Free Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You by Joyce Carol Oates

clearly. . . .”
    Merissa’s mother spoke pleadingly. She was increasingly distracted. You could see that something terrible was happening to her, Merissa thought.
    Like erosion, from the inside out.
    Merissa shrank from her mother. Those eyes!
    Except when her mother didn’t come into Merissa’s room in the evening, as she’d used to do—to question her in that intimate, prying way that so annoyed her but to which she’d become accustomed—Merissa missed her.
    â€œOh, hey—Mom?”
    And there was Mom on her bed, the bed that had been her and Merissa’s father’s bed, partially dressed, one shoe on and one shoe off as if she’d been flung from an accident scene, hair disheveled and mouth as flaccid as a fish’s mouth, breathing in a hoarse, rasping way, terrible to hear.
    â€œMom? Are you—drunk?”
    Merissa wanted to think yes, her mother was drunk. Not drugged, not sick, not desperate, not comatose. If she was just drunk, Merissa could despise her.
    â€œGood night, Mom!”
    Merissa dragged a cover over her mother’s inert body, switched off the overhead light, and shut the door.
    Poor Mom! Poor loser.
    I don’t need you. Either of you.
    Â 
    That night, lying in the bathtub, soothed by warm, sudsy water—(Merissa rarely took baths, only showers)—drawing the razor-sharp paring knife lightly, experimentally, across her abdomen where beneath, one day, if Merissa didn’t prevent it from happening, there might be a fetus , an embryo , the thought of which filled her with a kind of panicked dismay; and she must have drawn the blade a little too forcibly, for suddenly skeins of bright blood streamed out, fearful to see.
    For this was more blood than she’d seen. This was more than her usual small, shallow cuts.
    Panicked, thinking, Not yet! There will be a sign.

14.
    (BLADE RUNNER)
    Merissa knew: The male of the species Homo sapiens is a sexual being, by nature polygamous. The instinct of the male is to have sexual intercourse with as many fertile females as possible to propagate his DNA and, in this way, to propagate the species.
    There was marriage—family—morality. There was Thou shalt not commit adultery .
    â€œBullshit.”
    Startling to say this word aloud. But it felt good.
    A word that Morgan Carmichael was heard to say, often. A word with which Morgan Carmichael seemed to be on familiar terms.
    Which Merissa Carmichael rarely said. In fact, never.
    There were Quaker Heights girls who used such words frequently, and easily—almost as frequently and easily as the boys.
    Shit. Fuck. Go to hell—bitch!
    Slut. Hate you.
    â€œHate you both.”
    Merissa laughed, like a child saying forbidden words aloud for the first time.
    Â 
    DEATH ANGEL BLACK SWAN BLADE RUNNER
    Â 
    Holding her breath, Merissa clicked on BladeRunner.com.
    Immediately there popped up on her laptop screen the most amazing image Merissa had ever seen. Blade Runner was a girl of about Merissa’s age, you could tell by the smooth, taut skin of her exposed neck, though she was wearing a sexy black-satin half mask so you couldn’t see much of her face, and her hair—(platinum blond, like Merissa’s)—was pulled back tight, tight enough to hurt her scalp, like the hair of a ballerina, and Blade Runner’s narrow, slender chest was bare, her small hard-looking breasts with taut nipples like berries, and in Blade Runner’s smooth, pale skin were constellations of cuts, some freshly bleeding, some scabbed over, some healed and some scarred. Merissa stared and stared, feeling faint, forgetting to breathe.
    Then the camera moved lower on Blade Runner, so that you could see yet more cuts, an embroidery of cuts, in the thin flesh of her midriff, in her abdomen, and in the feathery-pale hairs at the pit of her belly.
    â€œOh! Oh God.”
    Merissa had never seen anything so— beautiful .
    It was crazy, of