By Jessie Atkin
I do not want children I decide, stretched out beneath the eyes of the late-night newsmen. My own eyes ache, but not as much as my ears, as my age, as my soul. Yet this ache, this loss without losing, without losing anything I have but the future stings less. It stings less because I choose, even if it is a choice of deprivation. But we have been deprived so long in this house, in this city, in this country. The face of this country is a man’s face, and the face of this family is a man’s, will be a man’s, in image and in name. Because my name is a man’s, given to me by my mother with only the question of ‘will you take his name,’ not ‘who’s name will you take?’ And they take and we give. They trade us names in exchange for babies so that we can give them more children to take more of their names. These are the names that will be carried into the future to represent them and not me. But who would want to represent me? Who would want to represent something so secondary? So low? So inhuman? For I am inhuman. On the rug, beneath the TV that tells me so, I am not a person. I am not a whole person. Like my daddy, like my brother, like the walls of Wall Street. All have more rights than me. Rights, or wrongs as my sister calls them. They have all the wrongs, she says. She says many things. Things to fill the silence and drown out the noise. But it is harder to drown something you feel, not just something you hear. I didn’t hear his hand on my back. I felt it. Felt it in stiff stock-still silence. Still, his hand moved beneath my shirt until it was beneath my waistband. The waistband of my jeans, which wasn’t so tight as my dad said because, if it were, no hand would have fit. But it would have fit no matter the size of my jeans. Jeans I was wearing, like everyone wears, all of them wearing and sitting, and oblivious because what was happening was normal. Normal, like what I was wearing. Normal like what he was wanting, and what the newsmen said he could take. It’s what the movies said he could take. It’s what the law said he could take. So I take my sister aside and tell her I’m not going to have children. I tell her they can have all the wrongs, but I won’t give them anything else to take from me. She tells me I don’t know, not now, how can I? How can you? You’re fourteen, you’re a baby, she says, as if sixteen is so much less of a baby. As if the babies aren’t the whole point anyway. And anyway, if I’m a baby I should matter more, according to Twitter, and television, and talk radio. You only lose your personhood with your babyhood. Only when you have opinions and ovaries, boobs and babies of your own do you lose the other things you could have had too. You lose them to history and tradition written down by the very humans who don’t have the things they punish you for having. I can’t have babies, I say. And she says, I know that’s not true. It’s true I can’t have human babies, I correct. I am not a human. I am not a person. Not a person? Is a woman not a person? No, I say. I am no mere man with grief and woe connected to the letters. I am more. I am Athena, I am Artemis, I am an Amazon. The Amazon is a river in Peru and the power of gods on earth is impossible, she replies. But I know impossible is where we already live.
Jessie Atkin received her MFA in creative writing from American University in 2015. She has had short work featured in the Young Adult Review Network, The Grief Diaries, Quantum Fairy Tales and The Rumpus. She has also had two plays honored and produced as staged readings through Rochester New York’s Geva Theater Regional Writers Showcase and the Washington University in St. Louis A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Competition and Festival. She published her YA novel, We Are Savages, in 2012. Visit her website at www.jessieatkin.com and follow her on Twitter @JessieA_7.
Photo credit: Maternity ward, 1918, U.S. Library of Congress.
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