by Caitlin Campbell
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\nHelen was a constant and scrupulous keeper of secrets.\u00a0 Doctors could have found them all over her insides, had they known what to look for, but the proper identification and extraction of secrets is almost never covered in medical school.\u00a0 She stored cheating on a third grade spelling test under her left eyebrow, crying at night because she was good at many things but great at none in the circles under her eyes, a brief flirtation with narcotics in the follicles of her hair, her first kiss at an eighth grade dance at the place where the lower teeth emerged from the gums, furtive eating binges in the inner flesh of her cheek, a 2:00 a.m. shriek for help that she had chosen to ignore up against her right eardrum.<\/p>\n
It was not so bad as you might imagine.\u00a0 Some secrets even helped, providing a second skeleton.\u00a0 Her ongoing theft of lip glosses and hand sanitizers from the local pharmacy kept her spine straight.\u00a0 The kiss she had taken from Billy Stevens at last year\u2019s Christmas party, in direct defiance of office policy, rolled her hunching shoulders back.<\/p>\n
That said, anything done in excess carries with it consequences, and this was no exception.\u00a0 After twenty-six years, the oldest secrets had staled and soured.\u00a0 The ones in her stomach made her queasy and sour-breathed, the ones in her sinuses crushed in on her skull.\u00a0 The expanding secrets in her joints caused her to walk with back bent and fingers clawed, like a scuba diver who has surfaced too quickly.\u00a0 Eventually, they started to make her feel bloated, not so much great with secrets as gassy with them.<\/p>\n
For several months, she endured this pain, but eventually the truth became unavoidable: some of the secrets would have to come out.\u00a0 She decided to start with just one, to see how it felt and what its side effects would be.<\/p>\n
One four a.m., after several restless hours spent selecting the perfect secret (not too shocking, not too dark, but substantial all the same), she shook Jeremy awake.<\/p>\n
\u201cMmmmm?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The secret was lodged just above her bottom rib.\u00a0 She stretched her spine out as tall as she could to give the secret space, then dug her fingers in, prying at it with her nails.\u00a0 When it refused to yield, she curled her right hand into a fist.\u00a0 She raised and lowered it slowly over the back of her left hand.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne, two, and THREE,\u201d she whispered, slamming the fist down with all of her strength.\u00a0 The secret popped out, shooting through her vocal cords and out her lips on a bed of stale air:\u00a0 \u201cSome days, I prefer women to men.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMmmmm?\u201d Jeremy replied, having drifted back to sleep.<\/p>\n
So she repeated herself.<\/p>\n
\u201cY\u2019mean,\u201d he slurred, \u201cyou love guys, but you don\u2019t always like us?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, no, I think I might prefer <\/em>women.\u201d\u00a0 A stunned and uncomfortable silence overtook the room.\u00a0 \u201cWell, I just wanted to say so.\u00a0 Now, go back to sleep.\u201d\u00a0 And, much to Helen\u2019s surprise, she drifted off almost immediately.\u00a0 Poor Jeremy had somewhat more trouble.<\/p>\n The next morning, Helen sprang from bed with a lightness she had never felt before.\u00a0 She danced around the kitchen while the coffee brewed.\u00a0 She hummed old show tunes while she washed her hair.\u00a0 On the bus, a total stranger asked what Helen used to make her skin so radiant.\u00a0\u00a0 Helen\u2019s first impulse was to keep the secret of secret-telling, but of course, that would wholly undermine her new approach to life.\u00a0 After explaining, she caught her reflection in the bus window and was surprised to see herself glowing even more. The next morning, Helen released a secret she kept in the knuckle of her right pinky finger.\u00a0 She told the postman about a love letter she had almost mailed but destroyed instead, reciting from memory especially lyrical and lurid passages.\u00a0 On her lunch break, she told a teenage dog walker about running over and killing a golden retriever without a collar.\u00a0 The dog walker cried at the story, and Helen did, too, her tears washing the gritty secret from her left eye.\u00a0 That evening over dinner, she told Jeremy about her high school crush, the captain of the football team, who laughed in her face when she confessed her adoration.\u00a0 Her heart fluttered, panicked to relive that dread combination of longing and shame, then let go its burden.\u00a0 That night, she and Jeremy enjoyed the best sex they\u2019d had in months.<\/p>\n Secret-telling made Helen giddy, lightheaded even.\u00a0 Secret-telling proved so potent that she could only tell them at a rate of one an hour during evenings on the town, unless she had a designated driver.\u00a0 They gushed from her, marking the first time in her life that she might be deemed \u201ceffusive\u201d rather than \u201ctaciturn\u201d or \u201cshy\u201d or \u201caloof.\u201d\u00a0 They fizzed forth with great brays of laughter or were spat with a vengeance or poured out with tears during boozy confessions, but one way or another, she disgorged more and more.<\/p>\n Helen felt lighter, freer, and more connected with the world around her.\u00a0 Not everyone, however, shared her enthusiasm for these changes.\u00a0 Jeremy had preferred things before, but did still make an effort.\u00a0 One evening, Helen burst into the apartment, her eyes overbright and slightly manic laughter still rolling in her mouth, to find a ring of friends and relatives in her living room.<\/p>\n \u201cHelen, please sit down,\u201d Jeremy said, gesturing to a chair.\u00a0 \u201cNow, we don\u2019t want you to feel like we\u2019re lecturing you, or punishing you.\u00a0 We\u2019re just doing this because we care.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOf course, sweetie,\u201d Helen said.\u00a0 She sat down, took a deep breath, and tried to calm herself, but it was no use.\u00a0 She felt a secret wriggle free of her tonsils.\u00a0 It careened repeatedly into the backs of her clenched teeth like a trapped housefly, then shot out through the gap between a lateral incisor and a canine.