Displacement by Michael Marano Page B

left the room with a soothing emptiness in my chest, knowing that what I had done was a ritual that offered me salvation.
    I decided to tell him.
    —Most children have imaginary playmates. I had an imaginary victim.
    —I . . . don’t understa . . .
    —I didn’t
play
with my imaginary friend. I beat the shit out of it. It was smaller than me and weaker and I could pummel it and bully it. I made it pay for the unspoken crimes I committed. It was my little pal. My coping mechanism.
    —It?
    —Yes. It.
    —It wasn’t a child, then? Another boy or girl?
    I know where the little shit came from, now. I’ve witnessed his birth twice. When I was older, just going to college, I’d sprained my knee. For two weeks, I walked using an elastic brace. Late one night, while getting ice water, I was too tired to put on the brace. My knee buckled. My arms flailed as I grabbed hold of a chair.
    And I saw myself ghosted in the night-black glass of the window over the sink, a mass of palsied movements, jerking limbs, reflected as on a pool of oil. A ridiculous caricature of who I am. The distorting glass made me look squat and twisted, like pictures I’d seen of the hunchback in Poe’s “Hop Frog.”
    What happened next was more than memory. It was a snapping of my mind through time that drowned my senses. Years collapsed, cracking into the moment in which I now stood on a burst knee, my arms trembling to support my weight.
    I’m five years old. My body remembers its weakness, its smallness. Even my mouth recalls the old set of my jaws before the loss of my milk teeth. I’m running through melting snow in my parents’ back yard. It’s warm for a winter’s day, spring-like. Despite this, my mother has packed me into a snowsuit too large for me, filling the space my body does not with layers of sweaters and pajama bottoms. Because it’s still winter out, no matter how warm and sunny and bright it is, no matter that the snow melts and drops from the branches . . . and to go to the yard in winter is how little shitty ungrateful boys catch cold and die, and that is how they show they don’t love their mothers, because their mothers have to worry all the time and if little boys really loved their mothers . . .
    So I wear the snowsuit and the layers and I’m miserably hot, because I also wear a hat and scarf. The drawstring of the hood is knotted to press against the underside of my chin: punishment tied by my mother’s sharp-nailed and rose-scented fingers for my wanting to step out into the air. I feel stupid and silly and angry. My movements are weighted, as if the air were thick as stale honey. The outfit is a prison I’ve been forced to wear, a prison like the loveless home I live in. I’m enraged that my body is co-opted as part of my prison. That I’m forced to be as weak and useless as my parents wish me to be.
    I try to run, as any child would, through the snow that glistens brilliantly, the only way I can: by holding my arms out almost to their sides and throwing my legs in front of me one at a time. I look up and see myself reflected against the windows of the house. They warp me like fun-house mirrors. I look like a twisted fat little goblin in a storybook, a troll creeping from under a bridge. Something rips inside me, tearing away like a strip of skin. The pain offers a kind of relief from the oppressive heat.
    That had been the first moment of self-contempt I’d ever felt that I understood to be self-contempt. The first time I’d been consciously sickened by my own image, the first splitting of the first cancerous cell that would devour my psyche. I realized this as I leaned against the table, recalling how I’d leaned that day against the swing set from which my father had removed the swings, lest I fall. My knee ached as I tasted the gorge that the Truth had pushed into my throat, through its revelation that my little scapegoat who’d helped me cope with my childhood had been
me
at that specific moment.