Cotton Xenomorph is a literary journal produced with the mission to showcase written and visual art while reducing language of oppression in our community. We are dedicated to uplifting new and established voices while engaging in thoughtful conversation around social justice.

The Skull is a Woman

BY MICHELE FINN JOHNSON

You show up with a cardboard file box. Our mediator, Frannie, gives you the scowl she typically reserves for the sessions where she dissects our joint tax returns and calls us fiscally irresponsible. You hate to be scolded. You blush.

I want to mock you; after everything, it still seems natural to play into the tease of us. “What’s in the box?” I ask.

You don’t smile, you don’t blink. “You’ll see.”

Curly brackets around the paragraph: ‘Some mediator,’ you whisper, after Frannie pounces on 2018’s 1040. I flirt-laugh as if we’re back in Cabo on our honeymoon—that in-pool bartender with the heavy pour, me bobbing my way to the edge of the pool"

It’s hard to concentrate on the things Frannie’s trying to talk about tonight—division of assets, 401K splits, stock divestitures. Boring stuff. The stuff you always handled. You look adequately engaged for the both of us. Frannie’s counsel floats all around us, a highway of words I’ll never be able to reassemble. I’m drifting.

Curly brackets around the phrase "File box. What’s in the file box? Did you find my stash of vibrators in the back of the junk drawer?"

Frannie closes her laptop. Session’s over. You ask if we can stay in her conference room for a few minutes. When she sighs, I smell the remnants of her lunch—pastrami, I’m guessing. I imagine Frannie with a half-gnawed sandwich, hunched over a thesaurus, searching for new ways to say awful things like division, split, equitable.

Frannie leaves, and you open the file box. You lay out souvenirs from every trip we ever took on the conference room table. A ceramic leprechaun mug from Galway. A tin Eiffel tower, the height of a quarter on edge. A keychain with a photo of us riding in the front car of the Runaway Mine Coaster. There are dozens of these tchotchkes. The crap of our lives.          

“You took nothing sentimental when you left,” You say.

Curly brackets around text: How could I? How do I know what parts of us were real? What will be safe to remember? What was yours-and-mine, not yours-and-hers? We cannot speak about that. We agreed to mediate her out of us. We agreed to settle// split

You fondle each souvenir on its way out of the file box as if it’s fragile and precious instead of plastic and plated. Once they are all out on the table, you say ‘Voila’ and Vanna-White-wave your magical arm in the open air between us. “We had some good times, you know. I just wanted you to remember that.”

I vow to stay silent. Sixteen years taught me that my silence is the thing that pains you most. Your eyes freeze open, just like the photo on the Runaway Mine Coaster keychain, captured in that moment where the front car dropped and our stomachs flew up into our throats. Remember that moment, I think. Remember how that felt.

Curly brackets around text: The moment you told me about her. If they could make a souvenir of those kinds of moments—the ones where your feet no longer honor the laws of physics and your gut seems to cherish the ache—what would they look like?

I pick up a hand-painted calavera we bought together in Mexico City. I assume the skull is a woman. Her hair is a wreath of painted flowers—deep pinks and yellows—and though her eye and nose sockets are hollow, her teeth gleam white in a wide smile that belies her current condition. She’s as light as a dozen paperclips; she rests comfortably in my palm. I slip her into my pocket and walk out the door. She grows heavier and heavier; she weighs me down like a million World’s Fair pennies, flattened.


Michele Finn Johnson’s short fiction collection, Development Times Vary, was the winner of the 2021 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award and is forthcoming in October 2022. Her work has appeared in A Public Space, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, DIAGRAM, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her work was selected for the 2019 Best Small Fictions anthology, won an AWP Intro Journals Award in nonfiction, and has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. Michele lives in Tucson and serves as contributing editor at Split Lip Magazine. Find her online at michelefinnjohnson.com and on twitter at @m_finn_johnson.

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