Harness the Power

         One of my mother’s favorite stories to tell from the Genesis of Jayne’s Abrasive Bravado is the time a bald, three-year-old me broke her left arm from, of all things, reading. As she tells it, I had been sitting comfortably on the armrest of our living room couch, one hand holding a ratty board book up to my face and the other scratching idly at an itch on my back, adorably but dangerously oblivious of my infant caboose sliding inch by inch off the garish, floral-printed cushion until I was airborne and my left arm broke my fall. That night at the hospital, some mustached doctor came to the side of my bed and explained that he’d have to examine my arm, so it would help if I stopped protectively cradling it to my chest for a little while.

I stared at him suspiciously and asked, “Is it going to hurt?”

“No,” he said. “Not a bit.”

And like all other young and impressionable fools, I believed him.

So when he lifted my decrepit arm and in doing so filled it with a raging, shooting, almost unknowable pain, I howled maniacally and yanked it back.

“You lied to me!” I scolded him. Then I punched him in the face.

I’m pretty sure my then tiny, crumpled fist had been shamefully ineffectual; to this day, though, whenever a man delusional enough to date me happens to comment on my raging temper, or my counter-productive defense mechanisms, or my undying need for self-preservation, my mother always refers back to this story as the most telling of first signs (she also likes to point out that the aforementioned mustached doctor had a son  my age who, two years after the arm incident, was in my preschool class; this is only relevant because apparently I also punched this boy in the face, for kissing me without asking). It paints a pretty scary picture of yours truly – trust me, I’m too, too aware of that fact. But I promise I don’t go around breaking faces for fun (not all the time, anyway), and it isn’t always an issue of illogical defensive tactics; I like to think of it as me claiming my power – standing up for myself and my (slightly dysfunctional) belief system.

I’m convinced that there are plenty of women who function just like this, though I have yet to encounter more than a handful of them in real life (what up, bad-ass girl friends of mine?). For the time being most of these women are tucked safely within the pages of Dana Johnson’s Break Any Woman Down and Beth Nugent’s City of Boys, two equally powerful and provocative short story collections whose hearts beat very much in tune with the raw, inner emotional, physical, and mental life of women. These are women with more proverbial balls than a country of frat boys; these are women who claim their sexuality with pride; these are women who snicker at carfulls of transparently trite, James Dean-wannabes and play along the asinine game for their own benefit, and theirs alone. Dana Johnson’s voice is enigmatic and sharp, but subtle and familiar. Her characters are our friends and neighbors and schoolmates, all secretly forgiving in nature, but wrought with grit. To them, Beth Nugent’s girls are the cynical older sisters, set against urban backdrops and burdened with explicit pasts and presents which they speak of with a ruthless shamelessness that challenges everyone to up the ante. Hers is a voice that’s dark and somber, but open, if even slightly, to the possibility of genuine hope. Placed against the popular literature’s current leading females, the girls and women in both collections resonate with a forceful type of reality that manages to weed out the docile reader with rose-tinted glasses, and insists instead upon the attention of a select few who are truly ready to feast their eyes upon the world.

In retrospect, that poor mustached doctor probably didn’t deserve to be punched for a lie that was clearly well-intentioned. But that isn’t the point. That I had a fiery little fury, that I took it upon myself in that moment and in many moments afterwards to seize some semblance of my own power, that I saw enough of myself and was proud enough of it – that’s the point. And that’s what women, what people in general, need to harness in themselves and keep safe.

 By Jayne Wilson

Jayne Wilson writes fiction about the likes of decapitated gnomes, compulsive hoarders, and sardonic old men. She laughs pathetically at her own jokes and is generally an impish mess. She graduated from the University of California, Davis in 2010 with a degree in English-Creative Writing.