Smooth

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In the dream where my genitals disappear, we have cable.

We’re sitting in the living room watching Wolf Blitzer’s final segment on The Situation Room. Our fingers, lazy tangled, perch in the crevasse of sofa between us and we laugh at the way Blitzer’s voice squats someplace behind his tongue, choked like a muted horn. In the segment, he announces the passage of an executive order that, in order to incentivize forward movement against the obesity epidemic, individuals with a Body Mass Index of 30% or higher will no longer be permitted the use of their genitals. During the panel discussion, a woman in a pert navy blazer discusses the tremendous strain sexual activity puts on the heart and lungs, a strain too great for overtaxed organs to bear.

It’s for these people’s own good, she says. It’s for the best.

To this, Blitzer offers a single stern nod.

In the dream, we trust the news. There’s no time to listen to glum counterarguments from a drab losing side. Our sock feet skid across laminate floors, and we forego disrobing for a hush of zip and pull. For trip. For push aside.

I always wake up before anything happens, but I assume we have sex with the lights off.

When I think of the way I wish the dream would go, I leave the television on and walk slowly toward a well-lit room. We stand, shins like drowned tree trunks in a puddle of leggings and denim, and I remind him for the very last time that I’m fat. For once, he doesn’t disagree. Instead, knuckles twisted with break and strain warm in the space between thighs that touch. That have always touched. In the morning, when he finds me squatting over a compact mirror and running my hand over the smooth, unbroken place where my genitals used to be, he sickles around my back like a raincoat while we look and mourn together.

Maybe we work through it. Through arm in weedy arm and squinted eyes that linger on the front of my jeans. Through how must that work? Through the first time we fight over altruistic oral sex, and the second, and the eighth. Maybe when I join the Smooth Movement, when I start wearing crop tops that shriek “No Peace Without Pussy,” he understands. But even if he doesn’t, we know it’s bigger than both of us, that to be loved by a fat woman is an act of revolution.

I leave home to join a traveling band of women and show the world what it’s like to still be seen. Some of them wear folded stomachs like armor. Others, like escape. One tells me in confidence that losing her genitals was the first time she felt free. Another boasts that she’s engineered a series of sexual acrobatics involving fresh ground black pepper and a pair of corduroy pants that can simultaneously mimic an orgasm and clear her sinuses. I tell him these stories in letters and try to understand when he writes back to tell me about the ones he sends to his Congressman in hopes of getting the decision reversed. If being loved by a fat woman is revolutionary, he says, then fucking her must be nothing short of revolutionary love.

His letters, as always, smell Old Spice clean and close with an update on Dolores, our cat.

In my reimagined dreams, I’m still a supporting player in civil disobedience. Seas of fat bodies churn the lawn of the National Mall, and in unison, they pull blooming skirts to the tips of their noses. Naked planes of skin uninterrupted in the crook of belly and thigh like mollusk tongues. I’m there beside them, tulle chafing my lip, when the woman from the traveling band enters into a dance with a pair of brown corduroys and an old wooden pepper mill. Her victory is mine when she throws her head back, when she sneezes and sneezes.