Untitled Project

"Have a seat."

"On the couch?" I asked, looking around for the proverbial leather seating.

"There is no'couch' I'm afraid, but I can assure you that one of these vinyl chairs will more than suffice," the shrink said with an open-handed gesture toward a pair of generic gray singles with wood trim.

The office was unimpressibe; the sort of sterile, wood-paneled remnant of an era when people snorted blow before going to the hairdresser's to get that godawful 'Farrah' cut. I knew all about these types of offices. I'd been here before. In primary school, when I ate crayons and guzzled Elmer's Glue on a daily basis, in junior high, when I'd lift my skirt to random boys for a dollar, in high school, when they caught me whacking off Mr. Murray, the biology teacher, and countless other times after that I'd end up in places like this.

"You need professional help and we're here to make sure you get it, Miss Foster," they'd say.

When I was born, my head was very big. I don't mean I was arrogant, just plain big-headed. Tore up my mother's shit pretty bad on the way out and was never allowed to forget it.

"See this scar?" my mother would say, pointing at the dark pink line that ran upwards from her shaved vagina to the area just below her navel. Another line almost identical to the one above her snatch was hidden in the crack of her ass.

"This is why you sleep in the closet. This is why I can't have sex anymore."

After the painful birth, which my grandparents insisted mother endure without anesthesia, doctors informed her that there had been irreparable damage to the clitoris, thereby causing any vaginal sexual intercourse to be "mildly discomforting."

This was why I slept in the closet.