Assistant Editor Toni Judnitch: In this twist on a creation myth, R. Cross’s “A Young Woman Made Up of Dirt” explores self-definition and womanhood through the speaker’s musings on her formation and destruction. The manipulation of tense and clipped lines imbues this story with questions of being, presenting a woman who seeks meaning and control of her own destiny through her own seemingly inevitable (and paradoxical) unmaking.
A Young Woman Made Up of Dirt
My body is made of unbaked clay, my chromosomes expressing such that I am a young woman made up of dirt. Nowhere in me is blood or an organ, just silt that can be reshaped if you add moisture to my limbs and give them a squeeze.
When it rains, I drip.
When it’s warm, my joints stiffen.
If I want to commit suicide, the quick way is to walk into a body of water and let myself disintegrate into the still floor of a pond or become particles a river carries.
No man loves me.
No man will ever love me.
My father was a garbage heap.
My mother: the hands of God sifting for a cocreator amid a pile of discarded things.
Every day I pinch off another piece of myself and toss it. Eventually I’ll be just one hand struggling to reach more of itself to tear more pieces off and I will have to seek help to finish the job.
And once I’ve finally done it, once I’m just pieces scattered, it will feel like freedom or annihilation; it will be my shining moment or no moment at all.
My mother will walk the earth, cupping dirt in her hands, looking for her baby in it, wondering where I went, the pieces I tore off and threw as the ground returning to myself.
R. Cross is a writer from the Midwest. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where she was also awarded a Zell Fellowship. Her prose has been featured in Glimmer Train, SmokeLong Quarterly, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Day One, Fugue, and elsewhere. She won first prize in Glimmer Train’s September/October 2018 Short Story Award for New Writers. You can find her online at rcross.net.
For more miCRo pieces, CLICK HERE
