I tried to take a nap earlier, but frazzled by the notion that I had to go to the school and pick up the Squeenager, I never quite made it to dreamland. Instead, while Billy Idol sang me to sleep, I thought about a novel I once wrote and started brainstorming a short story to accompany it. I sat down after I came back from picking her up and free wrote this little bit. It’s pretty dark and I’m sure it needs work, but thought I’d share it with you.

Either way, I’m happy to have written something today. Commitment: FORWARD HO!

BTW: This is somewhat graphic, so if you have sensitivities, I suggest you don’t read on.

Sweet Sixteen
The night my mother killed herself my twenty-five year old uncle raped me in the upstairs bathroom while Billy Idol crooned “Sweet Sixteen” from the boom box in my bedroom. As she drew the razor across her wrists in front of the television, Chas bent me over the bathroom sink and clapped a hand across my mouth to stifle the sound of my sobs.

Mom didn’t scream or cry. In fact, she hadn’t spoken a single word since the night my father was killed on duty by a seventeen year old kid outside a Pittsburgh convenience store ten years earlier. She just existed in some sort of self-induced coma while the world went on around her, waiting for the right moment to die. And as I was upstairs praying for someone, anyone to come to my rescue, she chose her moment and bled out all over Gran’s brand new sofa in the while a filterless Pall Mall burned in the heaping ashtray beside a fresh glass of diet pop fizzing on the coffee table.

Bangle bracelets clanged on porcelain as I fought to free myself, and Chas’s hot, strangled breath whispered, “That’s right baby girl. Don’t fight me, don’t fight.”

He pushed himself so deep into me I thought my insides would tear out when his entire body stiffened with grunting release. He drew back away from me. From the full-length mirror hanging askew on the back of the bathroom door, I saw the stark white skin of my back and legs. I tried to avoid the accusation of my own stare, blurred by the tears pouring down my face and leaving flakes of dried liquid eyeliner in trails on my cheeks.

His presence lingered behind me, back against the wall as he drew his jeans up over his hips and quickly worked the zipper to disassociate from the guilt. Pain and wetness burned between my thighs like fire, reassurance that I was falling apart from the inside out, and when he reached out to stroke my hair from the back with a trembling hand, the powder-blue tiled walls of the bathroom wavered in front of me like a mirage.

He drew me to him, my mind a limp rag unable to react or respond or push away, and held me against his chest. Chin perched atop my head while he ran his hand down the length of my tangled hair, he whispered, “I love you, Monica. I love you so much.”
I was suffocating, and downstairs, my mother drew her final breath, but no one even noticed until the next morning. Gran shuffled out of her bedroom in her bathrobe and slippers and headed straight to the coffee pot like a zombie. She passed the living room without a second glance at Jane Pauley and Bryant Gumble going through their Today Show morning routine.

Upstairs I laid in bed, my stomach still a tangle of briars and my body aching with the fever of his untoward gift. I turned off my alarm clock after the third snooze, rolling over onto my side and curling into a fetal ball with my back against the locked door. All I could think about was how everyone was going to notice. They’d all take one look at me and see the mark of shame and loathing like a scarlet letter on my skin.

And then the screaming started. Gran’s cries were strangled frogs clawing at the smoke-stale morning. Guttural and deep, laced with agony and fear, the sound tore me from the coma of my guilt. My first thought was that she knew, she somehow discovered what I’d let him do to me. Punishment after cruel punishment raked through my mind in stinging trails. She’d beat me, then send me away, put me in a home for wayward whores and leave me there to rot forever.

“Oh my god, Elise,” she moaned.

Uncle Chas was the first to react. I listened from the edge of my bed as he scrambled from the room beside my own and tumbled down the stairs.

“What the hell is…”

Silence.

It gripped and suspended the moment so long that not even my overactive imagination could fill the void. Even Gran’s sobs halted, and the only sound I heard was the distant rumble of traffic from the world waking up outside.

Muttering voices carried up the length of the staircase, but I couldn’t understand their words. Chas’s tone laced with a sense of frantic control, Gran shaken senseless in response.

I moved toward the door and turned the cold knob in my hand. Later I would swear I smelled her blood in the gust of air that wafted up the staircase to meet me, but then Chas was on the bottom stair, his grey eyes wide with horror.

“Stay there,” he barked like a drill sergeant.

“W-what’s—” I stretched to see past him from my room.

“Go back in your room, Monica,” his tone was firm, but gentle. “Just go.”

“What happened?”

Gran’s sobs formed a cocoon of grief around my mother’s name, interspersed between words like, “child” and “poor.”

“I didn’t know,” I heard her say. “I didn’t see her, and I don’t know when…”

“Just call the goddamn paramedics, Mom, or the police, or something,” Uncle Chas only looked over his shoulder at her for a second, but it was long enough for me to barrel down the steps and straight into the blockade of his arms.

I struggled against him harder than I had the night before, battering at his chest with my balled fists and jerking around like an epileptic to get past him. Even through the battle I could see her slumped over on the couch, her thin, pale arm straight and bare as a naked branch in winter. A dark pool leaked across the beige carpet, crawled under the glass-top coffee table and stretched toward the television. My uncle wrapped his arms around my waist and carried my kicking and screaming up the stairs. He threw me from the doorway of my bedroom onto my bed and blocked the space with his body.

“I don’t want you to see,” he swallowed.

I choked on my own voice, “Is she…”

I already knew. There’d been so much blood.

He said nothing. He didn’t even look at me as he closed me inside my room, and as the distant wail of sirens drew closer to the house, I could think of nothing. Nothing except that I wish it had been me.

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