By Michele Lombardo

My fourteen-year-old daughter lounges atop the Queen-sized bed wearing pink nylon hiking shorts, woolen socks, and nothing else. Torso, out. Boobs, out. I’d been in the bathroom for three minutes and now, somehow, this. Arms folded behind her head, she smiles, a sly tilt in her expression that signals danger. My husband faces the wall of the cramped hotel room, his back to her, like she ordered him to stand in the corner. Whatever this is, he’s losing. Lately, we’re all losing.  

Jake pivots to me. “Try to convince her that wearing a shirt in front of her father isn’t too much to ask.” As though he’s the only one being victimized here.  

Emma studies her nails like a Cartel boss deciding our fate. “You don’t have a shirt on. You never have a shirt on. Why should I have to wear a shirt when it’s hot out? You have nipples, do you not?” Her father is, indeed, shirtless. 

Ah! This is merely a feminist issue, I think with delight, watching my husband take tiny, shuffling side steps toward his suitcase to retrieve a shirt he may never remove. But before his head emerges from the V-neck, the positive feeling sinks. Fuck. When had I, or anyone else, managed to solve a single feminist issue? This is stemming from the drama at school. An escalation of Emma’s desire for piercings and tattoos. I get it. I acted out similarly in high school, which is why I hate it so much. 

“This room is air conditioned,” I say. It’s clear from her expression that I’ve earned a figurative beheading.  

“I am trapped on a carbon-addled planet, each year hotter than the last, where people are literally dying of heat stroke, and I’m supposed to walk around and look at man boobs while I sweat to death in a bra with a shirt over it? If my boobs aren’t okay, why are moobs?” 

“I’m wearing a shirt,” Jake says. “I will always wear a shirt, okay? So, when sharing a climate-controlled room with your parents, it’s inappropriate to lounge around topless.” 

He looks to me for backup, but I can’t meet his eyes. We are so lame. She is so right. But how to concede on the issue when I also have no interest in seeing my daughter’s naked breasts?  

“It’s natural to be naked, right Mom?” 

I’ve had my hang-ups over the years, but the stance that female minors should be allowed to cavort topless hasn’t taken up one iota of my brain space.  

I want to be cool. I want to disappear. I am utterly unprepared for this. If only I could parachute a blanket onto her, roll her up inside and stuff her in my closet for safekeeping. At least until her pre-frontal cortex development catches up with the rest of her. 

“There’s more than one way to hang your boobs out,” I say. “I’m not opposed to some dangerously low-cut attire. And I mean really low-cut.”  

Emma tosses her tawny hair over one shoulder. She recently got a cut, and the addition of bangs makes her look older than her age, not younger, as I’d hoped. 

She tsks. “You know it’s legal for women to be topless in New York? And Vermont doesn’t have any public nudity laws whatsoever.” 

“Right, and we live in Pennsylvania.” Next she’ll fire back that we’re in Vermont now, day one of our summer vacation, so I keep my mouth moving. Distraction can be a mother’s best offense. “And the closest I’ve come to witnessing public nudity in New York is the Naked Cowboy in Times Square, who isn’t even naked.” 

She opens her mouth to protest and I glance at my watch, remind her that it’s time to leave for our hike, which we’ll be doing clothed.  

“Fine.” She roots through her suitcase slowly, performatively, because neither of us want to be in the room for what happens next.  

I’d always meant to tell Emma about the violence in the world. Instead, we jointly binged a stream of true crime, horror, and noir. I let the shows do the work. A barrage of kidnapped girls, raped girls, dead girls. And then it was too late. And yet here she is, topless, serving more of herself up to that world on a platter.  

After my assault, I slept with every guy who crossed my path. Which led to more assaults. Violence is a circle. It didn’t heal me, and could’ve hurt me much worse. Jake doesn’t get what’s happening with Emma and why should he? He’s always been in control of his body. 

When she’s sequestered inside the bathroom, shirt and bra in hand, I tell Jake we need to start paying for adjoining hotel rooms. “She’s stuck spending a week sleeping in the same room as us. Consider this a successful protest.” 

“Do you think she’s doing it because of—you know?”  

I kiss him. “You’re about to have a call with the school board. It’s probably on her mind.” 

