CNF: Short Shorts
by Erika Eckart
Daisy Dukes
Half a cheek is hanging out, but if I say anything she throws her clothes at me, so I grind my teeth and repress my urge to tell her to cover up. I begrudge time as my girl’s legs elongate, her knees turn to smooth bulbs. I want to compress her long stalks in a funhouse mirror of permanent girlhood because I know the danger in her new shape. It will make her prey: men will start leering, she’ll have to hold keys between her fingers, cover her drink with her hand, speed up when she hears someone behind her; girls will attack from all directions—too pretty, not pretty enough, where are you going in that? And it will make her prey on herself, in a I’ll-destroy-it-before-you-can-kind of way. It is starting already. I watch her in the mirror pulling in her cheeks, sucking her stomach in, grabbing at the flesh on her abdomen to reveal more bone, trying to make a handle of her rib cage. Do you think I’m fat? she asks. The look on her face says she wants to collapse in, with great force like a cartoon-reenactment of the working of a black hole. I want it even now, the thing she is seeking, to collapse in on myself, to fold. Yes, to have long, angled limbs, but mostly that feeling of finger nails digging into my sides, creating a density that could cause implosion. I want to get smaller and smaller, to disappear, to be invisible, to be no bother, a wisp, a barely visible stroke with a calligraphy pen. It is an adaptation, these behaviors. It is the way we have survived in a world hostile to and hungry for our bodies. On some Polynesian Islands, birds have evolved to be flightless because of the lack of predators. Raspberry bushes there do not bother making thorns, because there is no one to eat them. What would it be to blossom in a place where there is nothing ready to devour us as soon as the first petal surfaces? Would we love our skin—grow it out—expand into available space pliant and plushy, flaunting to each other the ability of our flesh to press back at fabric, to pull it apart at its seams?
Erika Eckart is the author of the tyranny of heirlooms, a chapbook of interconnected prose poems, (Sundress Publications, 2018). Her writing has appeared in Double Room, Ghost Ocean, Quarter After Eight, Quick Fiction, Nano Fiction and Quiditty, and elsewhere. She is a High School English Teacher and mom in Oak Park, IL.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Short Shorts”? Parenting an 11 year old daughter, I’m reliving that precarious time, how excited I was to grow up, how in danger I felt when men looked at me, the guy at the 7-11 who touched my hand, a hotel clerk who lurked behind me in a hall, and how my mother and family members talked about my body, its need to be protected, kept pure, and if not violences would be inflicted on me, on everybody, and then somehow connected and simultaneous the girls: the tyranny of having the right clothes, the right hair, the right body, none of which I ever had but I got pretty close on the last one through a 1,200 calorie a day diet and the weird beauty standards of the 90’s. My shoulder blades with no cushion were like sharp wings, like a heavy metal bird, and when that happened, I earned the acclaim of my peers and adults alike, they all wanted my help putting them on diets. So the origin of this poem is my desire to bend culture, to bend time, to keep my daughter from the experiences that shaped my coming of age, to free her from them, because alas she seems to be going down some of the same holes, like she found my map; it’s written in her bones, and there is no escape. I’m trying to re-write the code or at least to call it out. I teach high school and we have an amazing Spoken Word teacher who leads a poetry unit that gives me an opportunity to read my work to my class, and while this was in development I read it to a room of 14 year olds, and the eyes of the girls and their solid minute of quiet after told me I was on to something, that they too felt held captive by this and had an interest in hearing it articulated and in some small way neutered with words, brought to the light.
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