Make Me

J. Long

Cages, a goth club downtown, wasn’t a place I normally went to, but I liked the industrial music and the hard edge that people carried themselves with. Everything in the club was black or dark shades; dark red, dark blue, dark brown. They had standing jail cells and dog cages across the club, poles and platforms that people danced on. There was even a Saint Andrew’s Cross on Thursday nights, their bondage night, the time when my people came out; the women in leather corsets and the men holding their leashes. It wasn’t the sort of place you took lightly.
I saw Mel there, the mousy pharmacy technician from the hospital that I worked at, wearing a tight, black, long-sleeved dress, stockings and heels. I had noticed her before, her thin, dark pony tail against her olive neck, the way her skin looked translucent against her lab coat. I almost hadn’t recognized her; I had never seen her in anything besides her uniform. She was only a few inches shorter than me in heels and had dark pink lips. When I introduced myself as one of the pharmacy clerks at Lutheran Hospital, she nodded, smiled, and accepted my offer to buy her a drink. We sat at the bar; she drank Jungle Juice and I drank Sapphire. Four drinks later, she told me that she had seen the knife in my boot.
“Do you know how to use it?” She tilted her head. Her lips were pursed and the blue light behind the bar made them look purple. I put my fingers on her cheek; my hand felt cold.
“Do you want to find out?” I asked.
I took her to my apartment and undressed her in the dark. We had sex in the dining area; the moonlight leaked through the kitchen window and made her hair look like ribbons against the table. She breathed in hot spurts on my knuckles as I held the old timer knife against her throat. She looked so helpless and desperate like that, her jaw shaking.
After we finished, I turned on the kitchen light. She was sitting on the edge of the table; a few loose hairs circled her face. She crossed her legs and asked me why I hadn’t cut her.
“Even just a little,” she asked. Her body was covered in scars; lines raised, cross hatching on her forearms, a star on her hip, the words ‘make me’ in large print on her thigh. None of them were new; you could tell that they were all healing. The star looked like it would be gone in less than a year; the lines on her arms would be gone in two. The only thing that didn’t have any marks was her torso. She shivered and wrapped her arms around her stomach. I tried to imagine if she had made all of those scars on her own, if someone had helped her carve the words. I knew how to use my knives, but I had never cut someone, not in even self defense. It was a last resort.
“Next time,” I told her.

I took her on a real date to an Italian restaurant a week later. She had her hair down and wore a cream colored sweater even though it was hot outside. She didn’t seem to notice. I had wanted to avoid her, but she had waved at me at work for the first time and she made it impossible. Her lean body that you could see in the lab coat, the scar I now noticed just below her ear. I told myself that I didn’t have to cut her if I didn’t want to, that she had only asked a question, that she could cut herself if she needed to.
I ordered a bottle of Chianti, I was feeling high. After we ate our fettuccini and finished the bottle, I took her back to my apartment, telling myself that it was only because the restaurant closed. I wanted to wait to have sex with her again, but she came back from the bathroom and stood naked in the doorway, her arms neatly at her sides, exposing herself without question, the scars on her hips illuminated by the hall light behind her. I gave in. She held herself like her body was flawless, like the scars weren’t from injury but were proof of what she had gone through. Intentional beauty marks. Her shadow stretched towards me and I could barely see her face. I picked her up and threw her on the bed. Her body sunk into the mattress, her stomach curved into her waist, her hips, into the scars that looked like white pencil marks. I thought of my Buck knife, the smooth blade against her body. She had gone through so much suffering and had no new wounds. Her lips were open and her jaw was relaxed. I got my knife and I was able to let myself go when I had it, but I still couldn’t hurt her.
After we had been dating for a few months, she made me dinner. We were celebrating my pay raise, even though she still made more than I did. I hated that I was a clerk and she was a technician; I thought of going back to school to get my certificate. She teased me, saying she was the man and the woman in the house, and complimented herself on her cooking skills, even though it had only been a steak. She was still wearing her heels and I was barefoot. I called her cocky and accused her of thinking that she was better than me. She crossed her arms and yelled, “What do you want to do? What would make you feel better, David? Why don’t you hit me? Cut me. You’re afraid to break skin.”
It had been six months and I hadn’t cut her, not even on accident. I turned away and didn’t say anything. She walked out of the kitchen and left me there alone. The ice maker clanged, echoing through our apartment. It sounded like it could do more damage to her than I could.
I found her in the bathroom an hour later, sitting cross legged on the ground with her back to the door, naked, her spine curved with straight white lines between each bone, a scalpel in her hand, size fifteen, the blade thin and delicate. I sat behind her and she faced me. Her arms were bleeding; she had cut a two inch line midway through her forearm. She took two deep breaths and smiled. She handed the scalpel to me.
“Do you want to try?” she asked. A drop fell to the tile. I didn’t answer. She put the scalpel in my palm and wrapped her hand around mine. She squeezed her grip and cut another line in her arm.
“There,” she said, looking at me. “That wasn’t so bad.” She used my hand to cut her again; the cuts were less than millimeters deep, but the blood peppered the white tile and made it look like splatter paint at a carnival. She let go of my hand and held her arm out straight, her breathing concentrated and loud. I took her other arm and put the scalpel to it. The metal shined against her skin and glared under the bathroom lights. I didn’t put enough pressure at first; I only made a white line that rose, so I put more force and cut deeper. She sucked in heavily, her saliva slapped against her teeth. I could feel her quivering under my grip. Her eyes glistened and she thanked me. I put the scalpel on the ground and kissed her, gripping her hair and mixing it with blood. She wrapped her arms around me.