We recently learned that a boy in Emma’s class created and shared nude AI photos of her, and that the school was tipped off about it six months earlier. The administration followed an exacting playbook of what not to do when faced with allegations of child sexual abuse. And now that the police are involved and the school is being skewered in the press, the board is attempting damage control. Emma and I will hike around Lake Willoughby while this conversation unfolds. We’ve already settled on sending her to a different school in the fall, so I’m not interested in justifications or policy updates. Jake is different. He wants heads on stakes.  

As Emma and I leave, Jake hands me bear spray.  

“Really?” I’m suspect. Bears don’t exactly run rampant here. Plus, my husband isn’t one to take extra precautions. He routinely captains hikes for which we have inadequate stores of food and water, no flashlights, no lighters, nothing to buffer an unforeseen complication. Bear spray is so beyond our norm, touching it is like palming a lightning bolt. 

“Probably works on humans, too. Send pics if you see critters.” 

I can’t imagine seeing more wildlife than I already do walking in and out of this hotel, its eaves obscured by spider webs and the orb weavers that own them. Their menacing bodies resemble overstuffed ticks the size of raspberries, and they have ominously speckled spindly legs. They’re also, thankfully, non-venomous. I looked it up, and packed food and water, and downloaded an offline-accessible map. 

Because I am the true buyer of bear spray, so to speak. 

The morning is crisp. 

“Good thing we have layers.” I wrap my arms around myself and shiver, choreographing a subliminal commercial for clothing.  

The terrain is uneven, a narrow trail studded with rocks and tree roots that erratically alternates between uphill slogs and downhill canters. Our path crosses channels of running water, the snow and ice melting from the highest points of Mount Hor, rutting through the state forest and into the lake below.  

“This is a real boob killer. Sports bras are great, am I right?” 

“I’m wearing clothes, Mom,” Emma says, deadpan. 

We come to Vermont often, but usually in the winter to ski. We’ve both seen this lake before, standing by its northern shore in winter coats, steeling ourselves against the wind. We marveled at how clear it was while counting down the seconds before we returned to the car and activated the seat warmers. 

Now we’re seeing a different lake. Hiking along its southern trail, we’re enveloped in forest. We catch occasional glimpses of the deep blue water, which fades to turquoise closer to shore. Fog slowly rises from the water’s surface and drifts away, so patches of ripples alight with reflected sun. Beyond that: obstructed flashes of cliff face. It’s Mount Pisgah, the steep, near-vertical hike my husband wants to do because he prefers his communions with nature to be punishing. “We need our exercise,” he often says, as if every proper workout includes exploding one’s heart while dangling from a boulder. 

“I just worry, Em. You can’t make yourself a target.” 

She sniffs. “Like before? All my whoring around and whatnot?”  

My point exactly. This time she was singled out simply because she developed faster than her friends. What will the fuckers do if she starts stripping every chance she gets? “Look. You can get pickpocketed in New York City with no provocation. Then there’s the scenario where you leave your purse in the middle of the sidewalk, come back in two hours, and it’s gone. In a perfect society, it’d be there indefinitely, but I think we can both agree that this is no utopia.” 

“So why not focus on laws or society or something? Why dial in on me?” 

“I guess because maybe the crimes change, but the impulse behind them? That kid could go to jail, he could repent, but hundreds more will step into his place. The patriarchy isn’t going to dismantle with a policy change and an op-ed.” 

“Wow. So inspiring, Mom. Truly.” 

Jake calls me a pessimist, but I’m not. When something awful happens in his world, he’s outraged, but know this: Outrage is reserved for the tippy top of the food chain. 

We descend a muddy section. The path leads to the shore, onto the beach by the southwest cove. Hallelujah! A landscape amenable to small talk. Cue subject change to the quality of the beach, whether to dip our feet in the water, the possibility of paddleboarding after dinner.  

Two steps into the sand and I freeze, staring at a man stationed by a tree, hands on his hips, one leg straight, the other bent at a right angle. He gazes over his shoulder, as though looking stately for a nonexistent photographer. Tufts of his thin, gray hair lift with the breeze. He is completely nude except for gold, wire-rimmed glasses and a pair of Keens. His junk, which I observe with a rapid eye twitch, is small and compact, but rocks to and fro, moved by currents of lake airflow. And he’s not the only one.  

