By Koolshooters: pexels.com
by Andrea Marcusa
Thank you, Mom, for always yelling “FUCK” in traffic, teaching me the power of a word that, during my tenth summer, rescued me from the name “Loser,” when I, squeaky-mouthed and itching for attention, lost card games at the beach picnic tables. Younger than most of the kids by two grades, the group tolerated or teased me, calling me “The Chipmunk” or “Munk,” mocking my fang teeth and overbite until I muttered “fuck” and turned their teasing into laughter. I lived for that table, for the moments when I slipped ice cubes into boys’ pockets, waited for the puddles to appear, and someone yelled, “Yo, you peed your pants, dude!” while I, grinning, looked down at my cards. That was the summer some kids hid in bathroom stalls to suck each other’s necks until they bloomed red with hickeys while the meaning of the word, “fuck,” was still a mystery, despite our viewing the act on porn sites, all of us pressed around a glowing phone screen, and I and the other girls pretended we weren’t freaked out by dazed women with huge boobs getting jackhammered by faceless men. But the expression “fuck” was mine—a secret weapon tucked in my back pocket, my talisman in a world of strange face sucking, and older girls sprouting boobs and pubic hair. I slipped it into pop songs, whispered it when rain soaked our game, crowed it when the sun shone, rang it out like a police siren, because some girls were afraid to say it, some of the shyer boys, too—it was the giant pedestal I stood upon, my middle name, “Fuck.”
Andrea Marcusa’s writings have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Moon City Review, Milk Candy Review, Citron Review, and others. She’s received recognition in a range of competitions, including Smokelong, Best Microfiction, Cleaver, Raleigh Review,and Southampton Review and is the author of the chapbook “What We Now Live With,” (Bottlecap Press.) She’s a member of the faculty at The Writer’s Studio in New York City. See her on Blue Sky: @andreamarcusa.bsky.social
