Maximum Allowance
by Shareen K. Murayama
She used to be adept at becoming invisible. To help matters, she saved her words for essential desires. Ten words a week was a gentle reminder to her parents that they still owned a child. She materialized to expend two words—roller skates—as she pointed to her birthday on the calendar. It was especially expensive when they forced her to use her words. What do you say to your uncle who brought you this gift? Shoulders shrugged. What do you say?! She sighed. Thank you very much, for the teddy bear. Eight. whole. words. She turned her face away from his chest-belly in order to breathe. He bent down lower to brush his coral against her skin, but she refused to spend another word on him.
He flew in every year to visit them. He took pleasure in grabbing and tickling her feet until her body stiffened, inadvertently squeezed warm drops of pee onto her underwear. He knew, then, to stop. For a whole year, she surveyed her uncle as a stranger, captained her foot as gangrenous, endured family as phantom pains one must tolerate until she was desensitized. She smirked when his face froze with disappointment at her non-writhing and non-begging. Another time, he reeled her in by grasping both her hands. I’ll show you something, he said. He tugged her index fingers free and propped them together. This is the church. He bent her pinkies together. Lift the tip of the rod skyward. This is the steeple. He laced and unlaced her thumbs. He opened her doors. See all the people? But when she looked inside her malformed hands, her world hung upside down. Do you see all the people who love you? She looked harder, a single-size family, a congregation, dangled from the rafters. She flexed her fingers, igniting their feet to dance.
When the fish slows down, it is time to go to work. Their laughter meant lust, meant surrendering to hands with more power than hers. This is how to build a place of worship, where the foundation of obedience is half-open fists. She could not make herself invisible. Do you see it, he asked? It didn’t matter if she used her last two words. He could see her. This is the church. This is the steeple.
Shareen K. Murayama is a Japanese American, Okinawan American poet and educator. Her debut poetry collection, Housebreak, is forthcoming by Bad Betty Press (July 2022). She’s a 2021 Best Microfiction winner, a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal, and Asst. CNF Editor for JMWW. Her works have been published or forthcoming in The McNeese Review, The Willowherb Review, National Flash Fiction, The Margins, Bamboo Ridge Press, and elsewhere. She lives in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. You can find her on IG and Twitter @ambusypoeming.