I grab Emma’s hand and, using my peripheral vision, we dodge statuesque, preening naked men, zigzagging across the sand until we duck into a patch of grass between two trees and some small boulders. We sit, legs dangling in the water, and I open my eyes widely at her. She raises both palms in a “don’t look at me” way, and I whisper that I had no idea. I thought nude beaches in America were remote, sure, but that they also involved ocean. I didn’t expect this in the backcountry lakes of rural Vermont.  

“They’re all men,” I say. “I only saw one set of boobs.” A lone woman, sprawled on a towel, sunbathing topless.  

“It’s great they’re all saggy old dudes,” Emma says. 

It is great. Excellent people-watching. Who wants to peer in on young, attractive people frolicking around in states of undress? We already have that: TV. But this. Something about all the curled back hair, the pot bellies, failing eyes and shriveled scrotums…it’s exciting.  

“Think we’ll make them uncomfortable if we stay here…dressed?” Like we’re spying on an endangered species I don’t want to scare away. 

“You let me know,” Emma says, gripping the bottom of her tank top. 

I yelp, then smack my hand over my mouth. 

She tears off the top and unhooks her bra, dropping them into the space between us. I look around, frantic. My equilibrium lurches in tandem with the giant shift in my understanding of the situation. Is it legal for an underage girl to disrobe in public? Around a bunch of old men? Is this kiddy porn and, if not, why not, when the only thing standing between this and that is the snap of a camera shutter? 

“I don’t think this is legal,” I whisper. 

She shimmies out of her shorts. “Tell them I’m computer-generated and it’ll be fine. Or I’m my own artistic expression and therefore protected by the First Amendment.” 

She lies back in the grass, underwear on (thank Christ!), her closed, fragile eyelids nearly translucent in the sunlight. Her feet sink deeper into the water and kick up the sandy bottom, forming a muddy blossom that hides her long toes, green chipped nails. She’s stripped down to near-nude in a brood of vipers, and I am beside her, helpless, bearing witness. 

“Relax,” Emma says without opening her eyes. 

I do not. I sit upright, back ramrod straight against a tree, scanning the area for signs of trouble. No one notices us. Some nudists are there with friends or lovers. There to swim in pairs or sip spiked drinks from koozies while reclined in beach chairs. Others seem to contemplate in solitude the way the ferns move, or the families of ducks gliding past in straight lines.  

The man in Keens and I lock eyes. He considers Em and I, squinting, and walks over to another man. They look and confer. The assemblage of men grows, and more faces turn our way, more words are said, someone points a finger, a laser beam of blame that shrivels me from the inside out.  

I need to Google the criminal sentence for allowing one’s minor to disrobe in public. Will child services get involved? Will I be jailed? Will my husband allow me to fester there, refusing to post bail? Fumbling my phone to life, the out of service SOS notice appears in the top right corner. SOS. My sentiments exactly.  

A young man the size of an oak tree stalks towards me with tousled hair, doe eyes, a zinc-smeared nose, and a penis. No. No no no no no. What now? I scan my surroundings, like the answer can be plucked from a blade of grass, as my mind stretches, diffuses, a contrail bleeding outward.  

“Excuse me,” he says, still a few strides away. The shock of his voice jolts me back to life and I ball together Emma’s pile of discarded clothes and throw it, the pieces landing around her like streamers.  

“Careful!” the man says. “No! Look out!”  

My head swivels to follow his outstretched finger, which I already know is levelled directly at Emma. She opens her eyes at the same moment that a brown blur darts from beneath her shirt and latches onto her. She shrieks and careens to the side, her shoulder knocking into my jaw, her head landing in my lap. The snake disappears as quickly as it attacked, a flash of tail thwacking a rock and is vacuumed away, into the earth.  

I bleat, bite my cheek, frozen.   

“Fuck me!” the man says. He squats down and inspects Emma’s body. “Lucy got her pretty good. Come now. We don’t have long to save her life.” 

