Chelsea Bieker

Lauren Ezzo

A Novel

Godshot

erin alise 

Women's needs had never been mentioned in the church, never mentioned by anyone that I could remember, and I lapped up any sign of them by instinct like a long-starved wolf. 

She took my hand. She squeezed. “Whatever's happened to you can either make you beautiful, or it will ruin you forever. You decide."

I pulled my hand back. "I'm not beautiful." 

"I don't mean beautiful like you're thinking, I mean beautiful. I mean, deep and changed. Affected. Wise. When you see a woman like that, you know. She's beautiful because of her undoing. Beautiful because she rebirthed herself from ashes."

It was as if the smoke cleared out for just that moment, the stars blinked a blinding silver. It was my own wound before me.

I decided then I’d tell [her] to be ugly. To make herself as ugly as possible and not worry too much about beauty or what any- one thought of her. To be unpainted, to live in the breeze and stand under waterfalls and not be worried over the height of mountains, of quiet trails deep in the woods. To not be scared of roads slick vith rain, of valleys dry in drought. I'd tell her no fear and she'd know it as the deepest truth and she would be everything I was not. She would be wild and free. And I wouldn't worry because I alone cnew the secret. That through all of her ugliness, all her hiking and running and jumping and falling and getting back up and saying no and saying what she wanted, her scraped hands, her freckled skin her smart brain, she would of course be beautiful.

The loneliness of a monster can only become sentimental after it is dead.

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