Stealing Nipples

Last year I couldn't say "nipple" out loud without laughing. I couldn't get my mouth around it, so to speak. The story I tried to write was light and silly, and I'd hoped to use it at a reading. But the physicality of the word brought me down.

In grad school, I wrote a story about an itchy, bleeding nipple, a slightly amusing and very slight story.

I must conclude that I have a thing for nipples.

I already know I have a thing for cleavage, so I suppose this makes sense.

*

The other night, I told V about my idea for a nipple story.

He was quiet for a while, then finally said, "I feel so guilty sometimes."

"You, feeling guilty? That doesn't sound like you."

"It's just that when people tell me ideas for their stories, I want to steal them. That's not right."

"It's not right if you plagiarize. But ideas . . . Well, the story that's written becomes yours. Ideas are 'stolen' all the time, in that no idea is wholly original, is it? So: I absolve you of your guilt."

"Thank you!"

*

The next night Jen told me a nipple story, a personal one, and it was better and odder and more frightening than the story idea I'd just described to her.

When I say I want to write a "nipple story," I'm thinking of the lightning bolt of pain that had me doubled over when I had my nipple pierced a few years ago. I'm also thinking of self-mutilation among girls---and I think of the story that came to me in the shower late one night last week as I murmured aloud to myself to hear the idea echo off the tiles.

And now I think too of Jen's story. I don't mean I'll be taking a shred of her story, no---but it's given my idea a new, eerier dimension, and, as she and I had been discussing synchronicity in art that night, her revealing this memory is a sign to me that I should go ahead with writing the story.

I really think I have something here.

*

But I still can't say the word aloud without cracking up like a twelve-year-old.