Winner
Terrain.org 15th Annual Nonfiction Contest
Walking the floodplain behind our house, I find a pelvis: complete, the size and shape of my palm, though I do not touch it. Another step and I would’ve crushed it under the Vibram sole of my hiking boot, hearing only too late the snap. For a moment, the pelvis and I are alone, and the pelvis could not be anything other than a rabbit’s.
Sound of boots, weight of a gloved hand on my shoulder.
“A trap,” Jonathan says.
“A trap?”
The pelvis is the trap, something spring-loaded with teeth, something that ensnares and causes anguish. I feel it: the place where my uterus was. A small ache lives on, rooted in the pelvis, inescapable, sometimes delivering sharp stabs, like the ones I’m having right now.
Then I see it—the rusted, steel-claw trap a few feet from the pelvis. Sticking up from between closed jaws: a slim, delicate bone.
*
A fragment separated from the knee joint is called a “loose body.” When the chip travels freely, orbiting the knee in the black space of synovial fluid, this is called an unstable, loose body.
The orthopedic surgeon wanted to know—had I endured a trauma? I seemed too young for the other explanation, which was degeneration over time, daily grind of ball and socket. I had questions, too: Had my unstable, loose body started out microscopic and then grown, calcifying, tumbling in nacre, like a pearl? Was the loose body to blame for the cold drip that ran down the back of my calf, the blueness of my skin, the midnight calls from the man who grunted like an animal into my answering machine?
The surgeon told me many things, but what I remembered was, “Don’t ever gain weight.”
In the hospital gurney before surgery, the nurse pulled back my blankets. She and my mother stood over my legs, looking. “What a little doll,” the nurse said, and drew an “L” on my left knee in sharpie.
*
He hadn’t told me to let myself in. But I’d knocked and knocked on the door and heard only strange, searching moans coming from deep within the ranch-style house. The door was unlocked.
The sounds were whale calls, and I followed them to the blue light spilling out the cracked door of a bedroom. Beyond the tiled living space, empty of furniture, a set of glass doors opening to a blue kidney pool, and I could see myself in that pool, see myself swimming the walls of the house with the man who sat on the edge of his bed, nearly naked, bathed in watery blue light.
“I said to call when you pulled up,” he said. “But I guess you let yourself in.”
Tom was 34, but he wouldn’t tell me that even though he knew exactly how old I was to the day, the hour, having met on my 19th birthday. I brought vegan enchiladas to his table of four, a party hat on my head, Bonnie Bell eye glitter catching twinkle lights from the El Paseo strip.
Projected on the wall of Tom’s bedroom: a blue whale gliding through the deep dark ocean, calling out, the loneliness of the groan cracking me open.
Tom was a part-time talent agent. “So, what do you think about this guy?”
I thought he meant the whale. And I felt this whale had talent.
“The guy I’m representing records whale sounds for documentaries. He’s pretty goofy.”
Tom imitated the call and laughed. He was still wet from the shower. I thought Tom looked sort of like a whale, a white one, thick but supple, big bones, and I wanted the weight of his body to slide over mine, to hold my loose body in place.
*
In the high desert, I couldn’t stop running even though my knee was killing me. Other runners tried to keep up. I confused them because I was slow as a wounded animal just before its demise, but then I’d keep going, lap after lap, road after road.
At night is when my knee would throb the most. Not just the knee, but the shin, ankle, down into my foot. I fantasized a painless removal, the leg stopping just after the strong, pale thigh. But I had an uncle whose leg had been amputated well above the knee, and I knew the pain would stay.
“What do you think about?” Bryan, the captain of the long-distance track team wanted to know my secrets. I tried kissing him once, after prom, because he was kind, and I was achingly lonely. “How do you keep going? When your knee is swollen?” His lips were soft, too soft, like a child’s.
How to tell him I was a furnace powered by pain? That pain was the source and the product, and even if that wasn’t true, I was stubborn as a Florida gator and would go down thrashing?
“Stories,” I said. “I think about stories.”
*
Our dog, Beatrix, once found a cow’s femur on a walk and carried it home. I don’t know if it belonged to a cow, and I don’t know if it was a femur. It was a very large bone, and my first thought was that we’d find a human skull nearby. Bea will carry something she wants a very far distance, drooling and readjusting her grip, dragging it if she has to.
Once, I caught her carrying a young dove in her jaws. How long had she held it between her tongue and the roof of her mouth?
“Drop it,” Jonathan commanded. “Drop it, Bea.” But she hesitated. She felt she knew something about the bird that we didn’t. The bird went dawdling off, wet, dazed.
When I was a small child, my father took me out behind our house to shoot a pistol. I found a crystal in the dirt. It was small like a tooth, but bigger than my baby teeth, a tooth I’d grow into.
“You only aim at a thing you’re willing to kill.” My dad had straight teeth that he brushed with peroxide and baking soda. I never saw him eat a vegetable.
I put the crystal in my mouth. It was salty like the earth, like the ocean. I felt I knew something about the body then, that it came from water, would return to the sea.
