Free The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne Page B

departs, the Trail swims to the deepest North Pacific and there, lets itself come apart and be scattered to the currents, the parts finding their own way and settling in separate beds of mud where they felt no more.

    When I wake, the sun is setting. The high-rises across the water are faced in orange.
    I feel energized. It’s a good time to perform my puja. I try to remember the correct steps. Mohini knew them all. She would do a simple puja every day, but there can be twelve or thirteen steps, with special steps just for offering the murti water to brush its teeth. This won’t be as elaborate.
    I spread the Nordi wrapper on the concrete between my legs, anchor it with shells all around its perimeter, dribble a pile of sand in the center, and stick the tongue scraper into it so that it stands upright in an arch. Here’s where I should offer something liquid to the murti. It seems obvious to offer seawater, so I bend down to cup from the surf, and pour it back and forth over my arrangement. But it doesn’t seem like enough. So I reach under the bandage under my shirt and push one of the scabs until I feel wetness, and then paint the tongue scraper with that little bit of blood, for ten seconds, to make it real, and then I feel something at rest in my body that wasn’t, before.
    In fact there’s more to be done.
    I get out the filet knife and some topical anesthetic, which I apply with gauze. Then I lift my left arm until my hand is grasping the right side of my throat, for purchase. I dig in my fingernails so that I don’t lose my grip.
    I angle the knife towards my exposed armpit. My flesh is matter, and responsive to physical principles, just like water is. I make a first incision, feeling no pain but a faint tug, and then another incision at an angle to the first, so now there’s a bleeding V in my skin. I have to work fast before I start bleeding too much. I dig the tip of the filet knife under the point of the V and work it up, tearing up a flap of skin, and there are few notes of pain, which without anesthesia would be a blinding white soprano pain. I nudge my aadhaar with the tip of the knife and it moves under another layer of dermis. I make a deeper cut. The tip of the almond is exposed now. It’s even colored like an almond. Now it slips out easily and I hold it in between slippery fingers. I place it in the little pile of sand under the arch of the tongue scraper and then I place the biscuit in front of the tongue scraper and light it on fire.
    I blow it out before it can melt the plastic of the Nordi wrapper.
    My puja is done. As fine and grotesque as any spectacle in Madurai, the home of my namesake, Meenakshi Devi. My armpit throbs like a supernova and I dress my shoulder. I’m out of the cloud, now, and not physically trackable. The blessing from my offering was received in its making.
The First Night
    Evening falls. Instead of families parading up and down Marine Drive, now it’s young couples matching their steps and gazing sideways out to sea. Romance is in the air. My lover is the Trail.
    To pass time, I unpack and repack three times to make sure I know where everything goes. I start reading the Mahabharata, which I’ve never read straight through, and I’m in the mood for grandiose undertakings. But I don’t even get past the frame story. I tell myself I’ll restart it once I’m on the Trail and I’ll read something else for now. Something not millennia old, but still at a temporal distance, a few decades—Kuta Sesay, Poems for Drowning Ndar, Senegal, 2026. Some light early-century fatalism.
    I wait until midnight, then crawl out of my square and up onto the seawall. A garland of golden streetlights, the Queen’s Necklace, rings the bay. It’s a lot of light but it can’t be helped. There’s traffic on Marine Drive, but dilute. Some people walk out to the end of the seawall, but not many. This is as deserted as it’s