The Shower

words by Jasmine Wang, art by Sana Friedman and Angeline Phan

She turns on the shower, the faucet squeaks at her judgmentally. She sits on the toilet seat wrapped tightly in a scratchy towel, plucking at all the stray fibers as she waits for her lungs to fill up with steaming fog. When it is time, she steps into a scorching jungle of mist. Her skin hisses at the sting of the hot water, but she doesn’t flinch. 

Dear Heavenly Father,

Please let me be clean. Please—

An apology escapes her wretched lips, as she allows her body to grow heavy with water. Her hair becomes matted against her naive cheeks. She stands dazed for a moment, the water practically drowns her—we were here last night—before she reaches for a rag and some soap and begins to scrub diligently. 

In pain, we find purification.

She grips her rag harder, digging her fingernails into her palms, piercing the skin where Christ too was purified during crucifixion. She hopes the adage is true. As the synthetic rag chafes against her skin, she winces at the remembering of his rough fingers hovering over the small of her back. She inhales sharply at the thought of his lips creeping up her collarbone, swatting at her neck. The memories are still buzzing in her ear. She is desperate to claw off the stain of his breath. 

Will I forever be haunted by the ghost of his touch—

She scrubs ever harder, rinsing once, twice, three times. She digs out the grime from underneath her fingernails and scrapes the silt off every strand of hair. She is determined to purge him from every crevice of her body. She scrubs and scrubs and scrubs, until she realizes that she has been holding her breath this entire time.

She clutches a slippery wall, lightheaded. Blood trickles down her legs, swirling into the soap scum that sits patiently in the shower drain. She stares for a second and imagines how easy this would all be if she too could just slide down the drain along with the suds. At least I would not feel so lost. At least I would have a destination. She finally remembers to come up for air, snapping her head back with a sharp breath. 

Hypocrite.

She spits. And all at once rage, grief, and desperation seep out of her prayer. A desperate tongue, maybe that’s what he saw too. 

She lifts her rag again, her body still uncleansed, encrusted in a lingering filth. But as it grazes the star-shaped freckles on her left shoulder, she realizes the rawness of her skin. How it burns with resentment. Goosebumps scurry across the surface and her nerves writhe in pain just below—a tortured squirm like that of the earthworms left suffocating on scalding concrete after a battered storm. 

Nature purges the weak. Was I meant to survive?

Her hands shiver, screaming for the scrubbing to cease. How did she not feel the pain before now? Suddenly, she is a stranger in her own body. She lifts a rotten hand up to her eyeline. It looks fleeting, a mirage of herself. She feels near and far all at once. 

She hesitantly drags a cursed middle finger across her lips, just to make sure it’s still there—still hers—unlike the night before. Her body is foreign, yet unchanged. 

Does he count as my first?

An unemotional tear crawls down her face. The salt teases her tongue. She imagines that she is one of the unsaved in the story of Noah’s ark—one of the undeserving, one of the drowned, one of the cleansed. As her tears blend into the overhead downpour, she wonders how much of Noah’s flood was actually the tears of the renewed, of the dead.

Did you warn me before it happened too? Was that my overdue reckoning? Where was my ark?

Ankle deep in water, she finally turns off the faucet, who creaks back with pity. She imagines herself among the lifeless bodies drifting after the Great Flood. She reaches for her towel, enveloping herself in a dry hug. The fibers scratch at her, but this time, she doesn’t wince. In fact, she craves the discomfort. 

You can’t feel anything when you’re underwater. 

She gulps down air to remind herself that she is no longer drowning. She wonders if he is the only kind of love she deserves. Maybe if she was more beautiful, she would deserve more.

Standing in front of the fogged mirror, she uses a small hand towel to wipe away the haze. But no matter how hard she tries, her reflection remains muddled. The memory of her own face slithers out of her brain, melting into a clouded blur. A willful forgetting. 

She stands back exasperated by her own blindness and opens her mouth to say the words. She will say them. 

He— Last night he—

And then suddenly her body reverberates, as though the shock of a hundred degree heat wave is sent rippling down her spinal cord. Her tongue is sent scrambling down her throat. She panics at the choking, manically scratching at her tongue, straining to untangle the knots that it has twisted itself into. 

She stutters, blubbers. Her body stubbornly refuses to banish those words—a sordid truth. It clings to the shame, plastering it against her ribs. The denial is futile yet pleading. The words ring ever louder, battering on the drum of her ears. She grimaces, craning her neck. 

I think I have an ear infection.

She picks at the inflamed crust that has swallowed her helix piercing—a distraction from the loudness. Heat tiptoes up her ear, until finally she feels a wet release. She examines the  crimson scab and the sticky, yellowed puss still left on her finger. She touches her ear again, squishing at the oozing wound. She can’t resist the temptation of pain. Perhaps neither could he.

The beauty of pain is irresistible. 

She shoves her head under the sink faucet, letting the water rush over her ear. She closes her eyes and wishes she was a child of the sea, buried deep beneath 10,000 leagues where sound and light cannot reach her. Maybe tomorrow she will go to meet the ocean. Perhaps if the ocean will adopt her, she will never truly be drowning. She imagines she is a shard of forgotten glass sinking into soft sands. 

If I lay still and unmoving, will I one day be turned to diamond? Will I one day be made beautiful?

As the noise subsides, she finally emerges from the sink. She flips her head to dry her hair, wondering if she will ever be able to wring out her sin soaked body. With the world upside down, she imagines she is Alice in Wonderland. Up is down. Left is right. True is false. Reality is imagined. Maybe it didn’t happen at all. 

Her heart heaves, sinking into her head. Her intestines coil counterclockwise in her stomach, threatening to snake down and squeeze her lungs. She wonders if Alice ever regretted drinking that potion, or if she felt stupid falling for the mysterious allure of the Cheshire Cat’s curled lip. She remembers too how he spoke in wonder of woman, lip curled. 

She wonders if the Mad Hatter was always mad. She knocks on her head, trying to remember what she was like before she went mad, before her head was cracked open like a sunny side up egg on a sizzling pan.

Still in the upside down, she grows dizzy. She is falling again. But this time, she isn’t flailing. The falling feels familiar. She is suspended in blackness for a moment. And then color trickles in—purple, yellow, green, blue—like an old splotchy bruise. She almost hopes she is trapped here. At least here, she is alone—safe. 

She reaches for the echoing hues, arms spread and eyes closed. The colors weave around her exposed tendons and sobbing skeleton, shrouding her nakedness. She offers her face to the sky. She is ready. Her body, the final sacrifice.