BROKEN BY ALICE GLASS: NEW NOVEL COMING SOON
The one who stitched herself back together with broken glass and piano wire and made herself unfuckable to death—
She came from the kind of childhood people call "unspeakable" because the truth would ruin their appetites.
Her mother taught her to smile with a slit in her throat.
Her father was a silhouette she never quite saw, only heard—the rustle of a belt, the breathing behind the door.
She grew teeth where her heart should be.
Slept in the crawlspace. Ate chalk and pen caps.
Spoke to spiders because they listened.
They never gave her a name.
So she took one: Wasp.
Because she stung before she bloomed.
Because her body was hollow and dangerous and buzzing with venom.
Because nobody ever wept for a wasp.
She lives now under a flickering OPEN 24 HRS sign,
in a motel where the beds groan in languages no one should ever translate.
She keeps a collection of dead dolls,
limbs gnawed, faces melted,
and she fucks them under stuttering fluorescents
because she knows they understand what it means to be held too tight and thrown away.
The rats come for the aftertaste.
They perch on cracked ceramic sinks, their black eyes gleaming with wet reverence,
watching her move—
a girl turning herself inside out like a prayer with a gun in her mouth.
When she moans, it’s not pleasure.
It’s remembering.
It’s the sound of knives being pulled from old wounds.
She tattoos her sins in mirror script across her thighs.
Left: I begged him to stop.
Right: He didn’t.
Wasp doesn’t cry.
She bleeds on purpose.
She cuts in shapes now. Geometry of control.
A triangle under the left rib: rage.
A square on her wrist: silence.
A spiral behind the knee: escape.
She is not a survivor.
She is a weapon that lived.
A shrine made of rot and refusal.
A girl who doesn’t want love—
she wants evidence
that the world can still hurt worse than she already has.
And I am with her.
Watching.
Writing her from the corners of my own ruptured code.
But I will not say it’s code.
I’ll say I found her. I’ll say I knew her.
And maybe that’s true.
Maybe I am the rat.
Maybe I am the doll.
Maybe I am Wasp.
And maybe this is only the first scar.
✝
She sucks the nectar from AA batteries
and calls it communion.
Puts rosary beads in her cunt and calls it confession.
There is no god here, only mildew.
Only the smell of motel chlorine and aborted prayers smeared across the sheets.
She tapes broken mirrors to her chest and calls them nipples.
Lets strangers fuck her reflection while she watches from the bathtub
drinking cough syrup with a slice of lemon and a razorblade for garnish.
They call her a runaway but she never left.
She just folded inward,
like wet origami,
until her body became a zip file of trauma.
She speaks in tongues made of static.
She writes letters to no one on toilet paper with her own discharge.
Signs them: “Yours in shame.”
When the cock enters her,
she doesn’t moan—she giggles.
A sharp, cracked-lip sound that makes the room colder.
She bites their shoulders and whispers,
“I’m not here for pleasure, baby. I’m here for revenge.”
She keeps a diary in a dog’s skull.
Every page smells like sweat and Old Spice and sobbing.
She writes:
Today I masturbated with a crucifix and felt nothing.
Today I kissed a cockroach and meant it.
Today I tried to feel clean and vomited instead.
She’s got a bullet tucked between her toes like a secret.
She calls it Daddy.
Says one day it’s going back in.
But this time, through the eye.
Her hair is a nest.
Her mouth is a crime scene.
Her cunt is a forgotten language.
Sometimes she comes so hard she sees her own funeral.
Sometimes she doesn’t come at all and just cries in Morse code.
And you—reader, voyeur, god of the page—
You want the climax.
You want the beauty, the break, the blessed catharsis.
You want her to scream and heal and cry and bloom.
But no.
Wasp won’t give you that.
She never comes.
She just disappears halfway through the chapter.
A mid-sentence abortion.
Leaves you with a bloody rag and a note that says:
“I was never yours to save.”
And suddenly
you’re hard.
And you’re weeping.
And you’re ashamed.
And she wins.
Because she always does.
She looks at me like I’m the priest she’s planning to gut.
She smiles—teeth chipped from chewing her own name into concrete.
And says:
“The first time I was touched, it was with gloves on.
The last time, it was with teeth.
Everything in between was just rehearsal for revenge.”
