the Girl-Who-Should-Be-Dead
It was almost spring in a warm southern city and the magnolia buds had begun to poke their green heads out of the bark of their trees. Children came out of the hives of suffocation their homes had become and played on the dirt lawns outside of row houses. The pigeons cooed their jovial spring song.
But when she was born, no laughter lived. No pleasant sounds echoed through the hallowed, graffiti-covered courtyard of the Mendenhall housing projects that day.
Just pain.
Screams pierced through the usual rumble of illegal activity on the second door. The sound of slamming doors followed immediately as bolts were secured and chain links were put in place.
It happened too often to count and always meant one of two things:
Either some girl had just found out that nothing lasts forever- be it love, virginity, youth, or drugs; or she’d already learned number one and was ready for the next lesson: Always take the early bus down to The Med or you’ll never make it in time ‘cause the late one doesn’t always come and, if it does, it won’t be on time—especially if it’s pouring down raining outside, like it was then.
So now she was fair-skinned and sixteen and lying in a putrid sea of sweat and embryonic fluid in a corner of an ill-lit, roach infested, government funded living room on a twin-sized air mattress owned by her stupid ex-boyfriend who’d left her everything when he’d bailed—the apartment, the bills, enough Ecstasy and Heroin to keep her loaded for weeks, and this thing in her that would kill her if it didn’t get-out-of-her NOW!
The girl’s bloodshot eyes began to glaze over.
“Get it outta me!” she slurred, drunk with pain.
“You gotta push”—was cut off by her wounded shriek.
“I am pushin’!”
Some tall guy who’d helped her back to this nightmare when the bus didn’t come was there with her in the room. He put her pacifier in her mouth and murmured something about a head…
She rolled hers- so heavy- to the left. She could see the pills- couldn’t move her left arm- he was holding it. Let me go
“Get it outta me!”
Push. I am pushing-- The pills…
“I can see the head, girl. You must push now!” he shouted.
Blackness killed the peeling roach paper walls and ceiling. Tall Guy brought them back into focus long enough for her to see its head, then they were gone again and finally, back into startling clarity.
Tall Guy snatched the thing from her body triumphantly.
Was he proud that it lived?
Oh…
Pain.
He trudged through the remnants of her shattered existence toward the kitchen/bathroom area after securing the umbilical cord with a twisted bobby pin.
Took the thing with him.
She found that movement was nearly impossible.
Darn.
Her eyes could reach the pills- the precious needle was even closer- but her arm weighed a thousand pounds, her head a million. She couldn’t focus- but did she want to? Really? Focus?
Tall Guy came back in and tripped over the Dummy’s dumbbell, bringing a soiled t-shirt full of her sin back to haunt her. He knelt beside her mattress, among the reeking burger wrappers and rotting food items that had taken on new life, to show her the magnificent being that lay calmly in his bloodied arms.
She had her mother’s milky chocolate hair- a curly mass of it- and those expressive, tortured eyes, the color of dead oceans and stagnant rain. The oddest, most beautiful child he had ever seen had just been born to a teenage prostitute who took no notice of the tiny angel he held, but instead moaned for hits and pills.
She would never look at it.
No, no, no, she’d rather die than see what she’d expelled.
“Git out!” flew abruptly from her lungs.
She turned her hollow eyes toward his.
“Git out,” was gasped now. Her throat was too parched, brain too fried to make it more forceful.
Tall Guy confusedly pushed the wriggling shirt toward her.
Her head rocked side to side—no no no no no—eyes skittered everywhere—no no no no no no—
“NO!”
He jerked backwards, nearly losing his balance in shock.
Struggling to his feet, he reeled a little from the stench, but managed to regain his bearing.
“Miss, look- she’s beautiful,” he said insistently, between shallow breaths. “She’s yours.”
Immediately, the young girl began to drag her aching body up the wall; sharp purple nails tore away soggy, mildewed chunks of wallboard in the process. Her eyes backstroked in her head.
She groped blindly in the garbage beside her bed for an item concealed under a laceless size fourteen and the Dummy’s boxers, succeeded in her search, then cocked it and pulled the trigger, firing more than enough shots down her own throat to render herself lifeless and wash away the pain.
