Assistant Editor Emily Rose Cole: In “Pepe’s Curse,” Jessica Franken captures the complex reality of being a woman in public. At the outset, we know a sprawl of facts about Pepe, but Pepe knows just one fact about the speaker, that she doesn’t have children, and from this one tidbit, he concludes that she will “die old and alone.” It’s a conflation familiar to many women, as is Pepe’s rebranding of his monologue as a “conversation.” We hear none of the speaker’s literal voice for the entirety of the piece. Yet, her interior life is beautifully rendered as she imagines what this same process will be like when another uninvited man sits down beside her, how she will “ache, again, to become whale.” What woman hasn’t felt this similar pull to be some creature other than herself, a creature with an inescapable voice that can “shake, shake the earth”?
To hear Jessica read the essay, with sound design by Niko Tomlinson and Jessica Franken, click below:
Pepe’s Curse
Pepe approaches me at the beach: “Do you want a beer? Ganja? Cocaine?” He’s been shot four times and stabbed seven. He’s engaged to a UFC fighter, “a real woman with five kids.” His daughter won the spelling bee twice. He killed two people in Belize City. He is furious I don’t have children.
Next to us in the sand, there is a charming weight bench someone built from cinder blocks and plywood. The sign WoRK ouT in orange spray paint, a stray dog sleeping underneath. Pepe, whom I’d met forty-five seconds earlier, tells me, “You will be like that dog, dying old and alone.”
A finger holds my place in the scuba textbook. When Pepe leaves in an hour, I’ll have three minutes before another man sits next to me, asks if I want drugs, then takes the book from my hands and pages slowly through it, making stoned comments about the women in wetsuits while I am too polite to ask for it back. I will watch the water. I will ache, again, to become whale. Hands smooth to fins, oaring my cathedral of cartilage and blubber to sea as I ring the low bell of my voice and shake, shake the earth.
In middle school, some boys dared me to lie down on a sacrifice slab that the tour guide at the ruins said was cursed. Sometimes I remember that I did it—can feel the cold granite on the back of my legs—but sometimes I’m sure I didn’t. Theoretical models of the multiverse include cosmic inflation, Hubbles, bubbles, ultimate ensemble, quilted, brane and bulk. Is mine the cursed life or the other?
Pepe grabs my hand and says, “Why do you think God gave you a vagina?” He spreads my fingers, reads my lined and briny palm, and tells me someone in my family will die in six months. “Then you’ll think of me,” he says as I try to pull my hand free, “and you’ll remember this conversation.”
Jessica Franken is an essayist, poet, and intermittent fiction writer living in Minneapolis. She has work published or forthcoming in River Teeth, Great Lakes Review, FERAL: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and Bitch magazine, among other places.
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