Keep Your Keys Between Your Knuckles

This painting makes me extremely uncomfortable, so much so that I stopped working on her several times over the past few days. But so does the song I’m presently recording, called “Safe,” that contains the lyric “keep your keys between your knuckles,” which became the title of this piece (saying “piece” sounds so preposterous, I love it). For reference, “Safe” is the song in the Asylum Musical in which the scene from the Asylum Book plays out wherein Emilie rants about “the middle of the street being the only safe place to walk.”

“Knuckles” is the personification of that magnificently horrific moment when a very young girl is told that she is a prey animal, that she was born a prey animal, and she will always be a prey animal. Don’t go out after sunset. Don’t walk home alone. Yell “fire” instead of “help.” Keep your keys between your knuckles. You are prey. And why you weren’t born with your eyes on the sides of your head like a deer’s, like all the other prey animals, we have no idea. Deal with it.

I remember that moment. Utter disappointment. And mortification. The air knocked from my lungs. The sense of my flesh melting from my bones into a pool on the floor, the matter that was “me” unable to hold its own molecules together. The statement of fact so violent in its implication that I swore a bullet had struck my chest and my face felt the crimson spatter.

And then it was over. And I am grown. And I keep my keys between my knuckles every time I walk alone. Every single time.