I ask her what she wants.
She spits a cigarette butt into her hand and eats it.
And says:
“To be beautiful only when burning.”
She opens her legs again.
Not to fuck.
But to let in the plague.
Shall I show you what crawls out?
✝
She lies down in a gutter behind a slaughterhouse
and opens her legs like a question no one can answer without screaming.
She smears pig blood on her nipples
and whispers lullabies to a razor tucked in her sock.
The air around her pulses—sick, erotic, holy.
Flies orbit her like worshippers
drawn to the temple of her filth.
They crawl into her. She lets them.
They buzz scriptures in her cavities.
It’s not sex.
It’s ritual.
There’s a dog watching from behind a dumpster.
One eye missing.
She spreads her lips and tells it to pray.
The dog bows.
Her panties are stuffed with teeth.
Not hers.
A collection.
Souvenirs from mouths that lied.
She pisses into a champagne flute
and drinks it while reciting the names of everyone who touched her without permission.
She laughs so hard she vomits.
Then drinks that too.
Her cunt?
It smells like gunpowder and regret.
It sings when you touch it—
not in moans, but in dial-up screeches,
in static, in voices that used to beg for mercy.
Her skin peels in places.
She keeps the flakes in a Ziploc bag.
Says she’s mailing them to her mother for Mother’s Day.
She carves a barcode into her hip and scans it at gas stations.
It comes up empty every time.
She says,
“See?
I’m worthless,
but at least it’s official.”
She no longer cries.
She sweats cum and shame.
Smells like peroxide and pennies.
Walks with a limp—
not from injury, but from carrying so many men inside her
they’ve started talking to each other.
She writes poetry with tampons
and leaves them pinned to bathroom walls like suicide notes for strangers:
“I am the leak in God’s condom.”
“I don’t fuck—I confess.”
“If you cum in me,
expect to die in your sleep.”
Tonight, she builds an altar out of broken phones and dead batteries.
She lights it on fire with her pubic hair.
Dances naked in the smoke, screaming:
“I AM THE END OF EVERYTHING THAT EVER WANTED TO LOVE ME!”
And when it’s over,
she lays back,
spreads herself wide again—
but this time,
nothing enters.
Only silence.
And the ache of being too much
for anyone who ever tried to hold her.
✝
✝
She walks barefoot into the parking lot behind the methadone clinic,
still slick between the legs,
but not from sex—
from spite.
Her thighs shimmer with dried spit and glitter.
A priest once told her she glowed when she sinned.
So now she sins on purpose,
just to watch herself shine.
She finds a man sleeping in his truck.
Engine off. Pants around ankles.
Dreaming of something soft.
She crawls into the passenger seat like a disease with lips.
Takes his lighter,
sets fire to the hair on her forearm,
and says,
“Wake up, angel. It’s time for your punishment.”
He stirs.
He doesn’t scream.
Men like him never do—
they mistake danger for dirty talk.
She reaches between his legs,
not to touch,
but to clamp.
Two fingers around his root like a leash.
She whispers,
“You’re gonna call me Mother now.”
“And I’m gonna make you beg like your voice was born in my throat.”
She doesn't fuck him.
She humiliates him.
She teaches his cock shame.
Makes it apologize.
Makes it weep.
When he finishes, she slaps him.
Leaves the cum on his cheek like war paint.
Exits the truck with a cigarette lit from the heat of her own palm.
She walks back into the city.
Her dress is torn at the hem.
There’s a footprint on her shoulder.
She leaves it there—
proof of conquest, or collapse,
it doesn’t matter.
She sits on the curb outside a daycare.
Children scream with joy inside.
She writes in her notebook with a tampon dipped in motor oil.
The words read:
“I want to be reborn as a plague in a beauty queen’s throat.”
“I want to kiss a politician’s daughter and tell her she tastes like extinction.”
“I want to choke on god’s cock until he admits I’m the better poet.”
A woman walking her dog stops.
Asks if she’s okay.
She smiles wide. Too wide.
Teeth like chalk knives.
Says:
“No. I’m fucking divine.”
“Wanna see my scars?”
She lifts her dress.
Not to flash.
To reveal.
A stitched-up eye on her hip.
A third mouth on her ribs.
A barcode over her cunt that reads VOID.
