Eat Your Heart Out by Katie Boland Page A

thought I’d never see.
    I lay out in my backyard the next morning. I was alone. My parents had gone to work. The sun felt nice on my skin, but I was still cold and I couldn’t shake it.
    I had my headphones on. I listened to the CD Francais, as I had taken to calling it. The music pushed the leaves from the trees, the clouds from the sky, the blue from heaven, and I could see all the planets. I could see silvery Pluto, beautiful red Jupiter, and then yellow Venus. I could see the infinite blackness and all the beautiful orbs of colours that populated it. I reached out and touched Neptune. It felt like cold water.
    I think I even saw Colin waving at me.
    â€œThis town is so severe and silent. I wonder if a person can die from it, choking to death on things they always wanted to but were never able to say.” Colin told me that the week before he died. We’d just gone out for breakfast, the two of us, because everyone else had slept through their alarms.
    It was a pretty insignificant thing, coming from him. He always said shit about life and death, waxed poetic about unanswerable bullshit. The boys called him Socracock.
    It’s only because he’s gone that all those trivial things from the past echo on and on and on, but I wonder if maybe it was the silence that killed him. Maybe he had died, choking on the silence, seconds before the train hit him. So on his death certificate it should have said that the cause was “peace and quiet,” not railroad misadventure.
    When I went inside, still shivering, I put the kettle on.
    The water boiled while the day was on fire, and I watched it, patiently waiting like a bird on a wire.

Monster

    I am a monster.
    This is how I was born, a fault in my stars. I can do no more to change it than an old dog can trade his worn, dirty fur for the clean feathers of a baby bird just because he dreams of taking flight.
    I can only really breathe when I am alone. Sometimes, in these moments, I think of James, the man who loves me, the man who will marry me next month, and I feel cruel. He does not know that I was born wearing the blue uniform of a prisoner inside myself. Everything else feels like a costume.
    Especially that white dress.
    I get on my knees and pray that I have a fighting chance.
    I started killing animals when I was five.
    It was around then that I began the long, solitary walks around our property. My mother never seemed bothered by my absences. She was a woman preoccupied by herself only. She spent her days tanning her lithe body and having gentlemen other than my father over.
    â€œJust friends.” I was jealous of her. I saw how men looked at her and I wanted that same attention myself. How does a five-year-old covet that specific and twisted breed of sex?
    I saw a bird on the side of the road. It had a broken wing, and it was yelling. I didn’t recognize that it was in pain, only that it was helpless. I lifted my shoe and I felt it’s wing break beneath me. I remember feeling it move, how it wanted to fly, hearing it scream, the struggle and then the collapse.
    Suddenly, I was not angry anymore. I was not happy. I was not anything. I was calm for the first time, and all I wanted was to recreate that feeling again and again.
    I wasn’t particular: mice I caught, any bug, any living creature I could get my hands on. Birds were always difficult. When I was eight, I killed a neighbourhood dog. Seeing the MISSING signs, I felt no guilt, only stupid for being so brazen. I considered myself lucky that I was never found out and was not so obvious again.
    I knew there was something wrong with my behaviour, my compulsions. I cried once to my mother about it.
    â€œStop making up stories,” she said.
    I learned to shave my legs when I was ten. I lost my virginity when I was eleven to a seventeen-year-old boy. I developed early, I could lie and pass for fifteen.
    Suddenly, almost overnight, men had become my act of violence. I’ve had