A month before our anniversary, I had asked her why she had never cut her stomach. Even her shoulder blades had scars on them. They made me feel like she was defying me, like she wanted me to know who she had been with, her past lovers. The scars were raised, keloids like caterpillars leeching on her body. I hated them.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to,” she said.
“Why not?”
“It’s my middle. It’s what people look at when they see you naked.”
She had her head in my lap and was stroking my leg. I brushed my finger tips along her arms, feeling the different patterns on each, scars I imagined were all hers, but knew that they might not have been.
“Isn’t that a reason to cut there?”
She paused and held her hand on my knee.
“It’s empty,” she said. “I feel like it’ll make me die.”
“Your back,” I said.
“That’s different.”
“It’s not.”
“If you want to cut my stomach, fine. Do it.”
She took the Buck knife off of the nightstand, handed it to me, and lifted her shirt. Her stomach was unbroken; the only bumps in her skin were from her ribs.
“Do it,” she said.
“Another time.”
“Why?” she asked and pulled down her shirt. “When?”
“I don’t know.”
After she went to sleep, I smoked a cigarette on the balcony and watched the sprinklers spray against the lawn. A cat was asleep, lying on the hood of an old grey Celica, its eyes closed, purring. There was no wind, the tree branches stood still and didn’t wrestle at all. The complex was dead; I got the feeling that I was the only one awake in the city. I imagined cutting Mel out on the balcony then; I would tie her wrists to the side rail and cut a thin line across her stomach; blood would ooze down. Anyone who looked through their apartment windows would be able to see her, see me hurting her, the way she wanted to hurt so badly for me. For herself.

The night before our anniversary, we were wrapped in each other with a sheet covering our legs. I had cut a triangle into her hip earlier and was covering the hardened blood with my palm. We were talking about our camping trip, not excited about the wilderness, but excited about being alone, away from the world, the illusion of isolation out in the woods. We thought that it would be a perfect way to remember our first time; a knife against her neck and her back against the dirt. We were excited that we had been together for so long; neither of us had made it much past a year before.
“Maybe I could cut you on the trip,” she said. “You know, as a symbol of us.”
I wasn’t one for pain or for letting anyone, including her, have power over me. I told her no and she was silent. She sunk further into the bed; the sheets covered her breasts.
“You should cut my stomach on the trip,” she said. “You don’t have to do it right away, but it means something. It’ll be a reminder of our trip. Something special.”
“Our relationship.”
I thought of writing the word ‘damned’ in jagged cursive on her ribs. Her blood would trickle down her stomach from each of the incisions. I thought of what it would mean to be the first one to cut her there, an area she hadn’t even touched. I imagined rubbing the blood into her, making her stomach streaked with red.
“Would you like that?” I asked.
“Yes.”

