Content warnings: Sexual Assault or Rape; Physical Violence or Abuse; Depiction of Death or Terminal Illness; Miscarriage or Abortion Blood Slick Nobody drills for oil out in our town anymore. The good spots had already been all used up. But I knew the truth— I’d seen my brother and my boyfriend Pete out past the church’s little graveyard, the one where my older sister was buried, with her baby. I was out there sitting by her stone when I saw them, carrying barrels and a pump, and a shovel. I watched them work at it for a good two hours, their gray shirts all full of sweat and dirt. I went over there after they’d left and looked down into those gaping holes they’d left in the dirt, like puncture wounds, the kind a bullet would leave after tearing through skin. But there was nothing at the bottom. Nothing but more dirt. That night, when I lay in bed, I felt myself start to bleed. But when I got up to change, the blood wasn’t red. It was black, and slick. Slick like oil. Black and slick like the kind that had drained from my older sister’s body after she’d given birth, like the stuff that had coated her baby, stopped its lungs before they could even expand. When we were younger, when our father still thought he could get rich out here, our mother had warned us girls about bleeding like that, in an unnatural way. She’d said if you bleed like that, let your babies go. Heat At my neighbor’s pool party, there are 12 girls and 6 boys. Boy-girl parties are new, an unusual ritual, and us girls swish our hair nervously, pulling at the straps of our neon bikinis. The boys crowd the water, tossing around a beach ball, dunking each other’s heads violently, holding each other under so long we worry one might drown. I sit with two other girls, one I know from church, another from soccer camp, on the edge of the pool, consciously aware of my mother’s warning that sitting in such a way was likely to cause a yeast infection from the dampness. We sip juice boxes and giggle in a high pitched voice that we’ve never used before. The girl from soccer camp whispers something in my ear about one of the boys. My stomach feels like I may vomit, and a cold, slippery sweat coats each of my armpits. My neighbor’s mom comes out to announce lunch, and five of us girls go to the bathroom to change. I hunch into the corner, hoping nobody will look at me, while in the same moment I hope to catch a glimpse of them, to know I’m not the only one with new, soft hair, and quarter-size lumps under our nipples that throb when touched. In my fresh summer dress and clean underwear, I sit at a table and eat a hot dog and chips. My neighbor’s dog, a small, white creature with an underbite, sniffs for scraps. One of the other girls screams, the dog is bleeding. I look at the patio tile and see small drops of bright red blood. The dog’s vulva is swollen. My neighbor’s dad gets on all fours and grabs the dog roughly. “I told you to get her fixed babe, fucking disgusting.” Mother Bird A bird’s nest is on my bedroom windowsill– the babies are ugly, with thick yellow lips around their triangle beaks. The mother feeds them bug after bug, and they tear up the worms, each enjoying a sliver of the creature’s guts. The mother has beautiful, brown, downy feathers lightly mottled as if speckled by sun, elegant black eyes, delicate, spindly feet. At dinner, my own mother serves me spaghetti with no sauce. She is not beautiful like the mother bird. When her boyfriend comes to visit he smiles at me and rubs my back very slowly. I stand and dump out my half eaten pasta. “Ungrateful,” my mother mutters. I take the stairs back to my room two at a time. Sleeping in my bed frightens me. Instead, I watch the nest. The mother bird arrives with a beetle. The babies scream. Ungrateful. I think. The babies don’t deserve her. They make her work all day. I open the window. The babies go silent, burrowing into the nest, their beady eyes watching me. The next time the mother bird arrives, I throw a T-shirt over her, moving quicker than I thought I could move. The babies scream. I shut the window. The mother bird thrashes against the T-shirt, and I open it, reaching to pet her, but she is too fast. She flies, frantic, around the room, making sharp chirping sounds, until she slams into the window, and falls limply to the ground. I pick her up, her body soft. I press her to my nose and inhale her sticky, musty scent. The babies scream from outside. I climb into my bed, laying her small, beautiful body on the sheet beside me. I stroke her head with my finger and pull the covers around us. We lay, perfectly still, in our own nest, soft and untouchable. Raw: A Micro Series
About the Author
Vivian Walman-Randall is a writer and scholar from Southern California. In her work, she’s interested in exploring themes of environment, feminism, climate change, and cyclicity. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and a BA in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is currently a PhD candidate in English with a creative writing emphasis at Oklahoma State University in Fall 2025. She is a Co-Founder and the Prose Editor of Fork Apple Press. Her prose and poetry can be read in Spectrum Summer Edition and the Santa Barbara Literary Journal, and is forthcoming in Yellow Arrow Journal. Vivian currently lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma with her partner and their standard poodle, Clover.