[6 ways to draw a circle on wikihow]
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How To Draw A Circle
1. You’re going to want to find something to trace around. This story has happened before. This story will always be happening. When you look at your hands, you think of your mother. When you stand at the mirror, your father looks back. You have never known your father. So you have never known yourself. We’re all just footprints in the end, left by hand-me-down boots. Boots, blood, and a name like an echo. These are the things your father left you. Boots, a bloodstain that won’t come out of the hardwood, and you. These are the things your father left behind.
A picture of a hand tracing around a cup with a pencil.
2. You can always make things more difficult. Draw it out. Make it interesting. Oh, you don’t want to follow someone else’s blueprints? Oh, you want to create something new? Too bad. We can’t all be architects. Some of us were born to lay the bricks. Some of us were born to hide the bodies. You’ve been building this house since you were born, just like your father. Just like your father, you will not live to see it finished. The house has been a nursery. The house has been a burial site. The house is swallowing bodies before the blood has dried. Your inheritance is a knife’s edge. Your inheritance is a culling. When the time comes, even your coffin will be a family heirloom. Come, make sure the measurements are right.
A picture of a pencil being affixed to a compass.
3. Your sister haunts you. Your sister held your hand and washed your hair. Your sister sang when your father was listening. You do not remember what she sounded like. You do not remember her at all, but these walls echo. The house is an echo. The house is a wound. Your sister was wounded, long before she was killed. Your sister has always been wounded. Once, you believed you would hold flowers at her wedding. That dream, too, is a wound. There is a string tied to your finger, and no one else can see it. No one else can feel it.The other end is trapped inside a tomb. At night, dead hands tug on it like stringing a piano. They know your hunger. They want you to come to dinner. They want you to come home.
A picture of a hand holding down a piece of string on a sheet of paper. The other end of the string is tied to a pencil.
4. Your father loved your mother. That was his first mistake. Your father tried to reinvent the wheel. That was his second. A wheel is just a circle that goes somewhere. You are not a wheel. You have never left this house. Your mother was a war widow. The war was her marriage bed. When is murder not a murder? Perhaps when it’s inevitable. When it’s inherited. When it’s earned. In this story, the king knows the queen will kill him, and he goes home anyway. In this story, the king has always been dead. The house has always been haunted. Your mother’s hands have always had blood on them. You have always known, more than most, what it is to be dead.
A picture of a hand tracing around a protractor with a pencil.
5. Your brother is not coming to save you. You thought he survived, didn’t you? No one survives this story. What a nice fantasy you invented, where you could be the hero and damsel both. Stupid girl, always dreaming of being rescued. Lonesome girl, always desperate to be touched. Rageful girl, always hungry for something to sink your teeth into. Something carved fresh from the bone. You were once a little girl who knew what it was to be tender. She haunts you now, too. In this story, no one else commits the crime for you. Matricide is the killing of a mother by her child. But you have never had a mother. You have only this knife, these hands, this screaming that has been echoing for generations. Scabs re-opened; stains re-made. Your hands have always had blood on them. You got them from your mother.
A picture of a thumbtack pressed into a sheet of paper. A string connects the tack to a pencil. The string is being held taut to draw a circle.
6. If you’re feeling brave, you can try to draw free handed. It almost never turns out the way we want it to. You’re better off fetching an empty glass. You’re better off watching it shatter. In the house filled with bodies, you are patching the drywall like bullet holes. You are peeling wallpaper like flayed skin. You are covering the dining room in lead-based paint. The walls look like they’re bleeding, and paint or blood, what’s the difference? It’s all red. There is paint on your hands, poison seeping into the blood stream. And it won’t ever wash out but you’ll scrub anyway, with soap from a different country. Each time you smell it, you will think how nice it would be to visit. You will never go. On the wall, you’ve begun to draw a circle without noticing. You will always be drawing a circle.
A picture of a circle being drawn free handed.]
