Tia Shang
Content warning: this piece contains blood, sexual violence, and disordered eating
The lights on the motorway explode like stars through my welling tears and skim across my glasses. My blood-imbrued hands clutch and twist their grip around the steering wheel, nervous with the need to do anything other than keep these tyres straight. The exit is close.
I turn to Dad in the passenger seat and glance over the stained Dora blanket in his lap.
‘Is she breathing?’
He pulls the blanket nest apart to reveal our little dog. ‘She’s breathing.’
‘She is?’
‘Yes, she’s breathing. She’s gone to sleep.’
‘Okay. Just watch her.’ I breathe, too. The smell of bloody bile sends a wave of sharp air up from my stomach. I squeeze up my face and swallow with a shake, rolling down the windows just a crack. The air whooshes through as our exit comes up.
I turn off the motorway and navigate the last leg of the drive, a snaking path through lopsided roundabouts and industrial streets. I pull into the parking bay of the emergency vet, and Dad is out before the car stops moving. I snatch my keys and tail him through the automatic doors and up to the counter. Behind are two nurses in purple patterned scrubs.
‘Hi there.’ One turns to me with a bright smile. ‘Who do we have here?’
‘Shiloh.’
‘And what’s happened with Shiloh tonight?’
‘She vomited blood everywhere.’ My mouth feels blurry. The nurse’s sweet face deepens into concern. ‘We were here a couple days ago with our puppy, Norman. He had a stomach bug, and we don’t know if he’s passed it to her.’
‘And this only happened tonight? The vomiting?’
‘Yes, she was fine this morning.’
The second nurse comes around and takes Shiloh, still wrapped up in her Dora blanket.
‘We’ll take her to be triaged, and then the doctor will speak with you,’ she says. ‘Just take a seat and I’ll come get you soon.’
‘Thank you,’ I murmur.
We slump onto the waiting room chairs, the kind with those plastic covered cushions. I drag my phone from my pocket and behold my empty lockscreen. I swipe up anyway and go to my chat with Leon, looking for a text I know isn’t there. Read 19 hours ago. Better than the five days he left it last time.
The blood is drying, and my screen gathers the stickiness from my fingertips. I wipe it against my pyjama pants, but it only smears the residue around.
I sink deeper into the chair, breathing in the fluorescent light. Dad puts his arm around me and gives my arm a pat, and my head falls against him like an apple tumbling off a table. We nearly lost Norman, because he’s only a puppy. Now we’ll likely lose Shiloh because she’s 16. Common illnesses wreak special havoc on the young and old.
‘I don’t want her to die, Dad,’ I choke. He sighs and rubs my shoulder.
Leon floats through the forefront of my mind, same as he floats in and out of feeling for me. This month keeps knocking me down and standing up again like a bowling pin, over and over at the end of this slippery lane, and the fact that I can’t have him steady me through it exacerbates each fall. He is yet another thing to lose, another reason to wobble.
My eyes wander over to the box of tissues I used to clean Norman’s vomit off this floor two days ago, down to the magazines beside. The doors open for another patient and their owner, and the night breeze follows in, fluttering one magazine page like a twitching foot.
A year ago, I was flicking through magazines in search of blackout poem material and came across an article on August winds. It discussed how dogs might grow anxious in August due to its typically windy weather. I sat at the kitchen counter and thumbed the thin corner of the page, same as the article had thumbed the frighteningly exhausted ventricles of my heart. It was August then, as it is now, and a breeze through the window lifted the page from my light grip and ran through my arm’s grasses. I wanted to scamper under the counter.
Augusts weren’t always like this in my mind. It was once my favourite month. As a child, I’d seemingly chosen it at random, and declared that if I could change my birthday to any month, it would be August, that when I had a child of my own, I’d plan their conception so they’d be born in August. I have a theory now that August is always a bad month for me, but follows a pattern of being completely catastrophic every five years, a quinquennial curse. I only noticed this when I was seventeen.
He turns to me and undoes his seatbelt, the click as it comes free like a stopwatch starting.
‘I’m going to rape you.’
