1
She’s thinking about grief and trauma, how they can hide out inside a woman, how they can come back. The playwright follows her eyes, until he sees what she sees. The photographer’s framed image, the orphan girl lit up by the explosion, a girl blowing forward, a girl coming out of fire, a girl who looks as if she might blast right through image and time into the world“ I know what’s happened, ” the poet says.Lidia Yuknavitch
2
What she thinks and feels is this: This is a world of men. They come into your country, they invade your home, they kill your family. They turn your body into the battlefield – the territory of all violence – all power – all life and death. And we take it. We do. We keep taking it. We have lost track of the reasons we do not slaughter the world of men, but we do not. Yes, there are good men. She sees the face of her father. She sees how the filmmaker loves the writer. She sees the yet-unwritten life of the writer’s son. She sees her. brother. Beautiful smear. But it is the world of men that creates pure destruction. And this is a truth we cannot bear: Since we bear them into the world, we cannot kill them. Cannot be done with them. Cannot exile them into oblivion.Lidia Yuknavitch
3
One day the girl is taking a bath and calls out. The widow comes into the tiny bathroom and the water surrounding the girl’s legs is clouded with crimson. She slaps the girl in the face and smiles and kisses her on the cheeks. She says, “May you bloom.” The girl doesn’t flinch. The widow tells her, “This is the first language of your body. It is the word ne. When you bleed each month, as when the moon comes and goes in its journey, you leave the world of men. You enter the body of all women, who are connected to all of nature.” The girl asks, “Why is it the word ne?” The widow responds, “When you bleed, this word is more powerful than any word you could ever speak. It is a blood word. It binds you to animals and trees and the moon and the sun. Where men take blood in the world in hunting and war, women give blood. It is the word ne because it closes the room of a woman’s body to men.” The widow places her hands into the water and says, “Good. You are alive. You and I are alive.Lidia Yuknavitch
4
And so, now, she runs. In her running, her mind leaves her. And she can hear nothing but her heart, the blast making her deaf. There is a great white silent empty in her running. She runs.Lidia Yuknavitch
5
Seventeen times against the wall or in the barn: You move or scream or say anything I will kill them all. In front of you. First I will torture them and then I will kill them. Her eyes as dead as she can make them. Her arms as limp as she can make them. Her heart as hidden as she can make it. A soldier’s cock entering the thin white flesh of a girl, into the small red cave of her, the fist of her heart pounding out be-dead, be-dead, be-dead. Counting.Lidia Yuknavitch