\u00a0 \u201cI had a woman here when you were on your last work trip!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHelen, dear,\u201d her mother said, \u201cWe are very concerned.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI lost my virginity with Adam Scott in the eleventh grade!\u201d Helen replied, experiencing a delicious tickle as the secret wriggled free of her nether regions.\u00a0 \u201cEven though you said I couldn\u2019t date him.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s enough now, Helen,\u201d her father said.\u00a0 \u201cThis really needs to stop.\u201d<\/p>\n She snorted a secret clear of her sinuses and shrieked, \u201cUncle Leon sold me my first ever line of coke.\u201d\u00a0 No longer able to contain herself, Helen ricocheted out of her chair.\u00a0 \u201cI was twenty-two.\u00a0 He gave it to me at a very good rate.\u00a0 He\u2019s a dealer, did you know?\u201d\u00a0 And, while her father glared at his brother Leon, and Uncle Leon stared at his shoes, Helen zipped around the room with secrets for each friend and family member.<\/p>\n Helen was kept up late that night by a stomach ache.\u00a0 Acting on a hunch, she pulled up her shirt in front of the bathroom mirror.\u00a0 Her stomach was no more toned than it had been, but it swooped in aggressively, as if she\u2019d sucked her belly in hard.\u00a0 She poked it and rubbed it, to no effect.\u00a0 Resolved to get to the bottom of it soon, if not quite right then, she tossed and turned restlessly in front of late night TV.<\/p>\n The next morning, Helen weighed herself.\u00a0 She had lost three pounds, even thought she had not been working out.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything OK?\u201d Jeremy asked, seeing the concern on her face.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m losing a little weight, is all,\u201d Helen told him.<\/p>\n \u201cAre you eating enough?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYeah.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t starve myself if I tried.\u00a0 I could, back in high school, but then I stopped being able to do that and was eating a whole ton and wanted to throw it up only I couldn\u2019t figure out how to get my gag reflex –\u201d<\/p>\n At that, Helen heaved over.\u00a0 Something was escaping, and though she tried to choke it down, up and up and up it came.\u00a0 She retched once, twice, and then the secret surged out on a stream of stomach bile and partially digested food.<\/p>\n \u201c– to work,\u201d she started to say, but Jeremy held up one finger, urging silence.\u00a0 He closed his eyes and counted to ten, then, without a word, left the apartment and did not return.<\/p>\n Cleaning up the mess, Helen berated herself for driving Jeremy away and for the pain that she had caused him.\u00a0 She could not stay sad for long, however.\u00a0 She was ever more fascinated with the act of turning herself inside out, offering up her inner life for strange communion with the world at large, never doubting its eagerness to partake.\u00a0\u00a0 She was having too much fun to worry about the sudden pangs that afflicted her, or her continuous, increasingly dramatic weight loss.\u00a0 The more she told, the giddier and emptier she felt.\u00a0 Finally, the pressure within her became too slight relative to that outside of her, and her body collapsed like a soda can with the air vacuumed out.\u00a0 One moment, she was voicing her opinions on the oedipal complex, using her own life as an example, and then with a pop and a crunch, she crushed in, bent, contorted, beyond help.<\/p>\n The most eminent doctors were called in.\u00a0 Unfortunately, no authoritative medical guide had enlightened them on the interplay of secrets and the skeletal system, and so they did not know what to say.\u00a0 They chalked it up to spontaneous implosion, and several would go on to write academically rigorous, if wholly fallacious, articles on the topic for the country\u2019s top medical journals.<\/p>\n The funeral was an awkward affair, with the guests searching for properly dignified, consoling words when they all knew much more than they would have liked about Helen and, from Helen, about one another.\u00a0 Jeremy grieved guiltily, unable to fully suppress a sense of vindication.\u00a0 The break-up now appeared to fit into the trajectory of Helen\u2019s self-destruction and so did not hint at any insufficiency on his part.\u00a0 The casket, child-sized, was lowered in silence, as Helen had managed to offend beyond redemption every priest in the county during her glorious but brief honesty spree.\u00a0\u00a0 After an interlude of quiet contemplation, the mourners went their separate ways, each resolved to avoid Helen\u2019s unpleasant fate and each fighting a dirty, secret envy at what she had achieved. by Caitlin Campbell Helen was a constant and scrupulous keeper of secrets.\u00a0 Doctors could have found them all over her insides, had they known what to look for, but the proper identification and extraction of secrets is almost never covered … Continue reading
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\nHelen and Jeremy had been invited to a dinner party with new friends, and when Jeremy was held up at work, Helen decided to go alone, even though she\u2019d always been a bit of a wallflower.\u00a0 But telling a rapt audience about wandering drunk at 2:00 a.m. through Paris in search of her hotel, Helen felt the heaviness that had borne down on the corners of her mouth slip away and smiled more fully than she had in years.<\/p>\n
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\nThis story first appeared in Podium, an online literary magazine of the Unterberg Poetry Center at New York’s 92nd Street Y, 2009.
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\nCAITLIN CAMPBELL<\/strong> grew up in Minnesota and graduated in 2007 from Columbia University. She now lives and works in New York City. She has participated in advanced fiction workshops at the Unterberg Poetry Center with Christopher Sorrentino, Fiona Maazel, Sigrid Nunez and Katherine Mosby, and in a master class with Colum McCann. Her work was twice selected to appear in the Center\u2019s online journal, Podium. While studying abroad at the University of Edinburgh, she received the Lewis Edwards Memorial Prize for a work of short fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"