I AM STRUCK DEAD AT THE CLASP OF HER HAND
ISADORA H. PETROVSKY
Original Publication Indecent Magazine August 2022
I am struck dead at the clasp of her hand.
I run through the streets, the warmth of her fingers lingering in my palms, declaring my love. No one hears, no one sees how my heart trills a sweet melody when she calls for me. In a world where women like me are already toeing the line between corporeal and effervescent, I disappear. Buried beneath slabs of unforgiving earth, and yet walking among you. I reach out my voice and my hand to strangers who pass me by, but I am met with nothing other than the disgruntled scrunch of a brow, as if a gust of wind has slapped them in the face, too close for comfort and yet inconsequential.
…
It begins beneath my mother’s roof. She has invited the strangers into our home but I can forgive her for it, for she has seen my hand wrapped in my lover’s and perceived.
My lover wraps her warm, grounding digits around mine as the party sways into motion. Men in coattails lean over their women and their half-filled drinks in dim corners and musty places. These are remarkably difficult to find in a house so open. They manage. They always have.
A woman with gloves that crawl up to her elbows, and her husband, who sports a top hat, come to greet me. I may have known them once, before their eyes grew crow’s feet, but they do not know me now.
“How lovely it is to see you dear,” the wife says. Her manicured nails clasp my free hand even through her gloves, as if her grip will be as soft and welcoming as my lover’s. It is not, it bites and pulls at me, drawing me away from the contented quiet of the presence of someone I can actually stand to be around.
Faux smiles and the shaking of hands proves to both of them that I am solid, a real and true being that stands before them. They seemed please to know that despite my lover’s hand in mine, that I am a person too. It surprises them, they try to wrap spindled unforgiving minds around it.
“It is lovely to see a friendship so close.” He tips his hat to our joined hands.
I recede into the wood work; the lowlight and the steady thrum of chatter and music conceal me within the walls of my home. I see myself, stiff and smiling, shaking their hands again, waving politely goodbye as they move on to torment some other guest with their drab conversation.
The party continues on without me, and all the while I watch from behind the slats in the wall, huddled against my partner as if she is the only thing that keeps me physical, pulled down to the earth, real. If she were absent, I would think that I am not real, that perhaps I never have been. She squeezes my hand with soft fingers. We hide there together not by choice, but by perception.
…
In the public gardens I have frequented since childhood, I am congratulated for spending time with my sister. I am an only child. An adult woman who picnics and frolics with her partner as so many others do.
I see a man and a woman farther off who are sandwiched together on the grass. The man’s suit jacket is abandoned on the blanket. The buttons on his white shirt are undone around his neck. The woman is dressed in this similar half-put together way. Corseted waist becomes hourglass in voluminous skirts. I see a flash of plush leg beneath them, her stockings lain out beside the man’s coat. The man’s thick fingers pop green grapes into her pretty pink smiling mouth. There is no question they are a couple. There is no stranger who mistakes them for siblings, who congratulates them on being so close, so incestuous.
Before I am able to correct this mistaken fool— who takes frolicking and flirting with my lover for familial affection—I find my limbs have lost their pallor. I lift my arm to the sun and through what once was skin and bone, muscle and sinew, I can see the blue of the autumn sky and the fluffed clouds that drift upon it. There lacks even a faint outline of what were once short, dense hands pressed with her finger’s indents. Nor are there silhouetted legs tangled together in the grass. There is no wall to recede into this time. No feigning corporealness. Even in in the bright open air I am unseen. Transparent.
…
It builds within my chest, but I catch my scream in my throat. Hot tears pool in my eyes.
Father doesn’t care. He doesn’t see me.
A vase from his travels lays fragmented on the ground. Shattered. My not quite-hand quivers in the air, post-strike.
There is a fever in that shaking. A hunger.
I am a storm. A gust of wind blown in from a window left open.
The bust in the hall splits open its head on cold checkered marble, dented. The rug mangled and shoved. Silent screams rattle the crystal in the kitchen cabinets, until they open and come spilling out in waves of broken glass. Plates mingle with the window pane in the garden soil. Paintings of long dead familial relations lose body parts in wide scratches.
The tapestry in the parlor, above the candelabra and its floral adornments, comes down last. Yanked in a musty huff, the dust settles. There is silence for a brief moment before the crackling of the fire, and the howl of that unwelcome wind.
It brushes through the fields. Runs amuck in the city streets. People close their doors against it. Against me.
I seep into the cracks, reverberate in oldest stone and youngest wood. The city folk leave their homes, brave the wind that pushes smoke down their throats. Eyes cast toward fire that laps up the remainder of the manor on the hill.
Folded hands and hunched bodies bow to the flying cinders. When piety and its many limbs catch flame, they are forced to wrench their eyes to the sky.
Hands clasp together; they think to pray it away.
Look to the fire, you fools.
Now do you see me?
Original Publication Indecent Magazine August 2022
I am struck dead at the clasp of her hand.
I run through the streets, the warmth of her fingers lingering in my palms, declaring my love. No one hears, no one sees how my heart trills a sweet melody when she calls for me. In a world where women like me are already toeing the line between corporeal and effervescent, I disappear. Buried beneath slabs of unforgiving earth, and yet walking among you. I reach out my voice and my hand to strangers who pass me by, but I am met with nothing other than the disgruntled scrunch of a brow, as if a gust of wind has slapped them in the face, too close for comfort and yet inconsequential.
