Rachelle Cruz
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The Girl Became
after Russell Edson
A woman had a daughter who was a stapler. Stop gritting your teeth, girl. We’ll have to stand in line at the dental school, said the mother. You’ll miss school for a week. The girl coughed, mashing her teeth and making a sound that pricked her mother’s finger. I’m just trying to hold it together, the girl said. The mother glared, bringing her torn finger to mouth. The girl bit the inside of her cheek then became a hanger, and on laundry day, the mother would misplace the girl, leaving her in a pile of wire hangers on the bed. The girl’s tongue dipped in coppery rust. After the last dry cycle, silence. The girl content enough to breathe the steam from her mother’s freshly-pressed pencil skirt, the alumni sweater she often wore to bed. Then the girl squinted her smallness: a keychain. Good! I’ve always wanted to get out of here, the mother said. The mother jangled the girl into the ignition. But this’ll only take me so far, the mother said, while the girl forced the sun to beat brighter, ALOHA FROM HONOLULU! her coconut bra knocking against the plastic frame. Then the girl became the windshield, staring into her mother’s eyes fixed on the flashing dotted lines on the road. She knew what little came between her mother and the dark highway stretching west.
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Rachelle Cruz is from Hayward, California. She is the author of the chapbook, Self-Portrait as Rumor and Blood (Dancing Girl Press, 2012). Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in As/Us, New California Writing 2013 (Heyday Books), the Los Angeles Review of Books, Yellow Medicine Review, Jet Fuel Review,The Lit Pub, The Bakery, Stone Highway, The Collagist, Bone Bouquet, PANK Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, Splinter Generation, KCET's Departures Series, Inlandia: A Literary Journey, among others. She hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour on Blog Talk Radio, and is the Podcast Editor at The Collagist. She is a recent recipient of the Manuel G. Flores Scholarship from PAWA (Philippine American Writers and Arists, Inc). An Emerging Voices Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow and a VONA writer, she lives, writes and teaches in Southern California.