The world is so cold inside this little car, and as I look out at the night through the windshield, I am thinking everything all at once.
I’m still buckled in, he’s not.
He’ll grab me before I can open the door.
It’s too dark.
The parking lot is empty.
Nobody will hear me scream.
I’m one of the girls that becomes a warning.
He’s going to kill me.
‘A shit month and a man who won’t text you back won’t kill you.’ Maggie says into her wine, her voice percussing through the glass.
‘Yeah.’ I sip mine and suck my teeth. ‘But it might kill everybody else. My lustrum is still due.’
The outdoor heater gives the patio air the temperature duality of tropical waters, warm in one spot and cool in another. Its persimmon glow brightens Maggie’s hair to the vibrant orange it was when we were kids.
‘How are they doing, by the way?’ She asks. ‘The doggies?’
‘Good, good.’ I shrug. ‘Shiloh sprang back like nothing happened. Norman’s still a bit funny.’ I prop my elbow on the table and rest my head in my hand. ‘It’s just one thing after another. Moving houses, the dogs nearly dying, looking after Grandma all by myself, plus two jobs to worry about, and Leon…’ I sigh and swirl my wine. ‘He doesn’t want me anymore. I must have lost him somehow, scared him off.’
‘There’s nothing you did to warrant that. He needs to pull his head in. Why would it be such a loss anyway, when he keeps you guessing?’
‘Because he’s everything I’ve ever wanted for myself. He’s my dream guy.’
‘Really?’ Maggie’s plump mouth purses in disapproval. ‘Yes, he’s all flash with his academic accolades, his band, and a style like Simon Petrikov. But the man of your dreams isn’t going to breadcrumb you like this. Just because he’s a psychology lecturer doesn’t mean he’s a good guy, or emotionally intelligent.’ She sips her red. ‘This is a 28-year-old man we’re talking about. He’s got five years on us, and we still communicate better than he does. Like, just text that he’ll get back to you later? It’s not that hard.’
‘But what if it’s not like that?’ I lean in. ‘He’s doing his PhD. He has so much on.’
‘You have so much on.’ Her glass clinks as she sets it down with new seriousness. ‘How many times have you cried over him already?’
My breath hitches at her question. I have no specific number.
‘And how much do you weigh now?’
This time my shoulders rise. There’s a number to this one.
‘Your skirt is slipping off you—you’re not eating. I know you’ve weighed yourself.’
‘48 kilos,’ I confess. ‘I didn’t do it on purpose, I’ve just felt so sick from the stress.’
‘And that’s what happened last time, too.’ Maggie takes my hands. ‘This is your last semester of uni, and you’ve gotta give it your all. I’m not saying it’ll happen the same way.’ She tilts her head. ‘But remember how a guy tore you down in your last term of high school?’
Ms Dunlap ushers us into a room tucked behind Head Office and makes me tell the story again. I swear I feel my body shrinking every time I speak. But it’s out there now, what he did, in the air. My hands in my lap look like they belong to someone else. I want to snatch my voice back and vanish into this armchair.
‘Since it wasn’t on school property, it’s out of our hands,’ Ms Dunlap says from behind the desk. ‘I’m not sure it constitutes rape, since he didn’t…complete.’ She steeples her fingers. ‘Without evidence or witnesses, it’s your word against his, so the police can’t do much either. It’s a very difficult process to endure for no good reason. I just don’t want you to draw this out for yourself.’
My friends stand around me, filling the small room. Jessie leans against the wall in a hoodie she’s not allowed to wear, and Amalie holds my shoulders from behind. Lexi waits in the back corner while Avneet crouches on the floor in front of me and rubs my knee. Maggie sits in the armchair beside mine, the concern on her face like that of a mother.
I stare down at my grey skirt and pull the hem to cover more of my thigh. Every time I look at my body, the sight is permeated by the memory of him stripping me down and piercing my virginity. And he’s getting away with it.
My organs feel rotten inside me.
‘What if he comes for me again?’
‘You’re safe now, he’s gone,’ Ms Dunlap says.
‘He’s not gone. He’s in my fucking maths class.’ The words scrape my throat. ‘How am I safe if he’s still here? He came to my house twice, he tried to break in. What if he comes back, what if he follows me to the car after school?’
‘He hasn’t come to school all week,’ Avneet says. I look down into her sparkling eyes. ‘And we won’t let him near you again. We’ll go with you everywhere.’
My friends agree in chorus. Boiling tears slip over my cheekbones and Avneet wipes them away. Maggie reaches her slender fingers over to take my hand, and I relish their chill.
‘And I’ll have your maths class changed to Avneet’s,’ Ms Dunlap adds. ‘You only have eight weeks left of high school, then you graduate. You just have to make it until then.’
I have eight weeks left of university, then I graduate. I just have to make it until then.
Of course I remember. I am here and there again.
Back then, I was petrified of falling asleep, thinking I’d wake up to him on top of me. Today I wake in Maggie’s bed, my hand around my throat the way Leon once did when we had sex. He’s gone now, my lustrum.
‘If I was ever going to fall in love with you, I’d feel more by now,’ he finally told me last night after two months of push and pull, requests to be in my locket, condemning the casual dating scene after ejaculating inside me and sending me off with a kiss on the forehead to by yet another morning-after pill. It felt like being yanked back by my ponytail, how quickly future plans, talks of meeting parents, and proclamations of my unbelievable cuteness, rare soul, and big green eyes turned into…
‘With what’s going on in my life, there’s a cap on what I can feel, and I need to be alone. I just didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity of meeting you. I shouldn’t have let it go on this long.’ He pinched his nose bridge like I was his headache, then he laughed. ‘But I had to break up with you in August so your five-year curse would still ring true.’
I drove straight to Maggie’s house. My chest only started to seize when I curled up here, my fists pressed into my chest like I’d need to use them as defibrillator pads. I deleted our message history, yet still had read stamped inside my eyelids, my mind’s hands trying to pry apart his professor packaging from the player he was in his pumice heart.
This morning, like all mornings since I met Leon, I feel a seed planted in my stomach, thin tendril roots threading through my intestines, and I know it’ll be another day trying to clear them out again. I hear the same birdsong in the same cadence I did five years ago. Maybe they’re still here because their wings are clipped like mine.
The sun shines as brightly now as it did then, too, but I know the warmth is thin, glossed over like egg wash. Behind those rays is a navy sky, wrapping around the world like a too-tight blanket. I can’t wriggle enough looseness to breathe, I stumble around asphyxiated, waiting for somebody to say the stars above my spinning head look good on me.
I roll over and see Maggie already up. She looks down at me, flaked mascara like black confetti under her eyes.
‘Did you sleep okay?’
‘Yeah,’ I lie. It was still far better than sleeping alone. ‘Mags, can I stay here every Wednesday?’
‘Of course!’ She dives onto me, and I catch her in my arms. ‘It’ll be like a tradition.’
Those birds twitter out again, each chirp sending a pang out from my chest like a gong. A brisk wind blows through the open windows, washing over our embracing forms and rising our skin to the height of their hairs.
‘I miss him,’ I whisper, and the breeze invades my mouth and licks under my muscles.
Maggie holds me tighter. ‘We’ve done this before—worse, even. We’ll do it again.’
‘I love you.’ My throat pops as I swallow. ‘But I’m going into hiding in August 2030.’
Maggie chuckles. I nudge closer, catching a whiff of the candy-like perfume we’ve shared for years. The wind surges again and rattles the windows. My ears flatten, but I don’t slink under the blanket. I stay here with Maggie, and it makes me think of Norman and Shiloh at home.
They slept on my bed their first day out of hospital. Shiloh breathed in steady wheezes, her fragile lungs still filling and emptying when I thought they’d cease forever. Norman was curled up at my feet until a gust of August swept through the room and bristled my tapestry against the wall. He retreated to me, climbing onto my chest and nestling his worried face in my neck. I wrapped my arms around his twitching ears and fluffy body like a shield from what unsettled him, this sudden change that set his world off-balance.
‘It’s alright, Norm,’ I hummed. ‘It’s just the wind.’