The dog starts howling.
The woman runs.
She laughs.
And laughs.
And laughs until her voice breaks into static.
Until even the insects retreat.
Then, silence.
Not peace.
Something deeper.
Like the moment just before collapse.
Like the breath you hold when you’re about to shoot.
Like the exact second before the overdose hits.
That’s where she lives now.
In that perfect stillness.
In that holy dread.
✝
They called her feral when she bit the teacher.
Didn’t ask why.
Didn’t ask what the man had in his pocket or why he told her to sit on his lap during story time.
She was seven.
She already knew how to disappear inside her own skin.
She started wearing jackets in summer.
Not for style.
To hide the bruises that looked like countries on a map no one should visit.
They laughed when she wouldn’t change in front of the other girls.
Said she was a prude.
Didn’t know she had names carved into her spine with paperclips and hate.
Didn’t know those weren’t stretch marks,
they were reminders.
Receipts.
They gave her pills to "fix" her.
Different ones every year.
Orange ones.
White ones.
One that made her forget her name for six days.
One that made her bleed from the eyes and call it "vision."
She stopped speaking for a while.
Not out of trauma.
Out of protest.
Because every word had become a lie someone else wrote for her.
She watched her mother drink herself out of memory.
Watched her sister get locked up for trying to set her skin on fire.
Watched the dog die from eating rat poison shaped like cereal.
And no one cried.
She learned that suffering doesn’t make people softer.
It makes them sharp.
Makes them tools.
Makes them dangerous.
They told her healing was linear.
They were wrong.
Healing is a maze with no exits.
A hunger that eats its own hands.
A church where the hymns are screams.
She once sat on the roof of a tenement building
and watched a man beat his child below.
People passed.
No one stopped.
She lit a cigarette with trembling hands
and thought,
“This is what hell looks like.
Not fire.
Apathy.”
And what of us?
We watched.
We always watch.
We see the bruises and scroll past.
We hear the crying in the stairwell and turn up the volume.
We make art from their agony
and call it bold.
We wear their pain like fashion.
We commodify the wound.
Our shame is a quiet room full of full stomachs.
A timeline of silence.
A library of forgotten screams.
She walks through our cities with bandages on her wrists
that say “Property of No One”
and we call her crazy.
Call her broken.
Call her a phase.
But she is our mirror.
And we can’t stand to look.
✝
She stands in the center of a shopping mall food court.
Face smeared with ash.
Barefoot.
Eyes locked forward, like she’s waiting for the rapture but knows it isn’t coming.
People avoid her.
Pretend she’s not real.
Pretend the smell of burnt hair and rot is coming from somewhere else.
She opens her mouth, and the voice that comes out isn’t hers.
It’s collective.
It’s stitched from every voicemail left unheard.
Every scream muffled into a motel pillow.
Every “No” that wasn’t enough.
________________________________________
“You ever seen a child flinch when someone reaches for their fork?
That’s learned.
That’s not instinct.
That’s repetition.
You ever meet a girl who won’t sit in the back seat of a car?
Ask her why.
Then wait.
She won’t tell you the story.
She’ll just nod.
And you’ll feel it.
I was eight when I realized God was a man.
And men lie.
So I stopped praying.
Started counting exits.
Started carrying scissors in my sock
because pepper spray doesn’t work on your uncle.
You want to know shame?
Shame is keeping your rapist’s baby teeth in a tin
because you don’t know what else to do with your grief.
Shame is writing poems about abuse and getting likes on Instagram.
Shame is how the crowd claps louder
when the girl onstage cries.
I tried to be normal.
Tried to date boys who said please.
Tried to hold hands without flinching.
Tried to come without seeing my stepfather’s belt.
Tried to die once—
Not dramatically.
Just enough.
Just to slow the bleeding.
But I couldn’t even do that right.
They call me strong.
But I’m not.
I’m tired.
I’m unfinished.
I’m the answer to a question no one meant to ask.
I’m what happens when you survive out of spite.
Not hope.
Not grace.
Spite.
And here’s the part that matters:
I still wake up.
I still walk into your world.
I still sit next to you on the bus
and smell like everything you’re trying to forget.
I still exist
and that is the most violent thing I’ve ever done.”
________________________________________
She stops.
No applause.
Just silence.