…
It begins beneath my mother’s roof. She has invited the strangers into our home but I can forgive her for it, for she has seen my hand wrapped in my lover’s and perceived.
My lover wraps her warm, grounding digits around mine as the party sways into motion. Men in coattails lean over their women and their half-filled drinks in dim corners and musty places. These are remarkably difficult to find in a house so open. They manage. They always have.
A woman with gloves that crawl up to her elbows, and her husband, who sports a top hat, come to greet me. I may have known them once, before their eyes grew crow’s feet, but they do not know me now.
“How lovely it is to see you dear,” the wife says. Her manicured nails clasp my free hand even through her gloves, as if her grip will be as soft and welcoming as my lover’s. It is not, it bites and pulls at me, drawing me away from the contented quiet of the presence of someone I can actually stand to be around.
Faux smiles and the shaking of hands proves to both of them that I am solid, a real and true being that stands before them. They seemed please to know that despite my lover’s hand in mine, that I am a person too. It surprises them, they try to wrap spindled unforgiving minds around it.
“It is lovely to see a friendship so close.” He tips his hat to our joined hands.
I recede into the wood work; the lowlight and the steady thrum of chatter and music conceal me within the walls of my home. I see myself, stiff and smiling, shaking their hands again, waving politely goodbye as they move on to torment some other guest with their drab conversation.
The party continues on without me, and all the while I watch from behind the slats in the wall, huddled against my partner as if she is the only thing that keeps me physical, pulled down to the earth, real. If she were absent, I would think that I am not real, that perhaps I never have been. She squeezes my hand with soft fingers. We hide there together not by choice, but by perception.
…
In the public gardens I have frequented since childhood, I am congratulated for spending time with my sister. I am an only child. An adult woman who picnics and frolics with her partner as so many others do.
I see a man and a woman farther off who are sandwiched together on the grass. The man’s suit jacket is abandoned on the blanket. The buttons on his white shirt are undone around his neck. The woman is dressed in this similar half-put together way. Corseted waist becomes hourglass in voluminous skirts. I see a flash of plush leg beneath them, her stockings lain out beside the man’s coat. The man’s thick fingers pop green grapes into her pretty pink smiling mouth. There is no question they are a couple. There is no stranger who mistakes them for siblings, who congratulates them on being so close, so incestuous.
Before I am able to correct this mistaken fool— who takes frolicking and flirting with my lover for familial affection—I find my limbs have lost their pallor. I lift my arm to the sun and through what once was skin and bone, muscle and sinew, I can see the blue of the autumn sky and the fluffed clouds that drift upon it. There lacks even a faint outline of what were once short, dense hands pressed with her finger’s indents. Nor are there silhouetted legs tangled together in the grass. There is no wall to recede into this time. No feigning corporealness. Even in in the bright open air I am unseen. Transparent.
…
It builds within my chest, but I catch my scream in my throat. Hot tears pool in my eyes.
Father doesn’t care. He doesn’t see me.
A vase from his travels lays fragmented on the ground. Shattered. My not quite-hand quivers in the air, post-strike.
There is a fever in that shaking. A hunger.
I am a storm. A gust of wind blown in from a window left open.
The bust in the hall splits open its head on cold checkered marble, dented. The rug mangled and shoved. Silent screams rattle the crystal in the kitchen cabinets, until they open and come spilling out in waves of broken glass. Plates mingle with the window pane in the garden soil. Paintings of long dead familial relations lose body parts in wide scratches.
The tapestry in the parlor, above the candelabra and its floral adornments, comes down last. Yanked in a musty huff, the dust settles. There is silence for a brief moment before the crackling of the fire, and the howl of that unwelcome wind.
It brushes through the fields. Runs amuck in the city streets. People close their doors against it. Against me.
I seep into the cracks, reverberate in oldest stone and youngest wood. The city folk leave their homes, brave the wind that pushes smoke down their throats. Eyes cast toward fire that laps up the remainder of the manor on the hill.
Folded hands and hunched bodies bow to the flying cinders. When piety and its many limbs catch flame, they are forced to wrench their eyes to the sky.
Hands clasp together; they think to pray it away.
Look to the fire, you fools.
Now do you see me?
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ISADORA H. PETROVSKY is a queer author who aims to redress LGBTQIAP+ and female erasure primarily through the subversion of fantastical tropes and folktales/fairy tales. She is currently attending the MFA Writing program at UC San Diego. When not writing, she can be found working as a copy writer, reading, playing D&D, and spoiling her cat Basil. Isadora was awarded Ron L. Hubbard Writers of the Future Honorable Mention for her short story "Red", published in Gingerbread House Lit Mag. To keep up with Isadora and her work, follow her @izzypetrovsky on Instagram, @ihpetrovsky on Twitter or visit her website https://isadorahpetrovsky.wordpress.com/.
/// For me being kaleidoscoped feels presently like a state of fracture, fragmentation. A lens through which to view yourself, and even others, that is both distorted and in pieces, but perhaps more indicative of the messiness and the whimsicality of what being human is. /// Ghosts & Gossip: "I Am Struck Dead at the Clasp of Her Hand" is about how society's perception of wlw individuals can often make ghosts of us. The way that people talk about wlw partnerships in terms of "Sappho and her friend" or "sisterhood" eliminates the romantic and sometimes sexual nature of these kinds of partnerships in favor for something more societally palitable. So really the gossip is what makes the ghosts. |