* 

“Whoa.” The word trails from my mouth long and lazy. I’m sideways in my mom’s arms. Raised voices ricochet off the trees and grubby feet stomp around me. Mom’s eyes look crazy and she presses them closer and closer to mine, like she wants us to touch eyeballs. Wtf? Moments after her pupils recede, she slaps my face, and all I can think is: not nice. I should slap her back, now that slapping is a thing that happens between us.  

Before I can, hands grab me, clench my arms and legs and lift. A jostling journey through space. I’ve been hoisted up and I’m being carried away by so many dangling penises. Ew! They’re flapping around, smacking against my legs and my back, clumsy and gross and impossibly soft. That’s when I realize: Shit. My clothes. I might need clothes. I look down at my jangling boobs. Two new holes ooze blood next to my armpit. Right. It all floods back to me. Fangs. Snake. Scary. 

There’s no pain, nothing but embarrassment, really. “Sorry,” I say to a rando man. I giggle. “I’m so fine. Seriously. You can go back to, you know, as you were.”  

Dude doesn’t even look at me. Like I’m Medusa and will turn him to stone.  

The backseat of the car smells like baked dog hair, making me cough. Oh! My mom’s next to me, my legs propped onto her lap. Her eyes are, like, so wide open. At least they aren’t trying to push against mine anymore. That was weird. The car rumbles to life. Two naked dudes sit up front driving, a young one and a grey hair. The young one introduces himself as Ben. The old one doesn’t say his name or anything else, because Ben is too busy reciting orders, a freaking litany of them. Keep her still, remain calm, let the bite bleed, don’t apply pressure, don’t clean it, don’t bandage it. Every drop of blood that exits the wound carries venom, and that’s what we want. He says, let the venom leak out. He says, keep the shirt off. He says, it’s going to swell a lot.  

“Should I suck the poison out?” Mom asks.  

“Do you have a death wish?” Ben asks. 

I laugh, still feeling giggly and embarrassed. “No, she just wants to protect my naked bod.” 

They’re driving me to a hospital twenty-five minutes away. Ben says it’s best to get treatment for a rattlesnake bite, the antivenin, within thirty minutes, but there’s nowhere closer.  

“We’re cutting it close,” Ben says, serious and in charge.  

I can’t decide if I believe him or if he’s a drama queen. All his mansplaining gives him an edge of insincerity, but for some reason he also reminds me of a totally genuine, mild-mannered folk singer, strumming a guitar. Must be the eyes. I realize that the passenger is the old man with the glasses and the Keens. Ha! I can picture them hanging out, naked around a bonfire, sipping obscure beers and playing music no one’s heard of but Ben.  

Then, all at once, a sharp, demon pain arrows through me. It’s involuntary; I wail, causing Ben to speak more loudly, like he’s read that raised voices minimize pain. He’s wrong.  

“I think the shock has worn off,” Ben says. 

“Oh, no, baby. Does it hurt?” Mom asks. 

What the motherfuckingfuck do you think, I want to ask, but instead I weep. 

“So, Lucy, as we call her, suns herself on that rock every day,” Ben shouts. “She’s a timber rattler, the same kind the colonies depicted on their flag during the Revolution. You know, the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag? It’s actually called the Gadsden Flag.” 

“I was bit by the Confederate flag. Figures.” I’m pleased by my coherent thought, but my voice comes out uneven and wonky.  

“Technically it has nothing to do with the Confederate Flag. That’s a misconception. Try not to pant back there, okay girlie? We want the venom to travel through your bloodstream at a sluggish rate. Slow and smooth breathing is clutch.” 

What is ‘clutch’? Grandma slang, probably.  

I use every coping mechanism my therapist taught me to lessen this pain. I lock it inside my container. I visit my special place. Roll my eyes. Tap in positivity. Nothing works, so I growl like a pregnant lady in a movie. 

The old man turns to assess me, then flips back around in his seat like he’s been bitten. By me. Don’t tempt me, Buddy.  

“It’s the size of a fucking golf ball,” the old guy says. 

The mound is taut, shiny, and bruised.  

“It’ll get bigger,” Ben says. 

It’s official: I’ve been rescued by a naked mansplainer. 

Mom paws at my legs without looking at the wound. “It’s my fault,” she says, top lip crimped in disgust. “I threw the shirt right onto Lucy, didn’t I?” 

She always finds a way to make everything about her. 

