I’d come here a while before—I remember that. Auntie had come and we had discussed some things and they were all hard to bear, painful to face, but important to voice out loud. It hadn’t been a good night, honestly—and even though Chico had found himself a new friend that time, it was still something I looked back on with apprehension.

But I hadn’t come there to talk to Auntie in the first place, though. I had come to look in the pool—to look in the mirror—and here I was again, doing the same thing. I don’t know why I had the compulsion to come back, to look at myself again, but yeah, here I was. And maybe it had something to do with what was going on in the Edge and all the people there but the urge to look at myself—to look at myself, to gage myself again, to see how much I had grown—captured my attention and drove out everything else.

Don’t jump in the water, dude, I told Chico from where I was standing by the bank, I wanna keep it as still as possible, don’t fuck it up.

Yeah, yeah, whatever B, Chico replied, trundling off somewhere in the thicket to take a hearty shit, lemme know if you have weird lump somewhere.

Heard.

I don’t know what I was looking for, though. Before I had just been assessing my body as a body I guess, wondering to myself what kind of a body a girl like me was supposed to have (I was still having trouble thinking myself as a woman and I didn’t know why. Before it didn’t bother me, and technically it still doesn’t, I guess, but I didn’t know what that meant. Was there a question I wasn’t asking myself somewhere?). I still didn’t know how to feel about my thick neck, or my broad shoulders, which were only accented by the thick leather straps of Sparkmarrow’s sheath and the glimmer of the blades resting against my side. It only looked like I had gotten thicker since I’ve looked at myself. I didn’t know what that meant, either (well, obviously it just meant I was older and had a little more muscle to show for it, but like. I was thinking about gender implications or some shit. I was still feeling my way in the dark).

I turned my head, reaching for Sparkmarrow’s hilt—but I kept my eye on my reflection and how it moved and flexed in the calm water, watching as some things bulged and other things were pulled taut with my motion. Was this the body of a warrior? But I had seen other warriors, female warriors, with all kinds of shapes and sizes that weren’t this. This was just me. And somehow I still didn’t know what that was.

…I need to talk to Ma, I thought suddenly, something powerful in me welling up as the idea flashed through my mind. It was a weird longing—cuz it had been an excuse for seasons now, allowing me houseroom in the World’s Edge and time to deal with shit I still didn’t know how to deal with. But here it was now, the urge flashing through my bones as I looked myself in the eye for the first time in forever.







talk
Chico