Zefyr Lisowski

ZEFYR LISOWSKI

Girl Work

I was a child. I wore my child clothes. I watched movies

and went home afterwards.

My hair long and matted. My body touched.

When I was a child, the boy showed me the movie, his eyes

a tiny pool of light. He showed me the movie about the girl

at the bottom of the well.

Why is it so hard to write what actually happens.

The boy started the movie. The boy stopped the movie.

When the movie was done the boy climbed up and down

the staircase like the girl at the bottom of the well.

Our house was small and smelled like cedar. I won't tell

you what happened next.

The girl had, of course, a bad father. She had a farm

problem. She had a little room she lived in and I didn't see

what was so wrong about that.

Nothing happened next but its shadow hung over every

interaction the boy and I had after that. The boy had a

friend who loved to bite, put the soft flesh of me in his

mouth. Boy tasting boy.

Everyone, someone said in the movie, deserves a little

room. The girl had two. She had her little room and she had

the bottom of the well.

It was a sunny day. It was overcast. It was slightly cloudy,

but we kept going.

The boy's friend would take the soft flesh of me and place

his tongue upon it. Place his teeth inside me. Make my arm

his home.

My hair was long and matted, no one told me to take a

hairbrush to it. They told me I was a boy being a boy.

Actually, they told me I was asking for it.

In the movie, the girl doesn't ask for anything, but she does

grow more dead, then less dead, then more dead again by

the film's end.

She moves around, but she's still at the bottom of the well.

She gets more or less dead, but she's still dead.

So many different kinds of dead.

His incisors, long and dazzling.

Years later, I read the book. In the book, the main character

is a man. He loves to rape.

This is the main character's defining trait. He says, to his

quirky friend, "I have a secret. I raped a girl today." Then

he says it again and again.

He has so many secrets. He must know about so many

girls, so many wells.

I read the book when my father was on his deathbed.

I read it because I heard that the girl was a girl like me.

Which is to say she had genitals that stuck out instead of

going in. That she used to love the smell of cedar.

When I read the book, I found out that a man discovers her

genitals, rapes her, throws her down the well. This is how

she dies.

This is of course not what happens in the movie. In the

movie she is a young girl, hair matted. No one looks up her

skirt, or if they do, it's when the theatre lights flicker on

and no one is around.

When the friend's friend who loved to bite pressed himself

onto me, I knew it had been only a matter of time. He threw

me to the bed. He said he was a big man.

In the movie the only man the girl knows is her father. Her

father kills himself after the girl dies. The movie frames

this as him dying because he was scared, but I think he died

because he was grieving as well.

There was no grieving in the book, which made it

incongruous to read in the hospital. I would sign in and see

my father. I would read my vile book.

When my father died I grieved, but less than I thought I

would, and this made me worry. I would smell the cedar. I

looked at pictures of his face.

I miss my dead daddy so much.

In the movie, everyone thinks the girl is a girl. She walks

like a girl, she eats like a girl.

In the book, the girl is a woman, and she literally asks for

it.

This is the girl's power, to make men first think she is

beautiful and then want to kill her. This is what makes it

scary.

As we watched the movie, my friend didn't show his body

to me and I was grateful. He didn't touch my hair. He

didn't call me beautiful, hunger for my body. He didn't ask

for it.

I have talked about beauty a lot. By beauty I mean that

which causes you to become an object of fascination, and

sometimes, to be thrown into a well.

I can't imagine what it feels like to be thrown in a well.

When my friend with the dazzling incisors came over, my

father would be the one to let him in. His voice would rattle

the foyer. It would fry our eardrums. It would frisk our

pockets. Welcome, he'd say. Well, he'd say. Come.

My father was a man who drank too much. He had a

daughter who was dead. He had a deep voice that scratched

the ceilings of the well.

I don't blame him for anything that happened.

My friend and I would get together and watch movies. The

only one I remember was about the girl at the bottom of the

well.

I wonder if the girl was terrified she was not beautiful. I

wonder if she avoided brushing her matted hair to feel she

could control whatever part of her life she could reach.

It might occur to you that I am not really talking about a

book or a movie.

A ring is a kind of circle, but it also is a sort of promise that

things will continue. I am trying to write something that

rings true to what happened.

He sunk into the soft flesh of me.

At what point is a girl no longer a girl.

His dazzling incisors, the deep smell of cedar.

Have you ever fallen into a hole and couldn't get out.

The girl brushing her matted hair, sending her body to so

many other people's bodies.

When she clatters up the walls of the well, when she

appears again in front of the man who killed her, I'm sure

she looks

beautiful.

Zefyr Lisowski is a trans artist and writer from the South. She's the author of Blood Box (Black Lawrence Press, 2019), a 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop attendee, and a poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Nat. Brut., Muzzle Magazine, DIAGRAM, Foglifter, and The Texas Review, among other places. She lives online at zeflisowski.com and @zefrrrrrrr. She's a Pisces.