What We Became
"She was a fuzzy pink glove around a polished blade. She was a comet amongst a sky of dead gas bombs, a luminary amongst a cosmos full of planets, a black rose in a field full of sunflowers."
trigger warning
It was heart wrenching watching her crawl back to him every time. He’d ignore her like a dog. I just sat there and let it happen. There was a point where I was certain she’d develop a bark, sit on the floor at the dining room table begging for scraps. I hated it. It was everything I stood against. But I think she liked it there. God help her, I truly think she liked it there.
I caught her taking a glimpse of herself in the mirror. It was as if her reflection wanted to leap out of the glass, shake her by the shoulders and shove her out the front door. She’d run her fingers through her hair until they melted like wax down the sides of her body. He eventually removed every mirror from the house, until she relied solely on him to tell her what was becoming and what was not. I could see the hesitation in her eyes when he would give her an answer, slowly tracing her fingers around her facial features to verify his validations. Honestly, I was grateful for the newly empty walls. The light had left my eyes anyway and my cheeks were nothing but sunken crates from the moon. The flesh always wins.
And she was long gone - wearing a flowy white house dress with no makeup on, spinning around his finger like a fucking dreidel. There were always critiques. He didn’t like that shade of white. She should wash her face. She should speak softer. Until one day, I found myself straining to hear her, her voice reduced to a murmur beneath the roar of a violent ocean. I might’ve been better off putting a seashell to my ear to catch what she was saying.
Our time together started to diminish. And I hated him for it. He was taking everything from her. The way she used to dress up her face, her fancy fur coats and heels, her loud cackle you’d hear from across the house was now nothing but a mere giggle. She was being stripped to nothing. I tried to mobilize my thinking - maybe it wasn’t so bad. She seemed free, twirling around his index finger in the sun, laying in his crotch like a lap dog. And boy, did he despise me.
We used to resemble one another, but there were far less similarities now than there ever were. I paraded around in bleached blonde hair, long colorful nails with faux eyelashes to the moon. Once in awhile we’d pass each other in the kitchen. He’d take a quick side glance and scoff, slurping his coffee as loud as humanly possible. As if we never shared a moment of intimacy, as if he had never kissed the back of my hand or cradled me on his lap once before. And every time he kissed her on her forehead, he smiled at me from behind her golden brown hair. A fox in a rabbit hole, a wolf in a fox hole.
I tried to convince her of what he was, what she would become if she stayed. I’d pass whispers into her ear the moments I got her alone, which wasn’t often. He knew. He knew everything. One day, he figured it had gone on too long. He convinced her that I couldn’t be in her life anymore, that I was a bad influence. I knew he wanted to kill me, but she convinced him to let me stay.
‘As long as we can lock the door, ‘ he suggested. And here I am.
Watching a part of myself abandon me wasn’t the worst of it. It was I who protected her all this time. How I can hear them giggling and dancing around, her making him dinner in the kitchen, hair frazzled and beautiful. Sun kissed, bare footed bunny hopping into his little trap. How I missed her. No God could ever know the empathy she was capable of holding. She was a fuzzy pink glove around a polished blade. She was a comet amongst a sky of dead gas bombs, a luminary amongst a cosmos full of planets, a black rose in a field full of sunflowers. And he knew it.
The day finally came for me to be shut away forever. I was fixing my morning cup of coffee only to be cut short, sugar left on the countertop. He yanked me by my arm and shoved me behind a massive oak door that led into the basement. It shut behind me and the light left the room. I heard the key in lock, the little metals clinking together to trap me forever. It took awhile for my eyes to adjust, but when it did it wasn’t worth the wait. A miniature hopper window decorated the concrete wall in front of me and cobwebs connected by the work of a spider draped across the corners.
I leaned against the door, feet propped on the second-to-top step. The silence was a weight on my heart, the dust swirling around me like a tornado in heat. There was almost always a tiny slice of sunlight cutting through the tiny basement window that nearly met with the ceiling. The concrete walls and floors emphasized whatever weather it was that day. If it was humid that day, it was hell fire in that room. If it was cold, it was polar bears tit in there. Everything, everything, everything felt bigger. Except me.
