A Girl As A Pyrotechnic Display

Fiery flash nonfiction on growing up in a fundamentalist religion where girl-bodies were synonymous with sin.

Lois Dodd, Burning House, Lavender, 2007, courtesy of Alexandre Gallery, New York, © Alexandre Fine Art, Inc.

I know how to write about rain. I know how to write about fire. I can spin you a poem about how it smells at the end of the world. I can write five thousand words right now about deep secrets and dark notions, but I don’t know how to write about desire.

I was never meant to feel it.

In the church where I was a child, desire was not a thing allowed a girl. An appetite was only meant for men and for whores and I was groomed to be a virgin until someone walked me down an aisle. In that church, wanting could light a girl up like an emergency flare. That kind of attention is dangerous; the same kind of heat that got witches burned on pyres, so I learned to keep my head down and cool my heels in the ashes.

My mother was a nurse who believed in using the proper terms for body things. It wasn’t pee, it was urine. Not poop, but a bowel movement. A stomach, not a belly. A head, not a noggin. A mouth, not a trap. Rectum, not butthole. Penis and scrotum, not cock and balls. Genitals, not private parts. But then the wheels fell off her lexicon when she got to my girl-body bits. The whole of my genitals was vagina, said quickly and without eye contact. There was no discussion of clitoris, vulva or labia, no differentiation between inner and outer, between majora and minor, or even that I housed three holes between my legs.

These facts I learned later from textbooks and the Catholic school girls who worked at the Dairy Queen. I’m ashamed to say how old I was when I finally met my own cunt in a mirror.

I was never meant to wonder. Never meant to touch. Never meant to do more than lie pliant on my back and think of Jesus while a man pushed himself into me and then a baby pushed itself out. I was never meant to want.

So when puberty hit and my mother heard the squeaking springs as I rode my fist to oblivion in the dark of my twin bed, she had no language for the voltage that shot through me. All she could say when she opened my door and turned on the lights was that I should pray more. Should dress modestly. Should purify my thoughts. Should surrender all to Jesus.

And I did. And I did. And I did. All the time. But the public library had a romance section, and on Saturdays I’d hide in the stacks with a pile of smut in my lap, scanning the text for any mention of lips and memorizing the way the words fired a violet trail from the back of my throat to the cleft of my legs. Feeling the way my face would blaze when I took my favorite selection to the lending counter. My entire body a pyrotechnic emergency flare.

In previous lives, LaDonna Witmer was a newspaper journalist, advertising copywriter, brand voice expert, editorial director, public speaker, and poetry slammer. She now tends her dogs, dahlias, and daughter on a small quinta in rural Portugal while writing essays, poems, and memoir. LaDonna has work published or forthcoming in KHÔRA, Literary Mama, Zero Readers, and Take the Fruit: An Anthology of Religious Trauma. She is writing a book about fundamentalism and fire. You can find her on BlueSky and Instagram — @wordsbyladonna — and on Substack at The Long Scrawl.

---

More Good Things:

Enrique

Going To The Go-Go's

Pool Hall | Michael Barrish

Are You There, God? It's Me, Celibate

A Spider Kind Of Woman