Saige England
Skinned Alive
We never grew out of ourselves. Never outgrew ourselves. For all of us the reasons were different. For all of us the reasons were the same.
We were breaking out. We were breaking. We were breaking out of our skins. Our flesh was breaking out from inside us. We wanted to cross the threshold. We were terrified of crossing the threshold. We wanted to run backwards and never cross that ravine. We were terrified of falling. We wanted someone to catch us. To hold us. To never let us go. We wanted to let ourselves go. We wanted to be let go. We wanted to return to ourselves. We wanted to be children again.
That simple.
It was the year Andrea Hannah and I had a hokey-pokey addiction. It was the year we found a dead mouse and tried to resuscitate that cute little beastie by using the inner tube of a biro pen.
It was the year we told on the boys for stealing from the cafeteria during the school trip and when we were shamed because Mr Clark and Norman – the bus driver – opened the boys’ suitcases, and made the boys empty their pockets. It turned out the boys had been bluffing and we were exposed, loathed, for wrongly accusing those boys. We sobbed because we were exposed.
Some of us didn’t tell when the boys felt us up. I was one of those girls. Never told about how the boys grabbed me when I was on my way to the latrine, how they pinned my arms and one felt between my legs. Never told my mother or the teacher.
Yvonne MacDonald told. Yvonne and the other girls were made to leave the room and go with another teacher for a special kind of talk.
The boys were all made to leave the classroom too.
I have never known where they went or whether they came back.
What I know is the talk the headmistress gave us, the girls who remained. We were good girls – good because we had not subjected ourselves to that dirtiness, the headmistress said.
Shame was blood, flooding my whole body all the way down to the part of myself that had been touched, that was dirty. I longed to exterminate that part of myself and I knew I could only do that if I exterminated my whole self, if my female body did not exist.
It was the year before my father died. It was the year before I got my period. It was the year before the man tried to abduct me and kept saying in a low sweet mesmerising menacing voice, ‘Come Here Little
Girl.’
Saige England is a New Zealand author and poet living between the sea and estuary in the village of New Brighton. She’s lived and written in other landing places including Paris, England, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific Islands.
Saige graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in anthologies and international journals including Penguin Books NZ, Turbine, Bravado, Blackmail Press, and Shotglass Journal (Muse-Pie Press).
Her journalism has been published in the Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times. Saige is a human rights activist in the Palestine Solidarity Network of Aotearoa (the PSNA) and a regular contributor to Asia Pacific Report.
A neuro diverse writer with Ehlers Danlos syndrome, she starts writing towards her next novels at 4am and rests in the afternoon – turning a siesta into fiesta if she reads or binge watches a TV series!
Saige’s debut novel, The Seasonwife, deals with the brutal frontiers of colonisation on people and the environment.
Saige can be found on her website:
https://www.saige-england.com
and substack:
https://saigewrites.substack.com
Banner Art:
Photo by Amatérsky fotograf Matúš, Unsplash, 2022
