“Unbirthday Means You Wish Yourself Unborn” by Avra Margariti

For years we were as inseparable as flesh fused together by wound-welding time. Until the night before twelfth grade, when you decided to rend us asunder with a few simple words: “I would like to go back to being normal until graduation.”

Normal, you said. Normal being straight. Being girlish. Being girl.

What would you have had me do, other than unfurl my garotte fists and let you go?

Still, I dressed myself in shadow and watched you through the school day, glimpses of you flash-fire-bright, captured between class and break time and smoking behind the main building. Your laughter was pitched higher than it had ever been; pseudo convulsions of your cygnine throat, a mating call appealing to the popular kids. When you walked past me with your new posse, you craned your neck like flesh hooks had been thrust through your thyroid, pulling you away from me. Anything to avoid my eyes excoriating yours. The tears like vitreous humor pooling under our eyelids, wetness matching wetness.

Tears weren’t the only fluid in abundance during our separation. Once, I poured a vial of my piss through the slats in your locker to claim my territory. Let all the boys you brought there smell my ammonia among your textbooks, berry lipglosses, woolen cardigans. Let them wonder about the fox smell, the forest smell, the fuck smell.

That, which cannot be erased.

Did you really think I would let go without a fight?

At night I tried to send my spirit to your window, haunt your sleep with Wild Hunt stampedes, make you regret ever leaving that queer animal burrow we had built together over the years. I wanted your dreams to reek of the rot of loneliness. And I wanted you to carry that festering loneliness even when you surrounded yourself with hollow-carcassed people. I would have opened my chest for you to nest in a cradle of my viscera, keep you warm and safe.

Was that not enough? Would the boys—those soccer players and science geniuses—ever have let you penetrate them like that?

The bulging sack of my ego likes to believe I summoned you then, when you showed up like a nocturnal bird of prey in my backyard three months into the school year, under a skin-shaving-thin moon. When I had sent my shadow your way, did you dig your nails into its crinkled edges and follow it, is that why you showed up outside my bedroom window like Peter fucking Pan?

You didn’t bother with apologies. Sorry was not a word your foaming mouth knew how to formulate. “I need to show you something. Something weird.”

I spat in your face. Sorry was not a word I knew how to swallow—spoken or unspoken. You let my saliva dribble down your mouth, only to lick it clean with a darting tongue. Those cruel, pretty lips smiled at the taste, as if in memory, in relief.

It was what made me follow you outside, in the garden weaving through my sleeping mother’s olive trees, their tangy smell of bitter grass permeating every molecule of autumn air. Together we looked up at the dark viridian canopy.

“Look,” you said, and reached up between the olive branches to pluck a star from the firmament like grit from an open wound. You brought your hand down, and beckoned me nearer. Pinched between thumb and forefinger writhed the luminescent foggy ball that had once been a star gored through the sky.

“Look,” you repeated, and I did. I watched your fingers peel back a starskin of celestial cells to reveal the candescent dark matter swirling within. The star, unmade to its base components: hydrogen, helium, the souls of the dead and gone. Every layer vanished, vaporized into the night air until only the core remained like a calcified stone, which you placed into my waiting palm. I watched the dissected star squirm weakly across my life line, my love line.

“For you,” you said, nearly bashful. “A gift.”

I looked at you, who had tried to get away from me, but also from yourself. I kept my eyes pinned on yours as I brought the unmade star to my mouth, biting down on one end, eyebrows raised in a dare. You leaned forward to sink your teeth into the other side, our lips caught in a gelatinous feral kiss. The crunching star was like hard candy on the outside, with a nucleus dripping cosmic secrets scarlet as cherry syrup down our mouths and chins.

We were filthy with it, a secretion thicker than blood. We were stuck together skin to skin, never to be separated again, forbidden fruit like body fluids welling between our lips. To peel ourselves back meant to relinquish the hold of our skins in the process.

There was no going back now.

The unraveled star had transubstantiated into a forgive-me-gift, a forget-me-not. And that was only the beginning of our unmaking.

***

We started out small, putting your newfound powers to the test. Teaching me, too, how to unravel the world around us one piece at a time.

Yet something had shifted when you sundered us. Something I felt like a splinter in my sternum, a foreign body I needed to pluck; a dissonance I needed to reharmonize.

