text: I became a woman in bright orange walls. I became a woman like most do: grown before we could be girls. Aflame in hot houses, born into war zones, you start to like the burning. Mother was a heatseeker, all ashy lungs and cigarette scars. Soot filled smiles and such. She came from a long chain of smilers, all burst from the same blister. All living only halfway alive. They were all dead before they hit the ground; for as much as that word counted, anyways. I wish I could hate her. Hate the things she tried to build from the same bricks that made her. The most I can do is feign apathy. I wish I’d been fashioned just as foolishly. Just as beautifully. That’s the only niche nice women get to fill here. Birth giving butterflies: breakable and beautiful. She’d always believe in the lord and his plans. That everything would work out for us all in the end. It was one of the many things that, now, I wish I was capable of believing. *** I’m partway the mould of the first not-a-woman I met. A monarch collector. Wrinkled and grey in a way women weren’t meant to be. Jezebel wasn’t gentle, soft spoken or refined, just alive. It made that enough, in its own special way. Jez was born cross eyed, ugly, half blind and managed to see more of the world than any woman I knew or could hope, then, to be. It was never made to be a beautiful thing, just to make them. Jezebel was a painter, not a mother. It didn’t draw smiles, just the butterflies it had always been too nearsighted to see in the sky. Too myopic to snatch out of the sunlight. That was my job. A penny a piece. No one knew Jez’s real name. That, or they’d tried too hard to forget. To forget how the thing was born from the womb of exactly that which it could never be. Lost to time, and label loving, the town settled for the irony of backhanded biblical allusions. Jez was the first to let me know my father wasn’t gonna make it to midsummer. That you can’t treat what you don’t know you’re fighting. Then she just shrugged and passed me a mason jar. She told me to find myself a caterpillar. I flew home on wings of adolescent anger that day, just wanting to scream at the sky. I wanted to hit, to hurt something. I liked the feeling. I liked being on fire: being something I wasn’t supposed to be. I liked the sting in my eyes, the salt of it all. I liked becoming something my mother could never quite be: alive to the point of tears. Till I teared. Mother scolded me that evening, when I burst through the doorway. For the dust in my hair, the scabs on my knees and crushed glass in my hands. For that dangerous, dark part of me that yearned to be free. To be the one thing a woman in the sixties could never really be. I was too young to see how that protected me. I was too young to know that women weren’t supposed to be bruised; that men’s fists weren’t meant to get so loose late at night, when the beer bottles went empty to their bottoms. I’d need a few more years: time to understand my mother’s mantras and smiles. The shields of ‘everything being just fine’. The truth was, that mum could never be free, not while she had me. My father was a cadmium miner, like most men in that orange painted town. He brought home enough to pay the bills, and, if that was enough to feed me, she could take the bruises. If it was for me, she could dare to think he’d pull through; that we’d make it to the other side. She could swear that God had a plan till the cows came home. Till dad’s lungs finished exploding. Illusion was what kept that woman together at the seams, it’s a skill I wish I’d let myself learn. Instead, I just cocooned. I accepted. Jezebel had taught me, years ago, about the monarch’s cycle of life. How, in chrysalids, they managed to totally dissolve. They became, in all ways, unmade. Skin and meat turned to something like wine, just to rebuild those broken parts of themselves into something that could fly. Scientists, Jez would say, didn’t know how they kept memories when their neurons melted to goo. When they were totally destroyed. Jezebel said it’s because those scientists had never been women before. We’d learn, in time, that it was dust that did dad in. Haze in the underground air, the same substance that made the orange of our house’s painted drywall. Monarch tinged, lung killing despair. It drove my mother to the brink: to do herself in. She did it for so many reasons I now understand. I think she learned to love our house out of hell: dad’s punches and the burning. I think she’d always leaned on her smile, on some trust in God’s plan. That dad would bring his fists back to work one day.