Old Words #2: Porcelain

Porcelain

She was breakable. I knew that as soon as I saw her. She just had that look about her. You know the one, the one that screams “I’m fragile so you’ve got to take care of me.” All pouty lips and flat hair that didn’t sit right. She was so pale too. Not a mark on her. I liked that in her, that untouched purity in her skin. It made me want to talk to her. To find out what her deal was. To see if she needed me.

I first saw her standing outside the video store; sucking on a lollipop in a ridiculously strange fashion. Like it would dissolve her teeth if she left it in her mouth to long. When I eat a lollipop I get bored after a while and crunch it down as soon as it will let me. I figured we were very different people that way. She was standing perfectly straight up against the wall, even her back didn’t arch. From far away it looked like she was standing still but as I got closer I could see her upper body moving slightly from side to side.

“Whatcha doin’?”, I asked because well, I was curious and I didn’t have anything to lose did I?

“Re-aligning my back”, she replied, like people come up to her outside video stores all the time and ask her things that are only her business.

“Erm...do you do this a lot? I mean like, shouldn’t you go to a chiropractor or a doctor or something?”, I made sure that I looked a suitable amount of concerned for a kind but still strange person attempting conversation.

“No they can’t help me anymore,” she said, as I heard her back grind and crack, “I’ve got porcelain bones. I’ll be able to fix it in a second.”

“Oh yeah?”, I asked her, “Like they got low density or something?”

“No”, she said, “I mean all of my actual skeleton is made of porcelain.”

“But how can that be? Porcelain is like a man-made product...”

“I don’t know what to tell you, it just is the way it is. Always has been. I came out that way.” You could tell that she’d been asked these types of questions a million times before but she was nice to me. Not angry like some people would be when a stranger comes up to them when they’re trying to minding their own business and questions their body make up.

I should have left it there and walked away. That would have been the polite thing to do. To let the girl be. But I couldn’t. I had to ask her. I had to know how she came to be. “So what happened? Like did your mother fuck a teapot?”, I didn’t mean it to come out so crude. To be so blunt. But there it was.

“You know what? I’ve never been asked that before.” I was about to feel very pleased with myself and my ability to come up with genius comedic lines about obscure medical conditions like that on the spot when I saw her pouty, fragile lips upcurl slightly. She looked different when she sneered. Maybe she wasn’t breakable after all.

I soon realised that dating a porcelain girl was not without its drawbacks. The girl can’t eat like normal people for a start, it’s all soup and eating lollipops like a crazy person. When I looked closer at her face I saw that her teeth were filled with hairline cracks and chips from years of overestimating what she could handle.

“I once chewed on a piece of granite for 3 whole minutes,” she told me one time. When I asked her as to why she would bother she told me it was just to see what could happen.

“And what did happen?” I asked.

She just smiled her broken smile and said, “Well, I don’t have any back teeth anymore.” And that was all their was to be said on the matter. Both her front teeth looked like they had been smashed head on. An overenthusiastic fourteen year old brace wearer, she explained. Among her handbag essentials were little tubes of super glue for all those just incases. The girl had some stories. The kind that make you want to bite the inside of your cheek to stop your body tensing up in imaginary pain. She told me that when she was seven she fell over and smashed her knee cap in to smithereens, shards of ceramic poking through her skin spurting out a lumpy concoction of crimson dyed porcelain dust. They gave her plastic knees after that like the kind old ladies get when their bones have ground down too much. More resilient that way. I asked her once why she didn’t just keep out of the way of trouble and spend a lot of time sitting down instead of eating gravel, kissing boys with braces and running in dangerous ways. She told me that there was no fun in a life like that and that she wished that someone would break her properly one time just to see what it felt like.

“ You don’t mean that,” I said even though despite myself I could feel my heart beating faster, “As soon as it happened you would freak out and regret it.”

“Would I?” she asked and held her arm out in front of me, “Why don’t you try it and see?”

I held her arm lightly with my hand and ran it up from her wrist to just below her shoulder, my eyes briefly went from where my hand was to her face and I could see her lips parting in a sharp intake of breath. Her eyes imploring me to press harder. I began to do as she wished and she closed her eyes. I saw her lips press together and moved my eyes back to her arm, my fingers had gripped her upper arm tightly and I could see her skin paling even further under my touch. Reluctantly but necessarily I released her, seeing her skin immediately purpling and moved my eyes once more to her mouth. Her lips had upcurled again, mockingly:

“Don’t think for one second that I believe you didn’t want to.”

After that things changed. She meticulously and regimentally set about trying to see how far she could push me. Exactly what it would take for me to break. She would set out traps for me. Leaving big patches of her skin exposed as we watched TV, with some sort of overly violent implement beside her. A hammer or something equally as subtle. Like I was just gonna smash her back in as soon as she turned around.

“Why don’t you just do it?” she would ask me in the middle of the night, “I know you want to.”

“It’s not the right time my love,” I would reply as I laid butterfly kisses all over her body.

I decided to wait until she stopped asking me to do it. I knew I would do it eventually, I would have to. It had gone too far by then, but it’s no fun breaking someone when they expect it to happen. I waited until one night when we were lying in bed. We had spent a nice day together at the beach.

“I do love you, you know,” she whispered.

“I love you too,” I replied.

Then I placed my hand firmly onto her breastbone, I spread it wide. I could see her eyes flutter closed and she tilted her head back further into the pillow. I pressed harder and her lips parted to gasp softly when I heard the first crack. Her eyelids shot open, her eyes big pools of black. “I’m going to do it now,” I said as I pressed even harder. She nodded silently but I knew as soon as it became a reality she would change her mind. It was too late now. I had already done it in my head. I will always remember the gulp she took as her chest gave way. In a clean break, an uneven circular dip formed between her breasts. It looked as though her whole chest must be completely hollow inside. I remember vaguely hearing her gurgling screams but it didn’t sound like her. It sounded as if someone was re-enacting the sounds that she could have made. Sounds from another point in time spliced with the image of the red and purple blotches rising up underneath her unbroken skin.