a pair of scissors

nicholas hellyer

There I am. What I am, I’ve only begun to discover, though the pair of scissors in my right hand
and the strip of black fabric in my left are paving a monochrome gray street ahead of me.

Checkered lines I thought were sunflower yellow now carried my feet between sidewalks of boy
blue and not-a-man pink.

Black strips of fabric that share the stain of tears and sweat of the floor beneath me. I’d cut the
floorboards if my scissors were sharp enough. Erase everything I’ve been taught to stand on
and float.

Hover.
Fall.

Falling isn’t so bad when you’ve stood on a crumbling cliff’s edge your entire life.

Once, not quite fall, but a summer when I was young, I took scissors to another pair of pants.
Each time I see a frayed cut of cloth I am taken through time to meet a child that once thought it
would be a delight to showcase a little thigh. An evening dream fulfilled by an old pair of jeans,
kitchen scissors, and the overconfidence of the young.

Dazzling the mirror with my strut, I extend my catwalk to the living room to show the house.
“Gay.” One said in a harsh tone.

A disappointed glare from another.

Hardly the reaction I expected. Something must have been wrong with their eyes. I was
flaunting my ragged daisy dukes. A hot girl summer before I knew what boy or girl meant.
“Take them off.” The primordial voice said. “Don’t let me see you wearing those again.”

And I didn’t wear them again.

Now, I sit, fabric in left hand, scissors in right, a bowl of soggy rice krispies and teardrops
somewhere behind. The floorboards have broken, the cliff’s edge below grows flush, and the
parachute I was given so long ago draws hives on my skin. Hovering, I scratch at my pants and
tear fabric from them to make a new parachute, desperate, and longing for a safe way down.
I do not know of the night ahead where I am overburdened with compliments. I can not know of
the kind smiles that strangers will give me in reverence, pride, and jealousy.

Were there so many strangers who hid themselves like I? Jealous of others self love?

The soft touch of dark cloth drags me back to a time before I existed. It throws me forward
through a slingshot of yarn and crochet needles. My sex, a gravitational well, twists me around
like thread on a spool; Apollo 13 around the moon. Never would I have believed that horrible,
ragged, unevenly-cut-off shorts would be a spark in my own rebirth.

But I knew a great kid who had a pair of scissors and some old jeans and they guided my hand.