At school, the boys you’d had eating from the palm of your hand wanted answers, said they wouldn’t give you up, knights jousting for your honor, your medieval courtly love. I wanted to perform my first unmaking on my rivals, but whenever I tried, my head bee-buzzed and my nose capillaries burst red and open. 

You insisted I start out even smaller: a cigarette deconstructed to bits of carcinogenic tar and nicotine and lung-deep pleasure. Then sewer mice found drowned after a rainfall, their flesh flensed from the bone, the fleas on the mice pelts too taken apart antenna to spiracle. There were so many things to break down and apart: the bone china dolls our mothers had gifted us for our thirteenth birthdays, now turned to the mishappen skeletons of lambs slaughtered and pulverized for not-girls to play with.

“How do you do it?” I asked, when I had watched you unmake small and inviting things with me, yet I had still to muster such finessed skill on my own. “Is it like unlocking a door?” I urged, my mouth tasting red with white-hot need.

“No,” you replied. “More like a key jammed in a lock. You wiggle it around until it wrenches free.”

I tried it too. Focused on the body. The gurgling cacophony of it. In class, I watched your suitors—my rivals—and my resentment strived to puncture holes into the backs of their gym-sweaty T-shirts. Like probes in a laparoscopy, my eyes delved under the skin until thrumming blood and creaking bone and rasping tendon rubbed like a meaty symphony against the edges of my brain. I studied subdermal substrates. The bilious humor where those boys’ arrogance was stored, the toxic glands I wished I could make them choke on. 

Did you know revenge tastes not peachy-sweet, but as savory as blood?

During math class, I scalpel-focused until my latent power at long last stroked along the bodies, sectioning the boys in my mind like a butcher’s cut chart. I peeled back the outer layer of skin over their acne, clogged pores, ingrown hair, until boils popped blood and pus all over your exes’ faces. Their bodies resembled the pictures of second-degree sunburns from anti-carcinoma campaign ads. Their T-shirts were stained with more than just musky body odor. It was a charnel house smell. And my smile as they screamed, ossuary-dry.

Were you proud of me? I know I was.

School was closed the next day, until the chaos settled, the adults wanting to convince us it was a mass delusion we had suffered to see our classmates’ skins split open like adolescent pupae. Only no beautiful, winged creatures emerged from the meat sacks of those boys. Their chrysalises were as empty as the rest of them, and so were their unbirthdays.

We arranged for flowers to be sent to their hospital rooms; insult to injury.

I took you on a picnic that night. We walked like prowling predators through our neighborhood locked down for curfew. You and I trespassed into the rose garden bordering my mother’s olive grove. This garden was considered the prettiest on our street. And in the owner’s mouth resided the sharpest tongue, telling on us to our mothers time after time, a church lady gossiping about girls kissing. Girls monstering.

We would give her something to gossip about.

I laid a gingham blanket down for you, picture fucking perfect, like a lover deserving of you should do. “Sit,” I told you, “sit and watch,” and gasping, you gaped at me and clapped with callous glee, dressed in your funerary Lolita-dress frills. Watched as I stood like a mad maestro in the midst of the garden, as I unspooled chlorophyl from leaf, the garden withering and dying like the ugly soul of its owner. Stoma and xylem I deprived of nourishment, minerals and jagged diamond droplets held hovering into a swarm above our heads. The bonemeal too I stole from our neighbor’s prized roses, ordering the decomposed matter to line the lungs of the sleeping church lady who had tortured us. Have her choke on it like her own envy.

You couldn’t resist joining me in my act of uncreation. Pollen and honey excised from bees midair, the insects dropping dead, us tipping our heads back to suck the nectar from the perfumed air. Using our teeth to extract the stubborn stingers from each other’s lips.

The constellations we took pity on for the time being, the sky having already mourned us devouring one of its own.

It was that timeless night—with my head in your lap and your fingers digging through my hair—that we took to calling the unraveling an unbirthday. We giggled against each other sleepover-quiet, in the forbidden garden we had commandeered for our rancid, luscious romanticism.

***

Of course, we were not complete amateurs at unraveling, even before our growing powers were unveiled.

