The Rust Belt

She was tired of people asking where she’s from. It was a question, she’d decided, that was both too strange and too familiar. There were any number of details that would say more about her. Her favorite dessert, for example, or the make of her first car. But still, the question of her hometown came up more than she thought should be usual. In supermarkets. At conferences. During chance encounters with strangers on the street.
She began to hold up her hand before the question was out.
At first she meant this to say, “Michigan” but then later to mean, “Stop.” Sometimes she’d stick her hands into her pockets and say, “The Midwest,” which wasn’t specific. Or other times she’d say, “The Suburbs,” which was less specific but also very specific in
important ways that few people understood.
She found if she chose not to answer, they’d try to fill in her blanks. There were some who saw her and said, “Farm Girl.” Some would say, “City Girl.” And when she had the energy and the patience she’d say, “No, but not no.” This in between. This question. It was like, she thought, trying to know someone by skin alone. And there was so much more to her, wasn’t there? So much more to everyone
than where they’re from.
Although there was this: a small patch of flesh on her back, behind her breast, between the wing of the trapezius and the sharp creases of scapula. This small patch in a shape she could not name— something rhombic—and that, whenever she’d travel, would glow warm through the threads of her shirt burning a bright, brown- orange grit grinding deeper and deeper within her the further she journeyed from home.