Purchase Receipt for a Body

475 Spring Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19128

 [at the corner of a shoulderblade, or where white teeth grind together] 

(800) 736-3739 

“Innocence ends when we are stripped of the delusion one likes oneself.” - Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem 

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ITEM PRICE 

1. I had good bones. When the marrow had forsaken my body, a pulpy, flesh-bound thing, I 

filled myself with other vices: cotton balls, cigarette ash, lemonade and vodka mixed like ethanol. Something so I wouldn’t go, and I wouldn’t want to be gone. A bone is a tough thing: fossils, left by calcium, give us the bones of what has been gone. I am not a tough thing: soft, unbled, with rounded edges, much all I was left of. 

Mint Gum - 1qty. $1.00 

2. When I was full of vice and glory, burning holy with this hot ash and warmed by the alcohol, I vomited up what made me a girl: rose thorns slicing at my insides, cold blood, laxatives. My eating disorder felt like a spine out of place, like anger churning in my gut, like being fifteen and wanting anything but a future. These good bones, these other vices, these foul forms of matter - into the molding bathtub, down the shower drain. 

Newport 100 - 1qty. $9.50 

3. My body: a pulpy, flesh-bound thing, like a rag-doll, her stomach stitched with sour bile, or 

maybe, a spider, belly round and arachnid, teetering on such thin legs, such bruised kneecaps, or maybe, something so haunted, a ghost girl translucent in the light, grotesque in her mutilation, however she died, her body nothing but a memory like a souvenir, or, borderless, when one limb stops another begins and is endless, like when I realized nobody wanted to believe they were mortal, was when I came closest to dying. 

The Bell Jar - 1qty $10.99 

4. I anticipated being stolen from. But I was the only one stealing: innocence, cheap lipstick 

tubes, pennies on the sidewalk. What gnawed at my flesh, what stole pound by pound, the insides of my thighs, the hollows of my cheekbones, the arch of a collarbone; I was guilty, my fingerprints bloodstained, red-handed. But when all that was left were these good bones, permanent objects, I had nothing left to take but myself. 

Tylenol - 1qty $6.99 

TIP: TOTAL: SIGNATURE: 

[CUSTOMER COPY: KEEP FOR YOUR RECORDS]

[I keep mine hidden, with the razor blades and half a fifth of vodka] 

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Imagine taking your limbs and pulling them apart, like in a black hole, until you became so large; and then, nothing at all. 

THANK YOU

COME AGAIN SOON