it to flood you out, to fill myself with another animal, to build up my bones so I can walk somewhere else.
Julia LoFaso has published writing in Conjunctions, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Day One, Underwater New York, The Southeast Review, Elm Leaves Journal, New South, and elsewhere. Her stories have been shortlisted for The Southeast Review’s World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest and PRISM international’s Grouse Grind Lit Prize for V. Short Forms. She received an MFA from Columbia University and lives in Queens.
Danielle Friesen is a visual artist, illustrator, and graphic designer from Winnipeg. The ink drawing featured here is from a collection of pieces exploring the human figure in its simplest form, published in issue 58.1 FIGURES. Danielle gravitates to working in ink and believes its permanency has an honest and authentic quality.