Hollow Girls Learn to Smash
Sister Ann kept three of us after school.
She passed out crowbars to the three of us, quiet girls, said that in exchange for our labor, our lunches will be free for one week and I’m hot, she’s noticed that food will move me. But also, she said, this is an honor, not a punishment, that’s why you three have been chosen.
We broke down the glass sitting in barrels outside the convent. She didn’t give us goggles but we knew to keep our mouths shut, we smashed bottles into shards, the pistons of our arms worked, pump, smash, pump, smash, girls as machines, smashing green necks and amber punts into shards and gristle so the sisters can get more bang for their buck at the recycling center. We glanced at each other but we did not confer, we did not stop, our noses ran at the smell of old wine, dried beer, ruined fruit, marinara, olives, thousand island dressing. A piece of glass pierced my palm and I shook it loose, wiped the blood on my skirt, kept going, up down pump smash. My arms filled with tired blood, grew heavy and thick, my eyes went white behind the lids.
How much did lunch cost for three hollow girls?
How much glass had I swallowed, would it travel from my throat to my stomach, would it grind itself into the tubes of my body, collect in the folds and hairpin turns, dam me, damn me, would I turn yellow then blue from the poisons unable to leak in their usual way from my skin, my throat, my crotch?
How did I get here, why was no one coming to check on us.
I let go of my percussive flesh, pulled the other two girls with me, we were light, just bones and sacs, we rose. Look, I said, they told us to break the glass then surrounded us with glass. I pointed. The windshield of the convent’s Ford Tempo, the door to the rectory, the stained-glass windows, the Stations of the Cross where Jesus falls a second time, a third time, father, why have you forsaken me.
They said to smash!
We swing high and swing low, we dance to the starlight sound of breaking glass, we are light, alight, we are doing what we’re told to do, three girls learning how to land a blow.
Later, sitting for a haircut, a shard comes out of my scalp.
Sister Ann told us to do it, I told my mother.
Do what. She doesn’t understand, she cannot imagine. Something like
this, in America.
She is torn, holding a shard and two conflicting impulses at once: she is
impressed and disgusted by my bovine obedience.
Lydia Kim is a writer based in the Bay Area. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, poeisis, Ursa Minor, Reflex Fiction, and Longleaf Review and in the anthologies And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing, Lunchbox Moments, and Non-White and Woman. Her work has been supported by Tin House and Rooted and Written and she is the recipient of the 2023 de Groot Foundation grant and the 2022 SF Fdn/Nomadic Press Fiction Award. She’s absolutely thrilled to have work appearing at Hellebore.
