I’ll admit, it took me a while to tell him. When I did, it wasn’t by choice, anyway. I’ve done my fair share of gaslighting, but it’s hard to convince someone that no, they didn’t just see a three-inch-wide gaping hole in your abdomen when you lifted your sweater over your head and accidentally untucked your undershirt. “You have such an active imagination, babe!” doesn’t cut it when he reaches out to lift my shirt himself and stares through my stomach at the pillows behind me. 

He gasps in shock, which is annoying. The holes never fazed other men. In fact, I had a boyfriend who enjoyed sticking two of his fingers straight through my stomach and wiggling them around, delighting in my lack of reaction. “You’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met,” he murmured once, gazing into my eyes with his hand resting on my belly. A week later, I found out that he fucked our coworker. But this is a different man, and he is disturbed by the hole, so I have to explain it to him. 

I tell him how the holes began appearing on my body when I was ten. The first was a tiny, perfectly round, half-centimeter-wide peephole through my left earlobe that my mom discovered while braiding my hair before school one morning. Always a woman of action, she resolved the issue by the end of the day, and both my earlobes were pierced and plugged up with tiny rhinestone studs. No one was any the wiser. 

Since then, a hole has popped up every three or four years. I explain to him that it’s really not a big deal. They’ve all been small, except for the hole in my stomach, which has been slowly expanding, claiming more and more territory on the terrain of my abdomen. He hasn’t blinked for several minutes, so I continue: my therapist had a theory that the holes are “physical manifestations of psychological trauma,” and that until I “heal my inner child,” they will continue to appear and grow. I think therapists are quacks, but I leave this detail out. Regardless, I don’t see her anymore; her office smelled like menthol and old people, which unnerved me. 

He begins acting differently, probably because he’s having trouble processing the fact that his girlfriend has holes he didn’t know about. First, he drags me to the doctor’s office, even though I insist that I’m neither sick nor in pain. When the receptionist hands me a pen to fill out paperwork, I remove a Band-Aid from my hand and allow the pen to slide straight through a hole in my palm. Pen wedged in palm, I point finger guns at her and say, “Gotcha!” She screams. He huffs out of the office, muttering something to himself about me not taking this seriously, and he doesn’t look at me the whole drive home. We don’t return to the doctor. 

Next, he begins carving small, cylindrical wooden blocks to fill the holes. The manual work seems to soothe him. The blocks are beautiful; he engraves them with delicate designs of birds and trees, his two favorite things. All plugged up with wood, I feel like a bastardized Pinocchio. He inspects me like an artist pleased with his work. But one day a hole appears at the top of my forehead, straight through my skull. He’s uncomfortable with the idea of sticking wood through my brain because it seems “invasive.” At his insistence, I start wearing hats. He does not carve any more wooden blocks. 

Finally, he turns to prayer, telling me solemnly that he walked away from religion at sixteen after his dog ran away, but maybe only God can fix me. It’s cute, like how a puppy chasing its own tail is cute. Ever serious, he brings me with him to Catholic Mass one Sunday. I’ve never been to Mass before and I don’t know the choreography, so I mimic what everyone else is doing. Upon entering the church, I tap my forehead and shoulders while reciting, “In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit.” When I reach “holy,” I nudge him and wink, seductively sliding down my bra strap to reveal a new hole in my right shoulder, but he has no sense of humor and only glares back at me in response. He does not touch me for the rest of the day. 

The next morning, he’s gone. I wake up in an empty bed to words on my screen saying that he “cant do this aynmore.” He has taken the wooden blocks from my bedside drawer. I wander into the bathroom, where water droplets cling to the sides of the sink, survivors from when he washed his face of me before leaving. They’ve evaded the drain for now. He can’t have left long ago, so I step into the hallway to see him dragging a single suitcase toward the elevator. The hallway smells sterile, as if someone just deep cleaned the carpet. He sees me and freezes, a deer in headlights. I ask him for one last hug, and he smiles sadly, pityingly, pitifully. When he stoops down and reaches his arms around me, I twist so his entire arm passes clean through the hole in my stomach, which I had hidden beneath his old T-shirt. Disgusted, he jerks his arm back and hurries into the elevator without looking back, and I laugh, and the hole grows.