“You couldn’t have known. Wish I’d spotted you sooner,” the old man says. 

“What people don’t understand is, danger is inherent in travel,” Ben says.  

This guy is too much. Danger is everywhere, even in the stupid suburbs. 

“Here, I know where everything is—wasps nests, where to look for black widows, places prone to falling rocks, the obscured ground holes that snag your foot when you’re hiking,” Ben says. “But put me somewhere else, I know nothing.” 

Ground holes. In between twisting jolts of pain, I repeat it to myself like a mantra: ground holes, ground holes, ground holes. I don’t think it’s a real term, which makes it funny. Ben said ground holes. Ha! 

“I always worry about the wrong things. All year I’m concerned with your math grade. Ridiculous!” Mom says. 

Oh, boy. Here we go. She’s talking about the AI nudes. Twenty-three pictures, twenty-three poses. It would’ve been better if I could’ve walked into biology class knowing everyone was picturing me with Double D’s and a shaved crotch. Instead, the pictures were real, stripped from Insta, and then, somehow, de-clothed. The bodies were fake, yes, but looked so much like my own they were, like, gaslighting me. That one of me in the neighbor’s back yard wearing a blue bikini. I’d only ever been in that place wearing that blue bikini. But I’d catch myself wondering when the nude was taken, why I didn’t remember. That I questioned. That the fake so resembled truth, that was the mindfuck. 

No one knew who’d seen them. Mom always saying: They could show up later to ruin your life. Dad saying: That little prick needs to pay. The school saying: We asked him if he did it and he said no, so we thought everything was fine.  

The car hits a huge pothole and I lift off, airborne. My mother rearranges my body on the seat when I land. She’s always remarking on Vermont’s “treacherous” unpaved roads, roads where the shoulders have washed away, sometimes on both sides, dusty channels crossing gulches. 

I used to care that Daniel, a former friend who lives three blocks from my house, wouldn’t get into any real trouble because legally, in Pennsylvania, it wasn’t a crime. Congressmen and police shaking their heads, saying: Sorry, the laws just haven’t caught up to the technology. But it’s hard to feel much about it now when I can’t feel my hands and feet and can’t seem to move them. I know what to do. Tell my brain to wiggle my toes. But it isn’t working and my sandy toes simply fan out, immobile on my mother’s thigh. I cry. I’m not sure if I ever stopped. This fucking body. This fucking body is supposed to be mine. 

My mouth fills with the taste of rubber, like how a band-aid smells. Rivulets of drool run down my cheeks and pool into the hollowed triangle at the base of my neck. The glowing red letters that spell EMERGENCY come into view and Mom and Ben both sit up straight. Mom wiggles, as if readying to pounce.  

“Here we go,” she says, making it clear she intends to crush this situation.  

Ben and the old dude ease me into a wheelchair, though Ben argues for a gurney. Instead, he’s handed a hospital gown and encouraged to cover up. Mom squeezes my hand and tells me everything will be okay. She wears her brave and determined face, but eyes don’t lie. I take her hand and place it flat just below my collarbone, so it’s a mirror image of the wound. Wound, right side, hand, left side.  

A nurse cloaks a blanket around my shoulders. Ben is insistent that the wound, which is now the size of a third boob, bigger, in fact, than my real ones, remain uncovered, so the nurse curls the blanket around the outer edge of the bite. Mom bends down in front of me with one of those foil-wrapped cups of apple juice they always give to kids in hospitals, and it tastes amazing.  

“Your Dad will be here any minute,” Mom says.  

That he probably still won’t be able to bear to look at my body, even when I’m half dead in a hospital, warms me. I swallow the comfort of it—that some things are constant—and try to hold it in my middle even though I’m cold and my legs twitch. 

I’d been both relieved and angry that he’d refused to look at the photos. That only Mom and I were willing to meet the detective and confirm that every face in the stack was mine.  

“Tell me it isn’t my fault,” I say to Mom.  

Her face falls as she tucks the hair behind my ears. “Oh, baby. I hope no one made you feel that way.” 

“Tell me I’m going to be okay,” I say. 

“Tomorrow I’ll take you to get as many fucking tattoos as you want.” 

A tear rolls off the side of her nose and plunks me below my eye. The nurse returns to collect the empty juice container. 

