Pestle

We're just thinking of it as a two-year plan, I heard my father say from the other side of the Atlantic. In two years maybe we'll know more what we want, where you girls are, and we can make a new plan. The DNA that flows in my crooked veins, oh but it comes from them after all. For 19 years, everything sorted into two-year increments: long enough to find comfort and laughter, short enough to never have to answer to anything. I wanted only to live so that I could move with two suitcases and my bicycle on a train, my mother said once, as she poisoned my tongue with the taste of freedom.

The compulsion of repetition lies like a dark forest against my heart. It rolls me inside its cogs and tosses me out time and again to be crushed in the grind. My musles soften, yes, my resistance.

But my heart is mangled
and bleeds to no end.