Issue 31 Special Edition: Muscle Memory
"When I met her, it was almost spring. We rode back to my place in a taxi with the windows down. Then she tied me to my headboard and the first hot breeze of the year was coming through my window."
Welcome to KHÔRA, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues. Scroll down if you’d like your work to be considered for future issues.
Issue 31: Special Edition
Today’s selection is a short story by Paola De Pasquale. Paola was born in a small town by the sea in the south of Italy. She’s majoring in creative writing at Scuola Holden, the first writing course in Europe. She thoroughly enjoys American fiction, memoirs, and tea.
Check out the full Issue 31 Special Edition, and if you missed our previous issues, visit our Archive. If you’d like to be considered for future publications, scroll down to learn more about KHÔRA’s 500 Words and KHÔRA’s Images.
Muscle Memory by Paola De Pasquale
In school I was taught that the body remembered things the mind couldn’t: it was called muscle memory.
When I met her, it was almost spring. We rode back to my place in a taxi with the windows down. Then she tied me to my headboard and the first hot breeze of the year was coming through my window.
The year after that night, I shaved myself everyday. I’d do it every other morning in the shower so that hair didn’t have time to grow back. I liked that when I looked down at my body, it looked like the body of a child, hairless and thin.
One time she asked me to tell her the worst thing I had ever done.
I tried to think or make up a story, but I could never think of something worth telling her. The truth was, I had a feeling that the worst thing I had ever done was what I was doing with her.
She had a car that year, it was green.…
Read Muscle Memory.
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