*
“It hurts most of the time,” Jonathan said, not casually, but with far less gravitas than I would’ve expressed. The x-ray of Jonathan’s spine doesn’t look like an x-ray but a piece of modern art. Ceci n’est pas une spine.
“How is your spine not crushing your organs? How are you walking? How are you not in agony?”
Sometimes I ask questions like my mother, his mother, three at a time, like a Gatling gun.
What I want to ask is, how have I been making love to a man for 14 years and not known his spine is shaped like a tobacco pipe?
My mind tries to catch up to the treachery of the body. How did it happen? When? In utero? Or as he grew—slowly, invisibly, pulled by the orbit of the moon. The spine, it turns out, can go rogue, make choices. Like the eyeless, feeling root of a tree.
*
Trees that grow by rivers eventually collapse into rivers and are emptied of their fibers as the water baptizes over and over. Memory works this way, perhaps. What’s left after the water of time has rushed through “are the hard, cross grained whorls of human experience,” that David James Duncan calls river teeth.
I want to lie face down in the river and let the current exfoliate the woody pulp of my heart, my gut, expunge the extra bits that fasten and slow.
But there are other trees that do not go down gently. The salt cedar, for instance, withstands drought, freeze, fire, and flood. Burning it will only ensure its regeneration. You will dull your blade with every swing, break the tip of your mattock. To poison the salt cedar is to poison your drinking water. I’m lost now in my metaphor.
What I want to show you is my memory of the rosy boa exsanguinating on the hot summer asphalt, it’s body a helix of red. Someone had hit it and not known or known and not stopped.
“We have to kill it,” Jonathan said. On the side of the road, we argued. We were ten minutes from home and had no shovel, no tool. “We have to back over it,” he said. My hesitation made me cruel.
In the rearview, I watched the snake not die. Cars kept turning onto the road, swerving at the last second. Its writhing was unbearable and cyclic, a shudder that rose and fell only to rise again. Be done, I begged. Let go. Then: Someone please hit it, so we don’t have to.
My pelvis confuses. It hurts and it hungers.
Any animal with hips has a pelvis of sorts, which doesn’t always include a sacrum. Some snakes have the memory of hips, little pelvic spurs, external remnants of femur bones. Boas and pythons have such spurs, and the males will use them to grip during mating.
That first night I visited Tom at his empty house, we ate vegan food from my work and watched blue whales use their pelvises to have sex.
From a National Geographic article titled “The Erotic Endurance of Whale Hips”:
Buried deep within the body of a whale, underneath the heaps of muscles and tendons, lie some little, lonely bones.
I asked him how old he was. “That’s boring,” he said. “You should be kissing me.”
The ancestors of whales had coats like seals and crept upon the land, had sex and slept on land. Inside the cold ocean, their nostrils traveled up behind their eyes to the tops of their heads, forelegs turned into paddles, back legs vanished in dark waters. Without legs, the hip bones shrunk, pulled away from the rest of the skeleton, sat alone but did not leave.
“Or maybe you’re a lesbian,” Tom said.
I did not leave. My bones were that lonely.
When I kiss, if I kiss too long, my hips start rocking. When I was 19, my rocking was sometimes an embarrassment. They call this motion “dry humping.” But to me it feels like a water activity, like swimming but in the air, something left over from our ocean selves.
Later, Tom would say to me, “You’re a dirty, dirty girl.”
*
After my knee surgery, I went home to my mother for a few days. Then I went back to Tom.
“Don’t look at me,” I told him. We were not together, had never really been a couple, at least not to him, and here he was helping me into my first bath. “I’ll call out when I’m done.”
I’d starved myself, run myself into a hole, survived on boiled cauliflower and tofu and no one swam naked with me in that kidney-shaped pool.
When I finally moved out, I pulled up the shitty flower garden I’d planted in the hard dirt around the pool, left the red roses sticking dramatically out of the green waste bin, where I hoped they would drop their petals like a bouquet of bleeding hearts.
The last hug he gave me, he said he could wrap his arms around me twice, like he’d only just noticed. “Where did you go?” he asked.
*
For the rest of the day, I cannot stop: the pelvis, the trap, the pelvis, the trap, the tiny leg bone that remained. Like the trap had eaten the rabbit and then picked its teeth.
I want to believe there is an order in the natural world. Things die. Things change.
Once, there was an ocean here. Its death gave birth to a desert. Some think the desert is immune to death, but these people don’t know anything.
That night, I dream of starting my period, of a white operating table, of grinding against a man made of moonlit boulders, of giving birth to a small, dead rabbit.
“I was humping a man made of boulders,” I confess to Jonathan. “It was you. Or mostly you.”
“I’m just happy to be included,” he says. I kiss him, kiss him too long, and my hips do their thing, but he doesn’t mind. My pelvis confuses. It hurts and it hungers.
*
Cholla cactus have hollow bones you cannot kill.
