Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

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I moaned and writhed, and hovered on the edge of coming for whole minutes, though no one was touching me there, not even me. You were a poor tenant, Little One, I say to him, rubbing shampoo into his fine brown hair, and I shall revoke your deposit. Read, enjoy, comment, and make links but don’t post or publish this material elsewhere without my permission. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. These women find themselves woven into the fabric of the everyday from literally being woven into clothing to committing protests by inserting themselves into ATMs and electrical systems.

I suspect that Little One did so much ruinous damage inside of me that my body couldn’t house another. Most importantly, my father said, arriving triumphantly at his final piece of evidence, why did no one notice the toes except for you?Silence and sound bumped up against each other but never intermingled; the jolly chaos of warm summer nights was as far away as it could be. They give me something that makes me sleepy, delivered through a mask pressed gently to my mouth and nose. The murdered girls become ghosts with bells for eyes who haunt Olivia Benson’s apartment, and the repetitive dun-dun of the show’s theme becomes the breathing of a vast monster on whose sleeping back New York City rests. A woman passing by helps me to sit up and gives me some water, telling me that the first pregnancy is always the worst. Refugees from the western states who drove and drove until their car broke down a mile from my cottage.

On re-reading the story, I think it maybe that she has cut out of herself the desire and the ability to be motherly.It is transformational for her but thoroughly mundane to the women making the transformation happen. To me the narrator seemed like an example of someone who has unconsciously internalised misogyny, and struggles to realise that until it's too late. We made out and she slipped her tongue into my mouth and after she went home I got off twice in the cool stillness of my apartment. Machado’s surgical prose builds the story of an empowered woman, certain of her path, who acts upon her desire and marries the man of her choosing.

One of them, the one that I had poked with the tip of my index finger, was cold as ice, and yielded beneath my touch the way a blister did.Carmen Maria Machado is the author of Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and In the Dream House, which was the winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize. If you are reading this story out loud, make the sound of the bed under the tension of train travel and lovemaking by straining a metal folding chair against its hinges. But the cup was tipped and the puddle was cold, and I recognized the symptoms from the television and newspapers, and then the leaflets, and then the radio broadcasts, and then the hushed voices around the bonfire.

That night, before I sleep, I imagine him again, his tongue pushing open my mouth, and my fingers slide over myself and I imagine him there, all muscle and desire to please, and I know that we are going to marry. Outside the window, the children play – knocking each other off the playground equipment, popping the heads off dandelions. I took my bag and tent and I got into the dinghy and I rowed to the island, to this island, where I have been stashing food since I got to the cottage. Bent over the kitchen table, something old is lit within me, and I remember the way we had desired before, how we had left love streaked on all of the surfaces.My boyfriend’s mother found my underwear behind the bed weeks later, and handed them to him, laundered, without a word. There is always her body, and there are also always all those other parties who believe they are entitled to it. I had Cal—difficult, sharp-eyed Cal, who has never gotten me half as much as I have never gotten her—and suddenly everything was wrecked, like she was a heavy-metal rocker trashing a hotel room before departing. A good part of the grief that drives our heroines reshaping of herself seems to come from the broken relationship with her daughter.