Nine Island Read Online Free Page A

feet and into the soil, and it was the soil that saved her. Her ragged toenails she’d only ever cut with a knife dug into the fallen leaves and the earth and latched to rocks way deep, and meanwhile such strange things were happening to the rest of the girl still overland! The skin she wanted no one ever to stroke or nibble or lick grew hard and cracked, the dry places at her knees and elbows whorled and stiffened, and her wrists grew long and thin and suddenly split, twiggy fingers reaching up toward the sky, and now so happy, ecstatic, she threw back her head as her long dirty hair metastasized into leaflets, and she had just enough time to think, I am losing all the parts of myself but becoming what I am, when the wind took the words from inside her mouth and they rustled into air.
    Put pencil in spine, rolled over, and stared at the sky.
    The sky here is so voluptuous, if you’re lying on your back on a soft warm towel, letting the world just spin you.
    You can keep climbing deeper into that gassy, dark blue.
    What are you singing me now, blue ions?
    Framed a square of potent sky with my hands.
    But—small lump on my index finger. What? It didn’t use to be there. On the knuckle, which I wiggled—stiff.
    Silhouetted against the sky, in fact, the fingers all looked knotty. The skin looked downright whorled .
    Well , good .
    Head tilted back, I could see clear up the building. And exactly then the thin white-blond woman came out on her balcony. I flipped over fast to see better. She stood by the railing, gazing out. Then disappeared, and reappeared farther down than she’d been the other day. Deliberate . She reached out far, opened her hand, again let something fall. Then peered down to see where it landed.
    Experiment?
    After a minute I couldn’t stand it and hurried barefoot along the cracked path between the gym windows and the low concrete rim that holds back the paradise jungle, to where it must have fallen. Poked at the leaves: nothing.
    I looked up the building, up the thing’s path—and there she was, all those stories above, looking down at me. We gazed up and down at each other, like I was her reflection, or shadow.

F OR INSTANCE (also not Ovid, exactly):
    There was a girl in college who ran. A real runner, yeah, but this was more: she was running away . She wanted no flesh that wasn’t muscle, and then she wanted her running to eat the muscle, too. That really made her eyes glow. Make me bone, those eyes said. Something so hard no one ever gets in.
    Long wild chestnut hair, the sort you can easily see turn into twigs.
    A so-called boyfriend of mine with sad eyes had an awful thing for her. She let him touch her once, he said, he almost managed to get her in bed, but that was more than she could take. She ran. From him, other men, everyone. You’d see her pale legs flitting outside the windows of the eating clubs, down the tree-lined streets at night.
    Someone must have fucked her up, he said, staring at her hard. Somebody really screwed her.
    Maybe, I thought. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to let anyone in. What’s wrong with that? Who made it obligatory?
    Porosity: some have it more than others.
    Say, girls.
    You have a hole, a boy said to me when I was eight. He and another had cornered me with their bikes against an alley wall.
    You have a hole, he said, that I can put my thing in if I want.
    For fuck’s sake!
    That boy’s bike crashed to the ground.

M Y FRIEND S has just typed me his opinion:
    Boys look at porn from the time they’re nine. Girls are only body parts.

M ORE BUSTER PUDDLES today. Spending a lot of time wiping; knees are getting bruised.
    Went outside to paradise—who would not be ecstatic here! How could your heart not flood with solitary joy when walking on the blistering concrete and beholding the hot blue sky and hot green grass and flowers so red they flame your eyes and all that milk-green water? Sometimes there are