Ani King
The girl I love wears a harness everyday under her shirt, worn brown leather, I made it from the straps of an old saddle myself, I cut the pieces to her measurements and punched the holes by hand with a hammer and an awl and pounded the rivets down, and every morning before she goes to work I slip the harness over her sloping shoulders, over the scatter of moles and acne scars, I press my hand between her shoulder blades so she stands straight, and I buckle her up and walk her in figure eights, around the living room with the rope lead soft between us, clipped to the harness between her breasts and hanging low like the belly of a pregnant mare, and in the morning while we walk, we’ve been talking about how we’d like a daughter someday.
The girl I love says she wants to have kids, and but she’s afraid for us to use her eggs, because what if our kid ended up like her, because in elementary school she would get the urge to scream at the top of her lungs when it was too quiet, or to break all the pencils on the table in half, and she always followed her urges, like sometimes if the French braid in her hair felt too tight she would scramble over the chair, onto the desk, and jump off over and over again until someone made her stop, and there was the time she jabbed at another girl with a fork too hard and it drew blood, not to mention the kleptomania, the insomnia, the dyscalculia; she thinks she was too much for anyone to handle, but I think I handle her just fine. I imagine having a child like her: the hot heart of an animal, all hunger, blood galloping around the ring of their body, loving another person with all that energy, and back when the girl I love would get sent out of class to sit on the floor, I also loved the slap of her shoes as she ran back and forth in front of the door, which sounded like hooves and I wanted to ask if she’d ever wear a saddle.
The girl I love talks and bites her nails at the same time, clicking and gnawing and jawing at her hands, and she’s been like this—squirming inside her own skin—since she was born, and when we’d walk out to the field behind my parents’ house, almost every day beginning in fifth grade, she bumped me off the trail without meaning to, hundreds of days of walking shoulder to shoulder, and hundreds of times of me telling her to please be careful, watch out there’s poison ivy, watch out for my feet please, and she still knocks into me on our way to the field because oh my god look at this pink, or can you even believe a plant would smell this bad, or her sock is bunching in her shoe, or her shoe is just back there a ways, but also because she can’t help but be captured by goldenrod, she can’t help but be stricken by the way fall leaves look like fire when the sun’s setting, somehow she can’t help but be distracted by me, and in tenth grade one time I took her hand and she ran me into a tree. I put my arm around her shoulder, which didn’t stop her from tripping over me like a branch, and she wouldn’t stop apologizing for it, which led to her saying sorry, sorry, sorry for all the things I loved about her, so I kissed her for the first time, and the girl I love was all teeth and nerves. With my lip bleeding, I grabbed the ends of her scarf like a lead and pulled her the rest of the way to the field, where I walked her around in circles because in my family we raise horses and when they’re anxious it’s best to keep their feet moving, and then when they’re ready, we say go on girl, and let them run.
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Ani King (they/them) is a queer, gender non-compliant writer, artist, and activist from Michigan. Ani is the first-place winner of the 2024 Blue Frog Annual Flash Fiction Contest, a SmokeLong Grand Micro Competition 2023 Finalist, and has had work featured in Split Lip Magazine. They can be found at aniking.net or trying to find somewhere to quietly finish reading a book without interruptions.