Her body-my body, mine-is still striped with the yellowish stains of fading bruises. His body, slender and tall and pale, leans his pants hit the floor with a thunk, the pockets full of keys and change.

Two strangers fumble with each other’s clothes, each other’s bodies. Two people stumble in, my finger lifts, the rush-to-now slows. A well that never emptied.”įor me, the emphasis of the narrator’s experience isn’t on the regaining of sexual self, but the acceptance and hope developed, “ending on a note of openness potential renewal.” I do not even struggle to speak the spark of words dies so deep in my chest there is not even space to mount them on an exhale. I look down at my legs, then up at the blank wall, then back to him. In the bedroom, Paul sits across from me, his fingers tapping idly on the denim of his pants.ĭo you remember, he says, what it was like before? We see that Paul’s desire for her starts to turn into contempt defeat. The paranoia we experience with the narrator is the beginning to a deeper question how can women amend and recover from the tragedies of their past, when societal ideals paint women as pinnacle of sexual objectification? Even here, while the narrator’s lover is delineated as patient and gentle, there is still an absence understanding. I’ll admit this was a difficult read, as Machado’s collection of stories “use fiction to explore and examine questions about women’s lives… sex, gender and…mental health ” with this account in particular focusing on the re-establishment of trust in a loving relationship. The eighth and final installation of Carmen Machado‘s Her Body and Other Parties, “Difficult at Parties,” follows the protagonist recovering from the trauma of sexual assault, as she tires to re-discover and invent a new sexual norm after her rape.

My body and other parties