Cock Block - Rachel Lloyd
Content Warnings: sexual content, oppression, self-harm, descriptions of blood, death, animal death, and language
In the woods behind the Cock Block—the strip in town with Pini’s Pizza, Wang’s Chinese, Johnson’s Meats, and Woody’s Liquors—there is a clearing overlooking the marsh—the clearing where they found Maggie Wood dead by alcohol poisoning and Anna Johnson’s severed hand—where I go to scream. Today I’m screaming because I want to run away, yesterday because I peeled my knuckles shredding carrots. Last week because I overheard my father crying, saying with only daughters he’d have to sell Pini’s.
On the Cock Block, girls are bad for business. We are by nature defiant, born in ironic opposition, the town’s curse. The daughter of a chef, I have no taste. The story goes there was once only one shop on the Cock Block—Standish’s Steel—and when the blacksmith died, he left it to his talented daughter over her bumbling brother. Her brother, outraged by his empty legacy, worked to become a warlock, more than he had ever worked to become a blacksmith. He returned to the shop, burning with rage, and turned his sister’s hands to iron, which melted to magma and slipped from her wrists like ribbons. The girls in town have been cursed ever since, while the boys follow in the footsteps laid forth for them by history. My mother says it’s natural, that if boys take up the reins, girls must be the horses they ride. She says I will marry. “But not too soon,” she adds. “You’re still my baby!” She kisses my head and smothers me with her breasts. “Wait as long as possible. Children make you old,” she tells me and my sisters, all sharing the same malady, ourselves those very children.
The men in my family have run Pini’s Pizza for generations, the Since 1925 sign as much a badge of honor as a mark of shame. Every shop on the Cock Block, this string of apostrophes and ownership, is like that: sons for decades, now only daughters.
I once used persimmons in the tomato sauce because I couldn’t taste the difference, and we closed for a week. For a while, I tried spicy foods hoping to taste anything at all. I drank hot sauce by the bottle and Emily Wang brought me Tien Tsin peppers by the case, but all it did was give me acne on my forehead and eczema behind my knees.
Emily Wang has the opposite problem. Her taste is so sensitive she can only eat plain rice and chicken soup. During business hours, she stands in the alley flattening boxes and kicking trash because the smells inside are too strong for her. “I can taste with my nose,” she told me, gagging on the pepper smell as I bit into one, and envy fell on me so strong I thought I was in love with her. Maggie Wood turned red and woozy at the smell of mouthwash. One day, stocking shelves in her family’s liquor store, her touch turned the wine to water. Her father fired her and the next day they found her dead, a half-empty beer in her hand.
When Anna Johnson, the butcher’s daughter, showed talent for slaughtering animals, we thought she’d broken the curse. Before she lost her hand, I’d watch her wring the necks off chickens easy as squeezing water from a towel. Even without her hand, she was adept at killing, and I followed her to the marsh to see frogs flop over dead as she passed, their legs splayed open as slimy and unashamed as a seasoned hooker. When Anna’s sister was born nurturing as a woodland fairy, Mrs. Johnson caved in with weeping. Anna’s father was the vet all along.
Mr. Johnson had been angry, but not like Anna. She was not the girl who broke the curse, her casual killing not a gift. It was a reminder that the man who kissed her goodnight had no real claim to her. He still called her my-baby-girl, but her blood told her otherwise. Her father talked about her taking over the shop, but she was no longer satisfied watching blood drain from a freshly wrung hen, and every kill pillaged light from her eyes.
Anna is the one who told me there is “a rat” in separate. “It’s spelled sep-a rat-e. Like how in your restaurant there is always a rat between the separate tables.” I kicked her in the shins so hard I broke two toes. We made up before her bruises faded, and when they turned from green to yellow, I wished they would stay forever. I traced their irregular shapes with tongue and fingertips thinking, I will brand her here with longing.
When she cut off her hand, I asked her why, and she said she’d thought maybe that’s where the cursed blood was, the killing blood. “I wanted to cut it out of me.” Sitting in the marsh, silent with dead frogs, I told her I thought it hadn’t worked. “Maybe it was the wrong part,” she said. “Maybe it’s in my other hand.”
She suggested I try it, saying, “You’d probably have to cut out your tongue.”
“With no tongue, I still wouldn’t be able to taste. Besides, I wouldn’t be able to do this,” and I got between her knees, which she spread for me like a dead frog.
That night, Anna undid her bandages and let me lick her stump, the stitches jagged like a zipper. They loosened as I passed my tongue over them and separated enough for her blood to leak out, redder and richer than any tomato sauce my father or his father or his father’s father ever made, and for a moment I tasted a twinge on my tongue, a sting like the sound of bees and a deep vibration like the low-throated croaks of frogs. Her blood burning into dreams the tastes ofsalt and iron.
Originally published by Moon City Review 2022
Rachel Lloyd is a Boston-based writer primarily of short stories and flash fiction. Her work has appeared in Moon City Review, The Capra Review, Vassar Review, Thimble Lit Mag, and others.
A late-to-the-literary-party dyslexic, Rachel is a voracious reader eager to make up for lost time. Her favorite subjects include nature writing and Monster Theory. She loves cooking, everything about raccoons, and cumulus clouds.
Rachel fervently believes that, as Mikhail Bakhtin said, “A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another.” It goes without saying she believes in building bridges.
You can find her on Twitter @73RachelLloyd or online at rachellloydwrites.com
