Leave Marks
Before the car hit us head on, in the liminal space before we both died, we gripped what we could: the steering wheel, the soft seat cushion underneath us, each other so hard our knuckles went white. Before we even had a chance to swerve—our last memory the sensation of lurching forward like a roller coaster hovering before it drops. Before we drove home with the windows rolled down, the wind shifting the car like a hum. Before we split our voices singing louder than the radio and fogged up the windows with our breath and drew hearts in the condensation on the glass because we were desperate to leave our mark on anything, everything like that time we wrote our initials in the wet concrete by the library, wrote our names in sharpie on the bathroom mirror at the mall, stuck our handprints in the sand at the mouth of the river only to have the traces of us ripped away. And we were so sick of this town, of our postage-stamp small world that we’d explored every corner, every shadow of already. Before we climbed onto the hood of my car, lit a cigarette and took turns blowing smoke rings into the air that faded just as quickly, the sun set purple-pink behind us but we hardly even noticed because our future stretched on like an open door before us and we were so sure we’d have tomorrow and tomorrow and another tomorrow.
Uncanny
The model slips out of her robe like removing the skin from a garlic clove. She’s pale and pressed against the paper-white wall behind her. She stands with her feet further than hip-width apart and her shoulders pulled back. Her body an open door. I use my finger and thumb to place her in the center of my page. She’s subject and object all at once.
Only a handful of people have seen me completely naked. My husband, a college fling, the nurses and doctors who delivered my daughter. The model doesn’t look at me, doesn’t look at any of us because her chin is tilted upwards toward the stucco ceiling. I sketch her without lifting my pencil. I draw sharp, unceasing lines. Moles constellate her left thigh. One of her eyes is bigger than the other. Her nipples dark purple like a bruise. The timer dings and she changes position, wedges one leg behind the other, arcs her neck, tilts her body into a crescent moon.
My husband doesn’t know this is a nude drawing class. He thinks I’m out sketching flowers and birds and shit like that. My daughter’s spit up crests my sweater just below my collarbone like the toothpaste my husband always leaves stuck to the edge of the sink. I stand up and no one notices because everyone has their heads bent over moon-bright card stock, pens moving, trying to capture the model before she changes shape again. I unbutton my shirt, unhook my bra, yank my skirt down to floor. Heads are looking up now. My breasts are swollen from breastfeeding, my body saggy and rung out yet swollen at the same time like one of those blow up dolls bending with the wind outside a car dealership. I want to ask them to draw me. Get me down on paper, I imagine myself saying. Show me my body from your eyes: alien, uncanny, unfamiliar. This doesn’t happen though. Everyone is too surprised to do anything at all.
Christina Tudor is a writer living in Washington, D.C. Her fiction has been featured in or is forthcoming from HAD, Flash Frog, Litro Magazine, Funicular Magazine, matchbook, Best Small Fictions 2024, and more. She has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and was a 2022 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow in fiction. She can be reached on social media @christinaltudor
January House Literary Journal 
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