When I was born, I plopped out onto the dirt and my bad uncle stood there kicking me while my good uncle and my mother looked on making faces like they were shocked but they didn't stop it and the kicking went on like the Olympics.
I have a teddy bear. I call him Buster Brown. Because he is brown and when I was little I needed a protector to get me through the night—that's why his name is Buster. He was there to help me survive the lights I saw on the wall—which I now know were just reflections off the light fixture, but at the time I knew they were spirits and I knew they could come off the ceiling any time they wanted and suck my breath out stick to my face like a bag and make the little girl holding the bear tight to her chest disappear into Tesla's sixth dimension which I believe, upon study, is hell.
That was Buster Bear. I held him so tight every single night that his front side flattened out to fit my chest perfectly and during the day he could no longer sit up like a normal teddy bear so he had to spend his whole life lying down and that's what he looks like now: round on his back, flat on his front, and his nose flattened and the fur around his eyes flattened so you cannot even see them.
He sleeps with me like a good bear, never tries to fuck me when I'm not looking (like the good boys do), he always stays through the night instead of sticking it in and rubbing it off and going through the window into dewdrop grass and a neighborhood full of other girls, sleeping in their beds, ready for night fucking and to take away my sperm suppliers for their own varied uses.
Buster Bear is a model citizen. He never carries torches and he always uses his power of speech for good.
When I felt him rumbling, buzzing, back at the beginning, he was rolling and bleeding black smoke rising up on his front paws (which were flat) and I put my hand over his belly and felt it rumble rumble with a mighty breakdancer's roar and I knew I had to operate.
Sad, sad face bear.
Multiple sclerosis bear.
Bear with a cross to bear.
I took my Victorinox and sliced the motherfucker.
Dashing, slashing at his black flat belly under matted fur and the make-believe of this puppet animal who had been with me since before I bled before I started my factory before I spliced rocks together to make vaginal beads inside him was a brevity of fleas, bottomless pit, springing out at space-shuttle velocity, faster than a gun and they covered me. Sensing my heat from the bed pan jumping and clutching my ankles, my wrists, my face, my breasts, my back. Picking them off squeezing them between my fingers stomping them with my head forearms turning black with the covering of them, the plague of them, and venture by venture, bone by bone, intersection by intersection, the fleas covered me like paint and after a few minutes I stopped picking them off, stopped brushing my skin where another wave would instantly land back on me and cover me again. Lying. On top of the covers. Every pit and hook of me crawling with fleas, and I knew I didn't have enough blood in me to feed them in a few minutes I would be gone nothing left but bones and tendons and hair and my next donor would come in through the window seeing this mess of girl I had been reduced to and he would fuck it anyway, fuck the tangle of pubes and flea mounds where my tunnel used to be. Riding me, bugs eating his penis and sucking blood from his one huge giant vein. He'll cum in my ghost, fleas still taking the shape of me, where I had been, fleas climbing up his urethra down into his balls and mixing with sperm, starting a colony in his balls.
These are the things I think.
I am a hypochondriac.
When I'm lying in bed after a deposit, I reach between my legs and dig in the crack, running fingernails on the side of my red muscle and bringing out more animals from the zoo program—a program all its own—and aphids are my danger, they litter my crotch in fast motion, giving birth to live young without even mating, zoom zoom zoom! We lie together, me and Buster Bear—his damage is fleas, zooming out of him for a nature show and my vulva has become something no sensible boy would like to fuck it is teeming like with fish from the sea, aphis wave, I am their plant, delicious girl waiting to be turned into a wave of blackness, no sight of me, me and my protector eaten alive by our specific death mates, competition of who had it worse, who died more painfully, who earned complaining rights, who is the biggest martyr, whose killer was more proficient, whose end more terrible, worth remembering, historic, epic, validating. 'Cause everyone wants to be validated, and for some, the way we come to have meaning is by our oppression: we are the least tolerated, the least accepted, the more outcast, the more ruined, the most forgotten, never understood, fringe, alternate, marginalized, tiny, stinky, small. No one will have sex with us. No one will hire us. No one likes us. No one will publish our books. No one accepts our bodies, identities, selves. I curse the wave of tyranny—aphids, fleas—that swept into my room and ate me to my death, even though they are squishable with my hands they kill me like a torrent of negative breath, the opposite of a thousand Crest Whitestrips, crawling in and out of every hole, from mouth to ass, chomping on my lady bits, going back inside me, pinching my red red muscle like every fetus I once delivered is finally coming home.