Christine Hume

Thought Record Portrait

If such an animal were to have existence, it ought to have two mouths. It ought to devour us. Had such a form actually existed, it would have crept weakly on the ground. It would wrap around our ankles, joining together our inconsistent parts. We venture to say that all imaginary animals break down in the limbs of a brute. Impossible to rear a heavy structure at the fore of the animal. The bones are too small and the masses of muscle displaced. Our inventions are incongruous unions that produce monsters. The painter and the sculptor do not think of this when they represent their Fawns dancing and piping. The photographer discovers multitudes of conformations, both of vegetables and animals, only when she looks away from the world, at her photographs.

—Charles Bell, The Hand, William Pickering Publishing, 1837 (326-328)

In place of a hand, a couple tongues and lips.

In place of a hand, a wrist of jangling bracelets.

In place of a hand, whiskers possess a fine sensibility.

In place of a hand, palpa, horny rods, antennae, the skin of a snake.

In place of a hand, feathers covered with nerves.

In place of a crutch, being in the grips.

In place of arms, ohms.

In place of a face, the five eyes of the fingers, a five-pointed star.

In place of hand wringing, palm reading.

In place of a future, estrogen.

In place of a future, pulling out your own hair and posting a photo of it on social media.

In place of catastrophizing, petting a horse.

In place of cutting yourself, seeing god in the mirror.

In place of a face, mimicking a toxic butterfly.

In place of wing, the hand that feeds you.

In place of a hand, a magnet in your blood, a migration.

In place of a hand, a conviction that you have long outlived your finest hour.

In place of hyperventilating, masturbating.

In place of eating the entire bag, the circumstance of walking out of the water.

In place of walking, sonambulating into the shape of a monster.

In place of a vestigial tail, spreading your arms and flapping to scare away predators.

In place of negative thoughts, clairvoyance.

In place of a body, a photograph.

In place of skin, scales.

In place of a mother, a sleight of hand.

Selfie

The first mention of our mental health had come from our own feed. Commenters wondered snidely if it were a handy excuse, a way out of difficulty, a way to de-fang public opinion. Had we endured long bouts of depression before or after the sponsorships and multimillion dollar contracts? Wasn’t it a little convenient, they said. Why didn’t we speak up sooner, they asked without waiting for an answer. We had believed too much in our own invincibility, or we were too fragile, too flamboyant, too sensitive, too anxious, too hot tempered, too much. What we had done was dangerous, if not foolish. What if some little girl broke her neck following our example? We had gone too far. We had no self-control. We had gained too much weight. We tried to explain that the pouch, as we called it, helped us power through to the end. We weighed one hundred and thirty-one days of rehab. We weighed almost a million likes. We had an eating disorder ever since our mother taught us to count calories in homeschool. Our parents were too controlling. Our parents had sacrificed everything for us. We had gotten lazy, they said at the very moment we felt our arms and legs pounding like trapped hearts. We drove our bodies as if we would never arrive, as if there was no place, finally, to arrive. We lacked drive, they said. Someone noted how many posts we made from bed. Someone thought we looked tired. Maybe we were on drugs. A fan had spotted prescription bottle in photograph of our bedside table, but when it was enlarged no one could make out the labels. They said all the fame was going to our head, making us forget who we were and making us forget how to fight. Were we afraid to admit we had made a mistake? The problem was we were spoiled; we took no responsibility for our failures. The way we shouted was a disgrace to our sport. They said we should delete the app if we didn’t like hearing what they had to say. They said if we can’t take the pressure, why did we take the job? Did we think football players had it any easier? We were certainly not acting professional. We said we needed a break; we were sick with our own terror of losing, of flinging our bodies into the air.  They reminded us that we had won gold with kidney stones; we had broken records with fevers. We won the tournament pregnant. We had once won with broken toes on both feet, but they said that just proved we could do it if we kept trying. That’s what separates good from great, they quipped. But when we were running faster than anyone thought possible, who could remember that our mother had died? When we lost, it felt like we did it to spite them. We made winning look easy. We talked of sacrifices, but no one who had been through high school thought missing it was a particular shame. They had filled us with their own belief in our invincibility. Now we or they were heartbroken. Was heartache our problem, or was it the reason for our greatness? What made us think we were special anyway? What we had done was humanly impossible, they said. Were we even qualified? We were a hoax! We had bamboozled them! That was at least half the reason. Someone in a sub-Reddit said we didn’t know how to get ourselves out of a pickle. They said we weren’t old enough to know how to reverse course. They said we were the face of the sport. They said we were killing it. The killing was also part of our job. We were a robots or a god until no one knew how to fix us. They said it must be that time of the month. Mercury was in retrograde, so there was that. Saturn returns. And the moon was in one of its bullshit phases. It had been unseasonably hot and humid. Half of the women one commenter knew had a migraine due to the weather. Could we say more about the pressures we felt and the sadness? Now that we seemed lost, the public only talked about us in the past tense. They noted the disparaging things we said out loud to ourselves, captured on the screen and repeated in clips all over social media. They said it confirmed what they had been saying about our confidence slipping. They said we were burnt out hacks and they hated us for it. They trolled us and threatened to kill us several times every hour. They said we were a fucking whore bitch cunt crazy ho liar jezebel who deserved to never walk again. They unliked hundreds of posts about us. They said our hormones were not normal. They said we had grown dependent on the cheering crowds. They said we squandered our potential. They speculated what they could do with a tenth of our talent. They said we were no match for them. They predicted that our suffering would eventually feel fake even to ourselves.

Cameo

We wondered if her cameo were real. Wondered really, what did it mean to be real? The cameo certainly had history, a jeweled frame around a precious stone, onyx or agate, shining like a currency. A face in relief. On the coin or ring, in a ring around her neck: a decapitation. A woman running around with her head cut off. In her hands, she is holding the head that keeps saying, “No.” Holding it up like a shield or a bouquet. She watches her body flower.  No woman I know is a talking head.  She spends the next one hundred and thirty-one-years watching the flowers die. Then traces their profiles in chalk, like a finger plotting out a route on a map. The country was the shape of silhouette, a woman from long ago whose story had been trapped and muted there. The lapidary’s work of exposing what was underneath offers some perspective. She thinks she will feel alive again when she’s dead the way she used to feel American when she was abroad.