Muscle
“Muscle” was a winner of the 2019 Short Short Fiction Prize and originally appeared in the Winter/Spring 2019 issue of TSR.
The summer I turned sixteen, I slept with my rowing coach. It was the first time I had sex in the way it happens sometimes, as a surprise. We were at his younger brother’s funeral, my first boyfriend, then we were along the canal bank, on his suit jacket, me tightening my muscles around him.
Joe had his reasons, or didn’t. He reminded me enough of Mike, straight angles everywhere, cheekbones, rib bones, hips sharp. I needed to stop the loop in my head of Mike loping to the dock, four blades on his shoulder, and the impossible grace he displayed setting them down.
I told Sue the next day. We walked to the hospital, past the convent where we played hide and seek as eight-year-olds. The main building stood empty now. Through the kitchen window we saw plates on a table collecting dust, harvesting mold, as if the nuns had left unexpectedly, as if they’d return. But there was no money to repair the plumbing and electricity, not from the Order, not from the city. Within a year the convent was leveled for the Hawk Estates—only a brick fireplace inexplicably left standing near the new tennis courts.
At the emergency room, the doctor asked, not unkindly, why I hadn’t used protection.
“I didn’t think it’d get that far.”
“Guess you need to be prepared for it to happen again,” he said as he handed me six packs of birth control pills. “Two pills now, two more in twelve hours.” As easy as that, if I took them soon, if there were no complications.
All that summer I ran three miles to the boathouse, then flung myself, no fear, against the oar during practice. My arms stretched out and reaching, quick with the hands, I’d drop my blade in and feel myself suspended against the weight of the water. My legs pushing. My body swinging back forcefully. My arms drawing in.
“You have such feel for the run of the boat,” Joe said, but I was awed by the memory of my muscles, how they moved on their own.