Some nights were worse than others. I could hear him make love to her the way he made love to me. How I’d bang my hands bloody on the other side of the door until the wood was soaked in cherry stains. I could hear them dancing in the kitchen, the music splitting her rib cage like a pair of wings. The sides of my hands were deformed with tiny broken bones and bloody knuckles. My screaming boomeranged off the basement wall and smacked me back across the mouth as punishment for my consistent outbursts. There were no amount of tears sustainable enough for me to drown it all away.
I don’t know how much time passed. I did, however, have a spider in the corner of my room to validate the torment. One evening, when the crickets were in symphony and the moon tucked herself behind the clouds, I heard a deep bellowing from upstairs. I pressed my cheek against the door, my ear against the seashell listening for the shipwreck. There were moments of silence. Oh, but his sinister voice I would recognize anywhere. Even a whisper could escape his lips and it would find me through the crack of the door, blowing mini dust clouds off the top step.
A few moments passed. Something scraped across the floor. Rustling followed. I stumbled back down the stairs. A sliver of moonlight cut through the tiny window, draping my shoulders in silver. I stood by and watched the knob anxiously, my hands to my sides, prepared for anything. The old knob started to turn, it’s locks passing each other inside the oak shield. The door, decorated in ancient blood stains like a medieval flag, opened and the light from the kitchen nearly blinded me. The silhouette of his shadow didn’t even appear human anymore. Her body tumbled down the stairs, and before it could reach the bottom, the door slammed shut, the lock sealing the act with finality.
She was so still. Not an ounce of life left in her. Even her breathing was as soft as her voice became, nearly nonexistent, the purr of a kitten. I knelt down on the cold basement floor and observed her lifeless body. She still wore the same white house dress, the bottoms of her feet slightly unkempt and her hair covered her face in thousands of brownish gold strands of hair. I carefully tucked one behind her ear and she lightly flinched from me. She had no obvious bruising, no black eye. She wore no bloodstains nor chipped teeth. Everything about her looked the same, except the eyes. The sparkle that used to send beams through those little blue droplets were now murky puddles of reflected obsidian. A darkness, a zombie, a goner. She looked just like me. Younger, more frail, not dead, but nearly.
Her hand gripped my wrist like the snap of a rubber band. My breath became immediately more rapid. I tried to yank my arm away but she prevailed, victorious. Her eyes widened like black saucers against a dark cloud. Rain poured from them and spilled down her hollow cheeks. Her cheekbones were now so sharp, watching her tears spill off of them was like watching a waterfall nosedive off of a cliff.
‘He wanted to kill me,’ she whispered. ‘But she begged him to keep me in the basement.’ I glanced at the door, then back to her wilted face.
‘Who?’ I asked gently. I tried to stroke her by the hair, but she shook me off, a sense of urgency on her face. I could finally see her, see her for what she was. I remembered her hands—slender and long, without the swollen knuckles from years of cracking them. Her arms, free of tattoos. Her teeth, without the tiny chip in the front. I grazed my fingers over my own dented tooth like a deer caught in headlights.
‘Please. Tell me.’ I begged. Her voice was caught on the hook of a cry, but she fought through it. And her finger pointed towards the door, as a little girl’s giggle rang throughout the house upstairs.
My body froze. Hummingbirds fought till the death in my chest. A sheet of cold air blanketed the both of us on the concrete floor. I looked down at her. She laid like a wet noodle in my arms, her pretty gown tear stained and moonlit. I don’t think anything could have stopped our synchronized weeping. I was mourning her, while she was mourning her.
I grabbed her wrist and kissed her fragile knuckles. I held her, cried into her hands said I was sorry a million times. I begged for forgiveness, I prayed to God, I cursed him, I prayed to the devil and cursed him all the same. My lives had been a hard knuckle fist in the mouth with sprinkles of loving moments. The tender meat around the hard morsel of bones.
‘I’ll get us out of here.’ I looked around frantically and before responding, she let out a gentle cough.
‘If you’re down here, you’re already dead.’ She tried to crack a smile, but was forced into a painful grimace.
‘I should have protected you.’ I cried, pressing my tear stained face into the back of her hand.
‘Silly, how could you protect us? You weren’t even here yet.’ And another giggle echoed from behind the old oak door.
The darkest ones are always the most thought provoking and important but also most difficult writings to read for me. I particularly liked the ending.
😭💙