the dress
The dress doesn’t fit right. Couldn’t, even if it had been bought for this purpose, this body, this life. Couldn’t, because no dress fits right, not on this body. This body is denim and ringer tees. This body is argyle vests paired with high-rise jeans. This body is that hat, that hat, that stupid fucking hat.
It doesn’t fit this body right, doesn’t look the same. Doesn’t hug curves, doesn’t flirt with cleavage or thigh muscles. It’s too tight in all the wrong places. Flares awkwardly in others. This body is not cradled, but cocooned. It is not wearing the dress; the dress is wearing it, all of those flaws on perpetual display.
It’s wrong, and that only makes it more necessary, because wrong is the only thing left in the world. Wrong is lost children and stillborn babies. Wrong is fire and snow. Wrong is an ear fleshy between her teeth, wrong is lipstick on a corpse, wrong is knowing how her best friend tastes from the most unacceptable angles possible.
Wrong is her whole world. She tells herself she can’t remember anything else. She needs to tell herself, because it’s too easy to scroll back through those pages, through the many lives lived over the course of a year. Too easy to flip, flip, flip until the worst thing in her life was a hidden college acceptance letter.
Too easy to remember the girl she buried as someone she actually still has to be, deep down.
The dress doesn’t fit right, but she waits impatiently for the wrong body to wrestle it on all the same. She waits, arms crossed, foot jittering against a bed of leaves. Her blankets are still mussed from the last time. They smell awful. Smell of sweat and sex and something else, something that catches her unawares at irrational moments. Blood, or perfume, or smoke. All of the above. All of them belonging in some way to—
But that one isn’t here; won’t ever be here again. She needs her, needs her so badly. What has she become on her own? Loss and grief and so much anger, she thrums with it. So much raw fury, she dances on its currents as she used to sway with alcohol in her bloodstream. Anger is addictive, she’s found. Addictive, and delicious, and necessary.
It's all wrong: the person she is now, the person she has to be going forward. The person she’s with, too. The one standing in that dress with her head cocked back, her chin tipped up. Pleading for something unsaid. Something illegible. Something she couldn’t have given even before, flip, flip, flip, when the story made a kind of sense.
She reaches. The dress is no longer silk-soft under her fingers. It’s taken on too much—not least of all the burden of crumpled desperation. It reeks of fire. It reeks like exactly what it is: the last object of obsession left. The one stuffed under her makeshift pillow. The one she can’t sleep without.
She reaches, and the dress is weathered, patchy, torn ragged in places. The body it sheathes is too tall, too lanky, too lean. The body is too eager, too fucking alive. Hands that grope. Enthusiasm that shines out like a goddamn flashlight tilted straight into her eyes.
It’s wrong, that enthusiasm, that blinding hope. It blisters her skin, and she leans into every skimming fingertip, every blunt catch of unkempt nails. She drags the dress forward, suntanned hands making the pallid green look all the more pathetic. She drags until it crushes against her flannel and shorts, until there is no space between the dress and everything she has left.
The body wraps her close. Adrenaline kickdrums beneath her skin as the wrong face tilts to meet her own, as still-unfamiliar lips graze her skin. She’s nearly overcome with the need to shove the body away. It smells wrong. It smells like the woods, like unwashed hair and threadbare t-shirts. It smells like soccer practice. Like bodies primed for war.
She wants to shove away, but want is a horrorshow at the best of times. She clenches her teeth against it, wheeling toward the opposite of craving. Her pulse hums in her ears as that mouth crushes to her own. She bites at soft lips, and though her fingers span the back of the dress, she imagines she can still feel the hilt of a blade against her palm. She is always holding the knife. Can’t put it down. Can’t remember—can’t let herself remember—what it was to set it aside.
She’s still holding it, though her hands are empty, as she forces the body in the dress against the wall of her hut. Her hut; a single, a room for one, a decision she never made. She thinks of that acceptance letter. Thinks of pink and green. Thinks, and swallows the scream that rests always between her back teeth.
Her knees ache when she drops, scraped raw on the wilderness’ carpet. The dress bunches in her hands. The body sways, the mouth opening. She does not hear the voice that follows. Doesn’t listen for the words, for the hopeful surging want. She can’t care. There is only the dress, washed-out, dragged higher. There is only the dress, which stinks of death and loss and chances never recovered.
There is the dress, the last ghost deigning to haunt this sorry excuse for a home. She ducks under its skirt, ignoring the gasp from above. Ducks under, letting it fall across her shoulders, skimming the top of her back. Ducks under, and shuts her eyes, fingers digging relentless into pale skin.
Wrong skin. Wrong shape. Wrong, wrong, wrong, but if her eyes are closed, she can’t tell. If her eyes are closed, she feels only the swivel of hips, the clenched muscle of legs. If her eyes are closed, she senses only what she can take away and still find herself able to stand the next day.
She never knew how this was supposed to smell. Can convince herself the taste on her tongue would always have been just like this. Can close her ears to voice, to words, to pleas. Everyone breathes the same. Everyone sounds the same, gasping for air. Wreathed in shadow, it could be anyone, anyone at all, hidden inside the grimy fabric.
She drives her fingers into pliant flesh, and it’s close enough, isn’t it? Close enough. An athlete’s build. The softness of secret skin. The hand curving around her skull through the flimsy fabric is almost the right size, almost familiar enough to clutch in the dark.
She sinks, her tongue as savage as the rest of her. The body is wrong. The dress fits it terribly. If there was any grace in the world, any mercy, it wouldn’t be so off. If there was any grace in the world, any mercy, this one could at least be the same size. Could at least try to be convincing.
It’s a badly cast play, but it’s the only one in town. If there was grace or mercy in the world, she wouldn’t hear the echoing cries of a child she’ll never feed. Wouldn’t smell the rot under a rime of frost. Wouldn’t know how it feels to step out a door and find herself in hell.
Anger is all she has. Anger, and this potent, addictive thing she’s let under her skin.
The dress looks wrong. Is wrong. Could never be right.
She buries herself beneath its weight and swears, when breath hitches from above, she can hear her name the way she used to say it.
It doesn't fit this time.
Maybe, maybe, maybe it will the next.