We once uprooted a patch of cholla and tried to burn the limbs in an oil drum. The bones hissed in chorus like a many-headed snake. The smoke was black and punishing, wrathful: an ancient spirit disturbed by well-meaning idiots.
Joshua trees are not fire resistant like the salt cedars and cholla, and they are slow to reproduce. In my hometown and elsewhere, they are dying off. When they fall, Joshua trees look like people, crawling toward water they will not reach.
Some say that the trees will be extinct by the end of the century. Others say that that their resiliency and redundancy will save them.
When the desert dies, I think the ocean may come back.
*
When the flower dies it becomes fruit. When the fruit falls it releases seeds. After my long runs through washes and flood paths, I’d find a long, grey, fallen trunk to sit on or straddle. The fibers felt like fur, like a thing that could wake and love me.
The flower of the Joshua tree is waxy, creamy-white, protecting the cone-shaped ovary. You can see why the Yucca moth wants to make love to it.
I knew nothing about ovaries then. Nothing about the uterus. Just that I loved a certain kind of caressing hand that wasn’t small, wasn’t thin or soft like mine.
For the first year, I hid my sanitary napkins in a vintage suitcase in my closet. A friend would later joke, “What kind of trip were you packing for?”
When a Joshua tree falls, animals continue to live inside of it: weevils, termites, night lizards. The cactus wren and the packrat. They wear it like a communal suit. They dance it. They writhe it.
This is how I want to be touched: in a way that resuscitates. Unkills. Makes life go on. Someone’s hand can do that, if you want—bring you back from the dead.
*
The morning we looked at Jonathan’s x-rays, the desert was covered in a light snowfall.
“It snowed,” Jonathan said. “It fucking snowed.”
When it snows in the desert, you have to say the word a few times before it’s real. Otherwise, you could still be dreaming or having some kind of delirium.
I came to the window and instantly recalled all three of my desert snow memories. As a toddler: my father lifting me onto an outdoor workbench where I crunched around in an inch of snow. As a child: slopping together a snow creature that I wanted to marry but who melted within minutes. As an adult, when, a few years ago, living in a house on the mesa, it snowed several feet on a late-March day, and Jonathan’s back went out.
I touched his spine then, reflexively, as we looked at the images his doctor emailed, back and forth between the spine and the snow.
My pelvis hurt. I had a cyst on my left ovary and didn’t know.
Spine, snow, spine, snow. For a moment, the spine is in the snow, the snow in the spine. I want to lie on the inch of white and make a spine angel. I want to pack snow around the heat of Jonathan’s vertebrae. I want him to put his perfect hand up inside me and pull out the gnawing ache.
*
An ovarian cyst that contains more than fluid is called “complex.” If the cyst has a mind of its own, it may embrace a strange collection: blood, skin, hair, sweat glands, teeth, anything that makes up the layers of a germ cell. This type of heavy trove is called a dermoid (derm, skin) and forms while you swim inside your mother’s uterus.
“I have a fever,” says Jonathan.
“I have pain,” I say. But I have pain often. The pain is resilient, or I am resilient. Talking about my pain makes me redundant.
Then the dry heaves come.
“Please,” I beg Jonathan, who has the flu, “grind your elbow into my sacrum.”
The pain wraps around my hips, bores into my rectum, tears down my inner thigh into my left foot.
I don’t know I have a dermoid cyst so big it’s twisting my ovary like a black plum on its stem. I don’t know that my dermoid has torn open, is spilling me into myself: blood, sweat, baby teeth, hair, crystals, little lonely bones, all those lose bodies.
Our local hospital has lower ratings than the worst As-Seen-on-TV products with even angrier reviews: “This place is dangerous,” and “This place almost got me killed,” and “Dont go there even if your dying,” and my favorite: “Garbage hospital.”
Jonathan’s temperature climbs. He stumbles out of bed a few times to hold my hair as I wretch.
For most of my life, I’ve been afraid. A man threatened my family. A man chased me to my apartment door. A man breathed into my answering machine. Red lights in the sky, a blue one that hovered for hours. The house shook and shook.
Pain doesn’t scare me, not like it should.
All night long, the pain shudders up and down, falls only to rise again, and I writhe like the snake in the road. I watch as I do not die.
*
In the morning, Jonathan’s fever has broken. He finds me on the bedroom floor, swallowing my own tail: a helix of red.
At the nice hospital 70 miles from home, the drugs are good. I joke that I should get a punch card, that my third burst cyst should be free. I cry for being a burden.
When the sky cracks open, we are standing in a floodplain. The water rushes in, and we lie down onto our bellies in the hot sand. We wonder if our bodies will remember, if our spines will grow meters long, our legs disappear in dark water.
We swim the long mile. We think about stories.
L.I. Henley was born and raised in the Mojave Desert of California. Her essays on pain, illness, and the Mojave Desert have won the Arts & Letters/Susan Atefat Prize and the Robert and Adele Schiff Award. “A Blur on the Spine,” originally published by Southern Humanities Review, is a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2024.
Photo by wolfman57, courtesy Shutterstock.