“Tell me I’m going to be okay,” I say to the nurse. 

She pats my knee and says, “Your room just opened up. I think you’ll make it.” 

I take my mom’s hand and place it back where it was. I like the feeling of it there. The injury on one side, her maternal touch on the other, both rooted there, even, like scales in perfect balance. Her face crumples but, still, she smiles. The smile doesn’t cover fear, like always. This time it’s a window. My blurry vision tunnels straight into her core, to the doorstep of her broken heart, which beats slowly, swelled with something new. I’ve cracked her hard exterior.  

We’re taken to a room, but once I’m clipped to all the wires, my vision goes from clouded to swimmy. Everything is under water, an impressionistic painting smudged beyond repair. For the first time since this whole thing started, I’m terrified.  

“Um, I might be going blind?” 

“Just some pain meds,” the nurse says. “Things should turn around soon.” 

But is the blindness permanent? Have I gotten the antivenin? Do they keep it in stock? The last thing I saw before my eyes died was the nurse’s back, her scrubs covered in smiling bears. To make matters worse, my hands inflate. Too big for my body. Also, they’re rising. Helium balloons that the nurse forgot to tether to the bed. And where is the rest of me? I can’t say. With my vision gone, my other senses wobble. Hearing muffled because of all the layers of gauze separating me from everything else. Also, it’s hard to hear without hands. Rhythmic bleeping of a machine is closer than the human sounds, the mumbles and whispers. Maybe the machine is resting somewhere in the middle of the stratified bandage that surrounds me. My mom and the doctors and nurses exist on the other side of a porous, yet impenetrable wall. They must be far, far away, but that’s hard to know when I can’t tell where I end and other things begin. I can’t feel my body at all. It’s become nothing, or maybe everything. 

Behind my eyelids, darkness erupts into shapes and colors. A red circle morphs into a ground hole, a paisley swoop, a fish that slithers away. Everything moves, a shifting tapestry wallpapering my mind.  

The tapestry darkens then shimmers into a bright, blinding day. My parents and I are lined up in a row, casting our bodies forward and back on matching green rocking chairs. The dangling spiders sweep left and right, swayed by every gust. The lake laps at its shore. Water rises, heaves, retreats. A line of ducks—momma and babies—crash into the surf one at a time. Overhead, a hawk whistles an electric shriek.  

I run the pads of my fingers along the manufactured grain of the polyethylene arm rests. The blaze of the sun suspended above, at its highest point of the day, stuns the retina.  

“It was stupid to think I could take away your pain by punishing that boy, that school,” my father says. 

“I thought I could absorb it,” my mother says. “Suction it inside my body. Do you think that works? Or does the suffering double, like a cell that splits into two?” 

They want so much, my parents. I take a hand from my father and one from my mother and nest them into my body, like a child hugging something precious, and maybe also paralyzing that thing a little.  

Still, the same red-tailed hawk wheels and circles, hunting for smaller things. I watch it. Float towards it. Is that what I’m to become, to swap bodies, to flip from prey to predator? But I simply hover, mid-air, watching at eye-level as the bird scans the terrain below. How wonderful to be without a body. Is this how a girl survives? A mantra, a conviction, a hypnotism: the body is nothing but a thing subjugated by the mind.  

The body is nothing, and therefore cannot be hurt.  

I open my eyes and wonder whether this is where my mind meant for me to go. Back to my hospital room.  

A man’s voice, my father, asks, “How is she?” 

The nurse says, “She’s a fighter. Pulling through nicely.” 

I tell myself: Oh, shit. 

I tell myself: I am in charge of you, body. 

I tell myself: I am getting a tattoo tomorrow, and at least there is that.  

---

Michele Lombardo is a fiction writer, Co-Founder of the monthly writing series Write Now Lancaster, and an Adjunct Faculty at the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, where she teaches creative writing classes. Her work has appeared in Sou’wester, Literary Orphans, DASH Literary Journal, Permafrost Magazine, and others. She was longlisted for the 2025 Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest in Fiction. Her story “Benched” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her story “People with Problems” was recently displayed within a Lancaster Public Art Project at Franklin & Marshall College. She is a graduate of UCR Palm Desert’s MFA Program.