Girl Locks
It’s very late, the policeman insists, for a woman and a girl. His flashlight drills into our car. I am the teeth, the proof of slut-darkness. He is the language of crosshatch and locks. He peers at my mother, bathed in red light. The suitcase swells and hides our shudders.
A hundred miles back, our Texas bungalow with sleepy white shutters. Father and brothers, no mother or girl. Sky shot with moonlight. Garage missing one car. The keys slept with Father, but Mother got the glitchy door unlocked. We left in the skin of darkness.
The laws bring their own darkness. Our bodies shudder. No man can be locked out. A girl is a woman is a slut is a girl. Is a car. Needing only maintenance, occasional starlight.
The policeman forces us into barbed light. He scans my fourteen-year-old body and finds a spine of darkness. An illegal flight across the border in our car. To kill your baby, he shudders. My mother says, She’s just a girl. But he is fond of steel locks.
I dream I’m eating oatmeal with bears in buttery kitchen sunlight. They love this fragile human girl. The bears shred the darkness. They choose lemon yellow to paint our shutters. They hide me from the men in saw-scaled viper cars.
In prison, there are no cars. Just black ravens hovering outside of bars and strong locks. Chained to our birth beds, we cleave our shudders. Gill-breathe the light. We smell the cracks in the darkness. They tell me she’s a girl.
A girl. I let myself unlock a breath as she takes her first. A girl, she will inside-out the darkness. A girl is a thistle of light.
Claudia Monpere (@ClaudiaMonpere) is a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her flash appears or is forthcoming in Craft, SmokeLong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, The Forge, Atlas and Alice, Atticus Review, Milk Candy Review, and elsewhere. Her short stories and poems appear in such journals as The Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, River Teeth, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, and Hunger Mountain. She received the 2023 SmokeLong Workshop Prize and has been nominated multiple times for a Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions.