The Inside-Out Woman
The Inside-Out Woman wings her arms all the time, a bird about to take off. Across her torso and back and belly hang her organs, a web of scarlet, wet-tooth gleaming. Everything is otherwise unremarkable: the stomach digests and the lungs expand and the liver, a dense sponge, does whatever livers do. So the Inside-Out Woman stands for hours as a living dummy, her whole body a teachable moment. Medical students hover their pens millimeters from the moons of her kidneys, from her fallopian tubes gripping white-knuckled. She twitches constantly, the way horses shiver away heat-sick flies. The students, mostly men, marvel at her, the splendor of the human form—the slinking worms of her veins, the rippling of her intestines. How alive she is, they whisper to one another, how perfectly alive. Floating their hands down the pulsing slippery glisten of her. The Inside-Out Woman wonders if they would see her as alive if they could watch none of the vital organs sustaining her, if she were simply skin instead.
The Famished Woman
The Famished Woman has no flesh; she is bird-bone hollow, flying-light. Her skin is vacuumed close, sealed tight to the gully between tibia and fibula and mangrove root clavicle. She can hear her joints click, a metronome counting the time she has not wasted away. Men love the Famished Woman, finger her winging cheekbones, the deltas of veins washing the backs of her hands; they wrap her in their arms, shield her from the elements—bullets of rain, blunt-handed shove of wind, even watery spokes of sunlight. I’ll protect you, they soothe. She is starving all the time, hole-ripped-in-the-universe hunger, but her stomach can never contain more than a side salad; the men watch each leaf as it rides through the cave of her body. They always get the urge to carry her home, swinging her into their arms like she is absolutely nothing: a wad of tissues or tumbleweed of cat hair or pile of leaves that can be swept away, dispersed without hardship. Each time, she feels unglued, feels how easy it would be to tear herself asunder. The Famished Woman tries to straighten herself into a knife when they fuck her, an object sharp and dangerous and honed, a weapon of unbelievable heft.
The Bent Woman
The Bent Woman is always staring down. She works at a computer all day—never looking up, never looking anyone in the eye. Her boss orders her a special ergonomic chair and says, I didn’t have to do this, you know. Thank you, the Bent Woman replies. She smiles even though nobody can see her face.
The Moldable Woman
The Moldable Woman is hot to the touch, sizzling, just-baked hot, scorch-the-skin-off hot, so hot she steams when it rains. Men go wild when they feel her, the molten gold skin that sticks in their mouths. They shout when she holds them inside her and she whispers Yes yes harder yes, only they cannot go harder, they are melting, becoming part of her; after they wipe themselves down and toss the towel on her belly, they say, I don’t think I’ll ever get you off me, and the Moldable Woman knows it is true, and she runs her hands over the tiny holes they leave. The edges of her body are stubbled with divots, the places where lips met skin and fused for only a second, and she remembers each one and loves that they are the ones to carry her around, that she will always cling to them, just a bit, like a melted spatula clings to a pan.
The Mirror Woman
When men look at the Mirror Woman, they only see themselves. Her skin is polished, gleaming, reflective; she carries a small bottle of glass cleaner in her purse for touch-ups, to wipe away fingerprints and water spots and oily smudges. From men standing so close, breath fogging her cheeks, hot and crusty and wanting, saying, Oh God, I didn’t see you there, I didn’t see anyone there at all. That’s all right, she tells them, whispering. They are staring again. That’s OK, she says. Her voice fades, almost nonexistent. She pulls out her glass spray, her always-damp cloth. She only cleans after the men walk away.
The Jigsaw Woman
The Jigsaw Woman is fun at parties, where she disconnects her fingers, hands them out as drink stirrers. She is fun when there are people to impress—her most popular joke is where she takes off her ear, hands it to a person in her group, and says, Don’t worry, I’m still listening, I just need more booze. Everyone laughs. And everyone has a favorite trick of hers—removing her nose when she smells something bad, unhinging her jaw when she’s hungry, taking off a hand to soothe that spot in the middle of someone’s back. But don’t get her wrong. The Jigsaw Woman is the whole package, around 206 pieces of the package, as she jokes, and she is fun on quiet nights in, too, when people need something to dissect and reassemble. It doesn’t hurt, she assures them as she gasps. She snaps back into place easily. She can be everywhere at once. She promises nothing ever leaves a mark.
The Shell Woman
The Shell Woman has a crust, a husk that sounds like baby birds are underneath, always trying to break out. When injured, she becomes a frozen pond, an iced-over body frosting with cracks. Her boyfriend threw her against a wall once, and it happened with tiny gunshot strikes, fractures of human-colored glass spreading over her whole body faster than she could patch them, finer than hair. She was a mosaic for a short time, a creation intentionally splintered, artfully shattered, and when her boyfriend whispered, stroking her fissured skin, Baby, look how beautiful, she tried to remember this was not her natural state, that breaking was not the purpose of her body.