Hungry for the World by Kim Barnes

would be married and have dark-haired babies, that as his wife I might regain a sense of my own decency and entitlement.
    I listened to his voice rise and fall, the soft laughter of his girlfriend. I tucked my knees against my chest, rested my forehead against my arms. Thane didn’t know the other side of me, how I could touch him and move him in ways his lover could not. And what if he did? What if I showed him?What if he needed me in this way, came to me because I knew how to please him more than any other woman?
    I shook my head in the dark. I did not want to be that girl anymore, the one who stole the book and its secrets, who abandoned herself to lust on a filthy bed.
Please let me be good, I prayed. Please let me be good
.
    T HE NEXT WEEK was Thane’s birthday, and I had a gift for him—a Bible with his name embossed in gold. After much prodding on my part, he had begun attending church, sitting beside me in the pew, bowing his head in prayer. This was the way it should be. My testimony had brought him closer to his own salvation, and if he were saved, then so was I.
    We were alone in his basement when he unwrapped the Bible, laid it aside, then pushed me down amid the colorful paper and ribbons. I laughed at first but then saw that he was not teasing. He pinned my arms above my head, held me with his weight. I remember how, at some point, I quit struggling, how I could not bear my own rising sense of helplessness or his growing brutality, how I turned my head so that I would not have to see who he had become, how it was easier to simply stop knowing and feeling and let that frantic part of me drift away.
    Perhaps it was pity he felt for me then, or fear for his own soul, the slackness of my body beneath his that made him stop. I rolled to my knees, smoothed my clothes, focused my eyes on the wall behind him. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. Even as I spoke, I let what had just happened float like bits of ash into the air around us. We would not have to remember,would we? No one would have to know, no one would have to see the bracelet of bruises circling each wrist.
    I drove my car down the backstreets, holding to the edge of the city. The reds and oranges of fall were crisp against the pale blue sky, the stones in the cemetery angled and sharp as blades. Everything was so defined, distinct in its place, yet I felt as though I had no borders, as though my skin had begun to dissolve, as though I were the watercolor painting drawn by a child, bleeding across the lines.
    I was grateful for the emptiness of my house, the bathwater so hot I gritted my teeth to bear it. I did not think about what would happen next but gave myself to the weightlessness of water, to the nebulous cloud of steam and sleep, waking only to add more heat, to open the drain and let the cold flow away.
    When Thane called several days later, he was crying. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Please.”
    Charity, forgiveness, compassion—I thought of all these things, Christ’s words of direction. I thought of the leather-bound book he held in his hands, even then, as we talked and made our plans to meet again, and I thought that this must have been what I had wanted all along, and that I could not blame him for anything.
    S OMETHING BROKE in me then—I cannot say what or why exactly, except that the restrictions I had placed on myself seemed suddenly pointless and impossible. When I met Thane at his house, I didn’t feel anger or disgust or betrayal; I felt nothing I can remember except a kind of disconnectedness,as though my world were being orchestrated in a way I could not control. I could lock myself in my house, sit pale and unsullied behind my father’s protective door, or I could go into the world, but I had begun to see the truth in my father’s teachings: to step through that passageway was to walk into the den of the lion.
    I knew that I could never sacrifice myself to the life of a nun. There was too much I wanted to know, do,