A Wine Glass of Mercury
Ophelia stirs the tiny wooden cauldron of salted peanuts with a finger before selecting one to nibble on. Lucifer tucks a strand of turquoise hair behind their ears and laughs with all their teeth, lips wet with cranberry juice. Even November, who’s usually the quiet one, is gibbering away, both elbows on the counter. There’s two empty Long Islands in front of her and the bartender is handing her a third.
Then my phone alarm goes off at a volume that’s hard to ignore, a pinprick to the balloon of drunk, giggle-infested conversation.
“What’s thaaat?” Lucifer sings, accompanied by a prodding finger.
“Nothing.” I turn the phone over. “Just a reminder to take my lithium.”
Ophelia frowns, her nickel-brown eyes widening. “The thing that’s in batteries?”
“Of course Poms isn’t going to eat batteries,” November drawls, mouth half-open, as she attempts to touch her nose with the tip of her tongue.
“I-I’m not going to eat batteries.” I fumble, rubbing a thumb across my jaw. “It’s a-an antidepressant. Of sorts.”
“My mom takes lithium, I think. She’s bipolar.” November presses her lips against the edge of the plastic straw. “Or Lamictal? One of the L-words.”
“Lovvvvve,” Lucifer croons, holding a peanut in their fist as an imaginary microphone.
The conversation balloon swells back to its spherical shape. My friends carry on, not noticing—just as they never have—how I start to shift from one butt cheek to the other, how I roll my shoulders back and forth as the bone sockets squeak.
I need to get home and take my lithium. Two hours past deadline is the maximum I can endure.
The night comes to an end after Lucifer vomits in the men’s bathroom stall and we each take a turn to wet a napkin and blot the bits of regurgitated fries off their salmon blouse. Lucifer and November take one cab, and I share another with Ophelia, who’s tipsy-crying in the hem of her sweater and mumbling about a dead bird she saw outside the gas station two weeks ago.
In the dark of the backseat of the car, while Ophelia presses snot stains into my shoulder, I reach down between my legs and detach my labia.
“Poms,” Ophelia murmurs, her breasts dipping against mine. “I think the birdie might’ve been s-scared.” She hiccups. “Birdie is scared.”
I move my hand out of the shadows and pat the slant of her shoulder blade. “It’s okay, Phe. It’s okay.”
When we arrive outside her apartment, I gently pry her off me until she finally exits the car with a delighted whoop and a wave.
As soon as my foot crosses into my bedroom, I rip my right shoulder blade out of its socket before I’m even fully undressed, then dig my thumbs into the hooks around my butt cheeks so I can toss them aside. The breasts land in the laundry basket, the scalp into the half-open closet door. The vagina I put carefully into the drawer beside my bed; it’s custom-made. Expensive.
I flop out on the bed, now nothing but a torso with a left arm and a ragged neck. I exhale.
Silvery-blue wires start streaming out of each amputated orifice. They wiggle and worm across the cotton bed sheets, practically ecstatic. My remaining arm digs for the packet of batteries under my pillow and I pop a single black and orange striped AAA into the open socket at the top of my neck.
The wires hum in contentment, gripping and releasing the bed sheets tenderly.
My breathing flattens to a soft murmur, tight coils unfurling in sweet relief. A few more wires tumble out from the tunnels my legs used to be attached to. They reach across the mattress like a slow trickle of honey slipping down the fur of a black bear’s chin.
I return the batteries back under my pillow. The allure of downing the entire pack always lingers in the back of my mind, but then so do the consequences. I remember the time my vagina clattered to the floor while a man’s hands were in my hair. There was also the workplace incident (imagine my breasts squeaking when my boss’ brother grabbed them), and that dismal Monday when my legs sprang loose and bounced down the stairs right before I gave a presentation on energy-saving mineral alternatives.
By now I’ve taught myself to resist the urge to splurge and take just one every night. So I can stand upright without fear of my appearance cracking; so I can get comfortably fucked in every custom-designed genitalia hole; so I can taste desire and disgust and watch sweat collect on brows like frog eggs.
And then I come home and dismember the fabrication. I love November, Lucifer, and Ophelia, but they only know me in the capacity I create for them to perceive. What would they think of me now, a chest split open and sleek wires spilling like spaghetti over obsidian black silk sheets? I am an airborne screensaver, I am a bouquet of earphone wires, I am a painting you think you created but then are disappointed to realize only ever existed in a dream.
I might be your disappointment, but I am my own divinity. I am what I am without the intervention of arbitrary criteria. I am a wine glass of mercury with a tin-foiled lipstick smear on the edge.
I sprawl out on my bed, thinking about electric pylons and the slenderness of their one thousand fingers reaching inside to touch me. With a shudder my final arm comes loose from its socket. It falls to the side as I picture myself grinding up and down the pylon’s cusp, electricity thrumming through me. My wires trill and twinkle; they flood the mattress and dangle over the sides, glittering in the overhead light like comets slipping from the gaps between God’s fingers.
© 2023 Elena Sichrovsky
About the Author
Elena Sichrovsky (she/they) is a queer Austrian-Taiwanese writer currently living in the Netherlands. This year her fiction has been published in Nightmare, Apparition Lit, Mythaxis, and more. Her work explores themes of identity, grief, and rebellion through the lens of body horror. You can find them @ESichr or read more of their work here.