New Animal Ella Baxter (best books to read non fiction txt) 📖

of me like a gas. But then the moment passes, and in its place is a sharp physical pain that is on the cusp of being unbearable, paired with all the emotions I’d managed to repress. The grief and sadness return together, like two friends holding hands.

I reach back and run my fingers over the pattern of welts that are bubbling up along my thighs, until Leo yells at me to move my fucking hand, and for a moment all I can smell is plastic, and it is the only thing that feels familiar. People think sadness is a heavy emotion, but it can’t be heavy if it permeates everything. Sadness penetrates. It floods; a body can be filled with it. A body can absorb it like a sponge. When you are this far gone, you take everyone down with you. You snuff.

‘Hit me harder!’ I yell back at Leo.

He walks around and bends down until he is level with my ear. ‘What?’

‘More!’ I yell into his face.

Leo walks to the far end of the stage and cracks the whip so hard across my back that I feel my heartbeat pulse in my fingertips. He’s broken my skin. I shoot one hand up into the air and wave it from side to side. No more. The pain has shot up a register, and I clench my jaw while all senses overload. I wave my hand—no more—a swimmer out past the break. Not waving, but drowning. Was that a book? An album? A poem or an epitaph?

I turn around to stop him from swinging at me again, and he drops the whip and unbuckles his belt. I am crushed into the chair as his body slams into mine, bumping into the entrance to my cervix and rearranging my internal landscape. I’m actually breaking in half; he’s stretching my body to the point that it tears. He’s not wearing a condom, I realise. Maybe walking through the doorway of the club is considered giving consent. I would have thought it would involve signing something. At the funeral home we make people sign consent forms any time there is access to a person’s body. Police, next of kin, council members, doctors, cleaners. I decide, while fully penetrated, to consent, because you can always throw your body on the fire to keep others warm. I was already filled with petrol; he’s just a man-shaped match.

I focus on a fire hydrant attached to the wall ahead, half concealed by the leg of the bouncer. His jeans are pulled up so high that they must be belted over his belly button, and I shift my focus to his belt buckle as I withstand more. I swallow four times. I blink twenty-two times. I grind my teeth. Leo pushes into me harder, and I wonder why anyone is interested in scary movies, or piercings, or creating drama and chaos. Why would anyone willingly fall face first into a soup of all these things, on a stage right now, in front of an audience?

A large part of me is horrified. It didn’t need to be like this. What have you done? the large part is saying. Get up and walk away, it’s yelling. Move, woman, it screams. Get your body away from this. But there’s a small part that is harping on. There always is, isn’t there? What did you expect? it’s saying. Intimate things have been brutal since early childhood. You have had metal spoons shoved into your mouth while you weren’t looking. You have had lovely, silky bananas taken out of your hand, pronged onto a cold fork and shoved into your closed mouth. Is this any different? And the larger part is screaming, Yes, yes. This is very different. And the small part is saying, Well, it is and it isn’t.

‘This is my choice,’ I say, as Leo starts to take my endurance personally. I wrap my hands tighter around the chair legs so that I can dig my fingernails into my thumbs, waiting for the endorphins, whenever they may choose to arrive.

The bouncer smiles at me politely and I close my eyes in response, letting out a groan as I cope with the friction of Leo eroding my insides. I want my head to explode and my heart to billow out my neck like a hot-air balloon, getting bigger and bigger, until the audience will be forced to cling to me as we all take off into the sky. I want to project all the emotions I have across my huge balloon heart. I want people to see my pain and to be so alarmed by it that they check books to see whether it’s normal. I want to know if it is actually normal to feel so much and so little. I want people to tell me it’s okay. I want the whole crowd and the entire world to tell me that I’m doing what I should be. That it’s not too much, and that this is as hard as it will be. I want to be told I will survive my own feelings. I want.

Enough.

I push Leo away and he stumbles back from my body, his erection bouncing in front of him. I am sore and naked on the platform. I let go of the chair and sink into a ball on the ground. I look away from the audience and lift my hands to my face, keenly aware that I got what I wanted, and I now smell like someone unfamiliar.

‘I am not coping,’ I say.

Leo zips up his trousers and rethreads his belt. He keeps me in his line of vision, confused and a little wary of what I might do. Like I’m something wild he doesn’t want to further alarm, he picks his shirt up off the floor slowly, holding it up like a matador’s cape as he takes small steps towards me. He looks genuinely concerned, and I sense he regrets plugging into a socket that is so