Victoria’s Even Bigger Secret by Cheryl Anne Gardner

Sometimes my cleavage gets in the way. I know I know. Sing me a sob story, but it’s true. I can’t always tell if my fly is undone, or if there’s toilet paper stuck to my shoe, and it takes a wish and a prayer to find a suitable seat on the train where you’re not rubbing against someone in an inappropriate manner. My boyfriend said, “The aftershocks rattled his brain” when we made love, and then I’d pass out cold, and he’d light an incense stick and let it burn between them cause he said the room smelled like flap sweat. I have hot ash scars on my chest to prove it. One of these days, I’m going to stick firecrackers in his ass-cheeks and light him up while he’s sleeping in the cheap motel room he always takes me to. No one will notice with all the gunshots ricocheting off the cars in the parking lot. He’s not really mean, my boyfriend, once you get to know him. He has a hearsay history of violence: spring rage chaos and polka dot blotter extremes. He’s a backdoor gangsta now, all cat claws and camp, dealing a marked deck to the strip-club counselors, waiting out their fortunes in the mirrored velvet. He said he was built to bounce heads on concrete. I believed him, even if no one else did.
+++++Once a month, he’d go through the motions: “Convict,” his parole officer would call him, to which “hard knocks,” he’d reply, and then, later, he’d curse my double Ds for knocking over his beer. If I had a ladder, I might climb it and hang myself by the nipples from the electrical wires adjacent to my fourth floor patio, hoping they and all the flabby skin attached to them would just rip right off. He said my tits were to blame for the fights and the bruises. Said I was just a tramp with a park side view and a short commute when all he had was a brick wall and an alley. All I know about views is that the paint’s chipping on the ceiling, and the palm trees behind the couch are fake, like those boxed potatoes he loves so much that would crust up in his beard for a week. It made his face rough, but he’d just yell over my chest and tell me to “shut up, hang on, and ride it out.”
+++++In the evenings, after he was through with me, I’d take a bath, but could never reach my legs to shave them, so I’d lie there, watching my breasts flap and swish around in the steamy water and wonder how much it would hurt if I just sliced them off.

Bio:

Cheryl Anne Gardner is a writer of dark, disturbing art-house novellas and abstract flash fiction. She is an Indie advocate, and prefers to read out-of-the-mainstream Indie published works, foreign translations, and a bit of philosophy. She lives with her husband and ferrets on the east coast USA, and she likes to eat lint and play with sharp objects. You can find more of her work at Twisted Knickers Publications and at various online flash journals.