Tina, Trapped and Released
Tina had a body like a bunker, little tennis ball tits
bound close to her chest and unshakeable. She
looked like somebody had pressed down on her
from above. Like God had, maybe, pressed her head
down into her tight neck, her broad shoulders, kept
pressing and pressing until everything shifted and
settled to become an object, hard and rectangular
and meant for storage, meant to insulate or be
insulated, compacted and at rest.
I was sixteen and bored and I was waiting for her
to burst.
“A bunker will not burst,” my mother said. “That
is the point of a bunker. You may be confusing
‘bunker’ with ‘balloon’.”
But what did she know—a lifetime away from high
spent puking quietly in someone else’s bathroom,
“Depression can lead to compression.” This my
mother’s explanation of Tina’s body, and she
would know—a lifetime spent depressed, her body
the ankles, the thighs, the insides of the arms, to
bone prisons.
shut, forever leaking judgments and benedictions
where they did or did not belong.
We were all trapped in our bodies, but Tina had it
bad. Tina was going to go. Someone had to go. We
could all feel it. We needed it. We needed to see
that it could be done, that a body could be shed,
that there was something else out there for us,
something even better, maybe.
Tina’s parents had been animal rights activists, the
wonky kind, a little misguided and well meaning
and under informed. ‘Had been’ because, irony
wanting what it wants, they were trampled to
death by an elephant at the zoo when an attempt
to ‘liberate’ the animals went awry.
I was, of course, in love with Tina, and did not want
her to go. More than anything I wanted to seize her
After the incident, Tina’s parents haunted her.
They climbed inside her, demanding protection,
demanding not to be forgotten. Like any good
bunker, Tina took them in and stowed them away.
She built her walls higher and tighter and thicker.
Her skin grew taut and impenetrable.
and swing her about like a ragdoll until she spun
right into me, until we merged. But we never even
touched, because Tina did go. My mother sat me
down before supper. “Tina has taken her own life,”
she said. Taken it where? I wondered. I have always
wondered. I have asked, but no one has told me.
No one will ever tell me.
I never once heard her speak a single word. I
imagined it all, the accouterment and accumulation
of a single human life, all those sentences she
never spoke, imagined them piling up inside her,
Carrie Guss
[email protected]
Carrie Guss is a Canadian writer and artist with illustrations and
photography appearing most recently in Lucky Peach, AOL News Online,
and SmokeLong Quarterly. She has another, shorter story forthcoming
in NANO Fiction. You can access her portfolio online at carrieguss.com
14