Once, when we were younger, our single, frazzled mothers had left us in your Grandma’s care while they worked overtime in downtown office jobs. We remembered being small, babysat by the old woman as she knitted in her rocking chair, each movement of gnarled hands as weighted as if the yarn was birthing galaxies, not purling mittens. We remembered Grandma falling asleep, us wrestling on the threadbare carpet like alley kittens, then kissing like the adults did on the romcoms our mothers liked to watch. Me pinning you down. You are my prisoner, my captive, I told you, while you smothered giggles behind fickle palms. I used the yarn to tie you up all pretty and helpless for me. The snow mittens in candy floss pink unraveling like viscera to spool around and cradle us while Grandma snored.

When she died from sleep apnea obstructing her airways, we didn’t notice until nightfall, when our mothers’ screams crescendoed, infiltrating our nap. Out of ravening guilt, you asked to stop playing the tie-up game, the unraveling game. We shouldn’t unstitch another tightly coiled thing, you said, in order to atone for our sins. How we had wished your grandma’s vellum-papered skin would slough off her bones and her sunken eyeballs would clatter to the floor like twin obols whenever she spanked us for misbehaving.

And now? Sometimes I thought you had wished to undo the way you sundered us that summer before twelfth grade, the vile things you said to me, the lies you told yourself. That’s why your power of unmaking manifested then. Why it could be mine, too. Just another thing we shared like spittle between starved lips.

***

After your boyfriends had been dealt with, there were more bullies to face still.

There was the school calling our homes after the teachers had caught us kissing, because two girl-shaped bodies being skin-close in middle school was endearing, yet in high school it grew dangerous. Grew teeth and want enough to slice through decorum, straight into deviance.

When my mother prohibited me from seeing you, I snuck into her bedroom as she snored. Like a sleep paralysis demon, I hovered, I delved deep into the part of her brain where hate resided: liminal spell woven through the grooves. But my own hate was grander and more abject than the world could dream of. I used that righteous resentment to unmake the part of my mother that cringed and sneered at my displays of degeneracy. And in that somnolent lobotomy, I discovered what I had always suspected. How someone else had unraveled my mother’s hypothalamus when she was my age. A conversion therapy that had made her despise her natural inclinations, and my own.

How she, too, had once shared forbidden fruit with a pretty, cruel mouth under our family’s olive trees.

 When my mother awoke, she didn’t recall the unbirthday that had been about righting an old, festering wrong. Rearranging the self-hating part of her brain convinced she had turned me queer because she was one of us, too.

***

There were so many things to unmake, so many unbirthdays to offer a repressed, too-tightly knit world. But there was one territory you and I had yet to touch, though it had been there for the taking since our first manifestation of power. Twin sleeping animals we had once been too afraid to approach and rouse from hibernation.

When one day after graduation you said, “They made us wrong, you and I, didn’t they? The messengers of the cosmos,” I knew exactly what you meant.

So I led us through the steps of the last remaining dance we had yet to waltz together.

Once more we stood face to face in the olive grove, a year and a day after we had first unraveled that star from the firmament and bit it between our teeth like stolen fruit. Cicadas crescendoed; the night breeze flapped our loosened skins like laundry hung to dry. We had taken so much from the world. And still, we hadn’t taken for ourselves that, which we’d always whispered in late-night confessions, we needed most.

I let my hands wander along your bare body like birds plummeting across the sky, pinion to prickled skin. Your hands matched mine, map-made me. Unmade me.

The innies between our legs, we turned to outies: deconstructed and rebuilt them like golem-members out of mud, and we liked those better, our honey-sweet stingers. You bifurcated my tongue, elongated enough that it would wriggle in your ear canal, then crawl down and through to lick your beautiful brain, fondle wetly along its ridges in primordial want. Your member was reminiscent of a tail. Once vestigial, now I summoned it forth and gave it a prehensile grip and a barbed tip, so that it would snag and twist against mine.

All through the night, we unbirthed each other.

Once upon a time, we were so at odds with the world, we wished our cells unmade, ourselves unborn. Now we vowed to unravel the whole world, at peace amid the frayed threads of fate, the loose constellary coils.

“Maybe the universe wished itself unborn,” you told me, gazing up at the abyssal stars while they gazed back into our own unique abysses. “Maybe it’s hurtling toward another Big Bang unbirthday, and we’re just helping it along. Orchestrators of the cosmos.”

“Maybe,” I replied, my tongue brimming red with your brain matter, “the universe saw how rotten it was, rotten down to its core.”

How it needed a knife and someone who knew how to wield it, to help the universe excise the excess of skin, bloodlet the abscesses, drain the buildup of celestial pus.

You and I, we were up to the task.