The 7-11 That Exists in Every Reality
Any absence maps the contours of a presence. Like the space between the shards of a chrysalis, shattered by the wild thing inside, or between the lines of a poem that contains the possibility of its own infinite unfolding, which is to say: any text at all. Let me say clearly that these are metaphors for the uterus. As is the ocean, or the Slurpee machine in the 7-11, which would empty, then replenish itself in a cycle that seemed infinite back then. What do you mean, what 7-11? You know there is only one 7-11 that exists in every reality, and it is the one on Route 35 that was in walking distance from your old house. Wandering the aisles on endless summer afternoons, lips glossed and ponytails high. The Coke Slurpee would sluice down in a reddish-brown strand that stained the pristine cup like a blush. Do you remember the story I told my parents about why the doctors scheduled an induction? The winter’s viral surge, the hospital staff strapped, my advanced maternal age—it was almost true, but missing the white blotches on my last ultrasound, each one blank as a page. God, I worried, as snow pelted the car and contractions knifed my lower back: If I hemorrhaged, my parents would know I lied and I would be in so much trouble! The uterus is also a time machine, which is to say: any text at all. We slid a box of tampons from the shelf and, giggles fizzing, paid for them and two Coke Slurpees with our parents’ money. The ultrasound either showed ablations, scar tissue where my last placenta had clung to the uterine wall, or else it showed the absence of any linear narrative at all. Do you remember the men outside the 7-11 one night, or maybe it was every night, on every highway, roamed by all the other girls like us? We walked away too quickly to make out what they said, but we would have other chances, the words to be picked up, revised, repeated by the men who stood close to us on subway cars and matched our pace on the streets, who lingered in the hallways leading from bars to bathrooms. There was no cause for panic, one of the nurses said. The blood bank was on call, the anesthesiologists prepared. But she sighed with relief when the placenta slid into her gloved hands, nothing inscribed on its surface, nothing rushing from me in its wake. Do you remember stealing away at the pool party, doling out tampons to the girls whose parents counted them as penetration? In one reality, I buy a kit with live caterpillars and my daughters release butterflies into the sunlit yard, laughing with their little hands outstretched. In another, my daughters watch the butterflies hatch in reverse. They fly back into the chrysalises that reassemble themselves, now unbroken, now enfolding, a pool of dark syrup waiting in their hollow plastic tray.
Lynne Beckenstein (@lynnebeckenstein.bsky.social) is a writer living in Connecticut. She teaches at Fordham University, and her writing has appeared in PANK, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, and elsewhere.