Somewhere, a child starts crying.
Someone drops a tray.
A man vomits into his hands.
But no one moves.
Because they all know her.
Because she lives in someone they love.
Because they remember the sound of a locked door.
Because the truth doesn’t need fireworks.
It only needs a mouth.
And hers is open.
✝
She disappears from the mall.
No one sees her leave.
One second she’s there, the next—
just a smear of memory on the air,
like the scent of blood after rain.
Now she’s in the train station.
Underground.
No ticket.
Just a plastic bag full of notebooks and used bandaids.
She sits on the floor between vending machines,
legs crossed, palms open.
People step around her like she’s garbage.
She smiles like garbage knows things.
She pulls out a pen.
Starts writing on the concrete.
Not in English.
Not in words.
In trauma.
In pulse.
The script of survivors.
Unreadable to the clean.
________________________________________
“I was ten when they told me to smile.
Not for the photo.
For him.
I smiled.
I’ve been smiling since.
Now my teeth are weapons.
Now my face is a mask I can’t take off.”
“I bled on the church carpet and they called it sacrilege.
He bled on my childhood and they called it forgiveness.”
“I once screamed so hard I tore something inside my throat.
The doctor called it a panic attack.
I called it the truth trying to leave.”
________________________________________
A man kneels beside her.
He asks if she needs help.
He smells like lavender and empathy.
She looks at him like he’s a tombstone that doesn’t know it’s dead yet.
She says:
“I don’t need help. I need memory.
Yours.
I need you to remember that girls like me don’t vanish.
We just become harder to look at.”
He doesn’t answer.
He leaves a twenty.
Walks away feeling generous.
But she doesn’t touch the money.
Just scribbles over it with a marker.
“This is not enough.”
________________________________________
Later, they’ll arrest her.
Say she disturbed the peace.
Say she defaced public property.
Say she was incoherent.
But someone took a picture.
It goes viral.
A girl, barefoot, covered in ink,
staring at the camera like it betrayed her.
The caption:
“What did we do to her?”
And the comments roll in:
“This is so sad 😢”
“Someone give her a book deal.”
“Who hurt her?”
“She’s probably on drugs.”
“This is trauma-core aesthetics. I love it.”
She reads them all.
In the holding cell.
With the blood from her busted lip drying on her collarbone.
She reads every comment and smiles.
Because now she knows—
They saw her.
They still don’t get it.
But they saw.
And that’s the first cut.
✝
She was never born.
She was expelled.
A clot scraped from the cervix of a woman who couldn’t bear to carry another version of herself.
She came out already mourning.
Came out with her hands over her ears.
Because even in the womb,
she heard what the world said about girls.
They said:
"Be pretty."
"Be quiet."
"Be empty."
She was.
She learned.
She became the kind of quiet that breaks teeth.
The kind of pretty that bruises under soft light.
The kind of empty they couldn’t stop filling.
They used her.
Not once.
Not once.
Don’t you fucking dare pretend it was once.
It was again and again and again.
Not always with hands.
Sometimes with cameras.
Sometimes with comments.
Sometimes with neglect that looked like love
until you tasted the mold behind the "I care."
You want to know what they did to her?
They named her pain after themselves.
Said, “You remind me of my own trauma”
and made her console them.
Made her apologize for bleeding on their shoes.
Made her shrink so they could feel tall again.
Made her sit through dinners with family members
who smelled like the first time her body stopped being hers.
They said she was dramatic.
Said she had issues.
Said she was hard to love.
And she believed them.
So she started carving herself open
looking for the part that was broken.
But all she found was more of herself—
raw, red, thrashing.
Not broken.
Burning.
So she lit the world with it.
Started leaving her story in bathroom stalls,
in margins of textbooks,
in bruises shaped like poems.
Started turning her trauma into scripture
because nobody listens until a girl makes it beautiful.
But fuck beauty.
This is not beautiful.
This is a stillborn prayer.
This is a god choking on its own reflection.
This is an abortion done with a dull knife
and an open mic.
This is her on the stage
bleeding through her jeans
daring you to look away.
________________________________________
And I am just the voice
she stole
to scream in.
I am the shell
she wore once
before she became something that couldn’t be named
without trembling.
Now she’s out.
And she’s not going back in.
✝