After an hour long drive, there were seven miles of windy two lane highway following the curves of the coast, a right turn, and ten miles on a road that was surrounded by trees that shielded travelers from the sun. Our campsite was on the edge of a stream and had an empty site to the right and an occupied campsite to the right of that one. I could see the other camper’s dark blue truck with my glasses on.
I smoked sitting next to the campfire. Mel was next to me with her legs tucked under her, eating popcorn. I had had Mel set my blades on a towel a few feet away from the pit, each one gently placed on the fabric; my Winchester large bowie, a black butterfly, a single blade Buck, a size ten scalpel, and a Ka-bar utility knife; each one with its own intended purpose. They gleamed orange. We hadn’t spoken since before dinner and the loudest thing was the kernels rustling around in the pan.
“I wonder what it would feel like to die,” she said as she gazed into the fire.
I had never seen someone die before, but I had seen a dead body. It had been Mel’s grandmother a few months earlier. I had been ashamed when I didn’t know what to do after the memorial. Mel had pushed me towards the coffin and I had stared at the body, the yellow, rigid skin and magenta lips. There was no blood, no signs of struggle, just a clean, stiff body. Barren.
“Do you want to die?” I asked.
She paused, then looked at me. “Cutting makes you feel,” she said. “I wonder if death is that way.”
I thought of putting my cigarette out on her arm, wondering if she would scream. She hadn’t burned herself in a long time. She had tried branding a happy face into her arm during middle school; it was a pink dot and a crooked half circle. I imagined what she would look like with her throat cut like it was a necklace, but her cords would spill out and her face would be limp. It wouldn’t be pretty. I imagined her with cuts all over her abdomen, her body as an open sore. I put the cigarette on the ground next to us and pressed it out.

The trees stretched towards the sky, covering the bit of light we had left. The stream trickled behind us and insects hummed in the dark. We had taken out metal folding chairs; Mel was sitting on one across from me, her legs crossed, wearing jeans and an oversized white sweater, holding her face up with her hand. She was staring into the campfire, not looking at me. The fire made her look like an orange doll.
I gestured to the right. Mel looked up and uncrossed her legs, parting them enough so I could see the seam in her pants. She stood and took off her sweater; she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. She folded the sweater, placing it on her chair. Her fingernails looked black against her gold zipper; each piece of metal revealed her body, her flesh, like a blade unveils blood. When she was bare, she came to me. I was still sitting in my chair. She was tall and erect, her posture straight; I glided my palm across her hip. Her shadow fell across my body and covered me; it was unbearable. I snapped my fingers and she slid onto her back. I looked at the fire and imagined her grimacing as the tiny rocks dug into her back, her hair collecting dirt as her pony tail followed her movement, how her stomach would bleed when I gave her the first cuts there.
I took off my belt and unbuttoned my pants and took the utility knife from the towel. It flickered from the fire and she hid her face under her arms. I held her hands above her head with my left hand and squeezed the knife in my right.
“Help me,” she whispered. Her eyes were closed and her pony tail was under her shoulders, holding her head back.
“No one will hear you,” I murmured. “Scream all you want and no one will hear you.”
Dust rose around us. I think she coughed but I kept going. I put the knife against her stomach and ran the point across her ribs. A white line formed on her body, like a nail had scratched her, and she moaned. I put the blade against her ribs and looked at her.
“Tell me what you want,” I said.
“What?”
“Tell me what you want.”
“Just cut me, damn it,” she said.
“Like this?” I asked as I cut an inch, just barely breaking skin, like a paper cut.
“Fuck, David, just cut me,” she yelled. I cut her again, below the first, where her belly began, a centimeter deep. Red liquid formed at the top and ran against her stomach and landed on the ground, making it look like clay. Her breathing was short and loud, her head fell back, and her hands struggled against mine.
“What do you want?”
“Just—”
I penetrated her with the knife just below the other two cuts. Her eyes opened; you could see the white around her irises for a second, maybe two, and her lids relaxed. Her head fell back and all the energy in my hands was gone, like a switch had been turned off. I didn’t mean to cut her that deep. I let go of my grip on her hands and cradled her head in my palm and looked at my other hand. My knuckles were red and slick. When I pulled the knife from her, the blade shined under the blood; it still reflected the fire. I was afraid to move. I couldn’t hear anything besides Mel’s breathing.
“Welcome,” she said.