Girls on Fire

THEM

THEY HAD ALL BEEN GIRLS, once upon a time. If they were afraid now, of their girls, it was only because they remembered what it was like. Girls grew up; girls grew wild. Girls didn’t know themselves and the sharp-toothed needs breeding within, and it was a mother’s job not to let them.

Girls today thought they didn’t need their mothers, thought their mothers didn’t understand, when their mothers understood too well. Girls today didn’t know what it was to march through crowded streets hoisting signs and screaming slogans, to kiss boys off to war, to watch the news and see boys burn, to lie in browning weeds and weave a crown of thorns, to wrinkle and bloat and sag, to watch doors close, life narrow, circumstances harden, to hate the girl you were for the life she chose for you, to want her back. Girls today wanted to believe they were different, that girls like them could never grow up into mothers like these.

They let their girls believe this was true.

They lied to their girls, and taught their girls how to lie to themselves.

Girls today had to be made to believe. Not just in a higher power, a permanent record, someone always watching — girls had to believe that the world was hungry and waited to consume them. They had to believe in depravity and fragility, in longing as a force that acted upon them, a force to be resisted. They had to believe that they were the fairer, the weaker, the vulnerable, that they could only be good girls or bad, and that the choice, once made, could never be revoked. They had to believe in the consequence of incursion. Girls had to believe there were limits on what a girl could be, and that trespass would lead to punishment. They had to believe they could find themselves in a doctor’s office with scalpel and suction, or in an alley with panties at their ankles, or in a plastic bag tossed out with the trash; they had to believe that life was danger, and that it was their own responsibility to stay safe, and that nothing they did could guarantee that they would. If they believed this, they would build fortresses, they would wall themselves in, they would endure.

Girls had to believe in everything but their own power, because if girls knew what they could do, imagine what they might.

They told themselves that this was for the girls’ own good. Sometimes they resented the responsibility; sometimes they resented the girls.

Girls today thought they could do anything. Girls burned bright, knew what they wanted, imagined they could take it, and it was glorious and it was terrifying.

They couldn’t remember ever burning so bright.

Or they did remember, and remembering made things worse.

They wanted, for their girls. They wanted for their girls more than they wanted for themselves; this was the sacrifice they’d made. They wanted their girls to be safe. To do what they had to do to conform, to defer, to survive, to grow up. They wanted their girls never to grow up. Never to stop burning. They wanted their girls to say fuck it, to see through the lies, to know their own strength. They wanted their girls to believe things could be different this time, and they wanted it to be true.

They wondered, sometimes, if they’d made a mistake. If it was dangerous, taming the wild, stealing away the words a girl might use to name her secret self. They wondered at the consequence of teaching a girl she was weak instead of warning her she was strong. They wondered, if knowing was power, what happened to power that refused to know itself; they wondered what happened to need that couldn’t be satisfied, to pain that couldn’t be felt, to rage that couldn’t be spoken. They wondered most about that girl, a good girl, who’d nonetheless carried herself away to some secret place, taken knife to pale flesh, drawn blood. They wondered about that girl, what she’d known and what she’d discovered, what story she’d been told or told herself that could only end this way, with a girl alone in the dark, with a knife, in the woods.