Curse by Jess Moody
She was nearly caught out this month. His work, her work, housework: she’d lost track of the date. She’d even forgot to re-stock supplies in the weekly shop and then the damn stationers had been closed. Now she was down to a few emergency scraps of paper and a broken pencil nub shoved in her make-up bag.
Warning signs were there, as ever. That ache in her wrist, the buzz at the back of her brain. Christ, she’d only just stopped herself tracing letters on the boardroom table a few days ago. When the boss had given her instructions, she’d said ‘noted’ before she could stop herself. She’d seen the smirks of the men at the table and the whisper on her way out: must be that time of the month.
After careful negotiations with another girl in her office, she’d managed to palm away a spare leaky biro and walk swiftly off to privacy. She returned to her desk with its standard screen, camera and microphone, tried to keep her inky palms face down as she used her controls.
The first couple of days were worse, as always. In any spare moment she scrawled out stanzas and clawed punctuation onto utilitarian Post-Its with a dull fury. He’d bought wine home one night with a hopeful expression, only to find her weeping as she etched alliterations across her forearms. He’d left her to it, run a bath, embarrassed.
She’d kept a fixed smile on her face at Friday’s after-work drinks, urging the alcohol to stop her thoughts forming iambic pentameters. She soon escaped to the bathroom, where she caught the unmissable sound of pages being turned in the one of the cubicles. After a moment, a muttered Where’s a fucking thesaurus when you need one?
In a spirit of generosity, she put down the lipstick she was looping onto the glass, fed a quid into the vending machine for an audio-OED flash drive (pink), and slipped it under her neighbour’s door.
Thanks love. Girls together eh? followed her back to the mirror.
Not that she was getting into the whole biological sex BS. If you lived as a woman, affirmed as a woman, it soon came: the urge to form letters, marks, utterance failing to have the reach and finality and fucking physicality you needed. We were all sisters in this lexical hell.
She stared at her latest scrawls, letters floating around her reflection like a cartoon of what was in her head.
Of course, she’d heard rumours. They all had.
Communities where they valued monthly verbosity, didn’t hide it away. In some places, they treasured inheritances, passed on from the time before: fountain pens with golden nibs flowing with deep blue ink. Beautiful handbound notebooks, gifted with actual goddamn lines. Lines, can you believe that? A path, a promise for you to follow.
Yes, she heard things.
She heard that somewhere out there they would let the sentences gather, tumbling on for pages like a river, or dripping precariously down the paper in broken lines.
They said that somewhere out there, there were books.
Hearing noise behind her, she grabbed a paper towel and started wiping the lipstick, first into mushed squiggles, then whirlpools of tacky smudges, streaks blinding her eyes.
They say somewhere a woman can write her name out for others to see.
They say there is a place where you can write another woman’s words out in your own hand. Cradling them, stains like an open wound.
………………..
Jess Moody is a Wulfrunian in London, and likes her words and worlds on the weird side.
@jesskamoody