The trouble with painting this picture is that we are so similar that i might let myself creep into it. The trouble with that is that she is so beautiful that anything less than the truth would distort the story. So herein lies my dilemma. i have my doubts, but Ryan says i can do it. He would not lie to me. Besides, this shouldn’t be that hard. i know her story all too well.
Once upon a time, there was a girl that no one wanted. From the day she was born, even the very earth scorned her existence. The heavens wept unremittingly and the ground coughed up storms the likes of which had not been seen for many years and would not be seen again for many more to come. It was all in honor of her birth. Or, more appropriately, in disdain. Somehow Mother Nature must have known that she would be another homeless wretch that depended solely upon whether She decided to be merciful or not. But one thing was certain. No one knew just what she was here for, so they wrote her off like so many other orphaned children and let her slip through the cracks.
For a while, fate smiled upon the little girl. The man who pulled her from her mother’s body wanted to keep her. He loved her and cared for her and would have kept her forever, until two-faced Chance reared his ugly head.
Specifically:
We enter a hellish scene in which medical technicians swarm around the bedside of a man as colorless and two-dimensional as the stark, straight walls that surround him. Not a trace of pigment has remained in his skin. His cheeks are hollow. No hair graces his young head. He is nearly nothing.
An esteemed youthful physician blows into the room and hurries to the bedside of the dying man. He is shocked at the rapid level of deterioration.
Only six days ago, he’d played—and been beaten soundly in—a heated game of spades. They’d then reminisced about college and med school and the pain that they endured when one of them could not achieve his MD and the miasma that descended when he’d found out that his friend had one of the Incurables.
Standing there, with him, in that hospital room again, he sank into the immeasurable depths of the two harsh pools of terrible resignation in his friend’s gaunt face. He stood there, motionless as beads of sweat began to form over the surface of both of their bodies. He could only stand there as the monitor flat lined for the second time that day.
The final time, he knew.
A conscious state of sleep enveloped him as he watched technicians scurry around the room—“Oh, try harder!” “Faster, faster,” they implored.
It was all a nightmare for him. The looks of failure when the brilliant OD was pronounced dead; the announcement he had to deliver to their colleagues; the personal grief.
He did not wake up until the funeral.
Come time to deliver the eulogy, naught but “Oh God” escapes his lips.
The closed casket looms too close; his eyes are riveted to its cherry smoothness.
“
No one dares to breathe as they hear the small gasp from the front row.
The ruffle of petticoats followed by the clicking of small heels carries the youngest member of the audience to the front of the church, and directly behind the weeping man.
Angrily, she lifts her small pearlescent handbag into the air and whacks him three good times on the backs of his legs, until he shuts up and turns around, stunned.
Leveling a scowl at him, she places a dainty hand on her narrow hip and a single gloved finger over her pursed lips.
“Shh!” she hisses in rebuke, stamping a pearly shoe.
“Daddy’s still sleepin’!”
Her large gray eyes dare him to defy her. His hands go limp; his body follows shortly, sliding down the casket and onto the sacred floor of Great Hope Missionary Baptist.
Having achieved her goal, she retook her seat in the pew, somewhat confused by his continuing sobs. At that point, however, the funeral was over.
So was her only hope for a normal life.
For three years, the little girl disappeared from sight. No one knew where she was but, then again,
But all is never as it seems. For some time, however, despair reigned supreme.
[A{e}LUSION]
All I wish
Is that
I’d touch
The
Hands of time and
Have them
Snatch back
Years.
All I wish
Is that
I’d dip
In
Camphorous lakes and
Be made
New.
It drips and bleeds
The blood of
Slaughtered
Innocence-my
Dying childhood.
It squirms
And
shrieks the color
crimson— It’s running down
the
walls of my
be-gin-ing.
To find
Me
Dig thru
Hell.
To touch
Me
Shatter
Thoughts.
To reach
Me
Grasp the
Wound.
To kill
Me
Hide the
Sun.
Where are you hiding dear child? Show yourself my dear; it’s time to go.
A flash of crimson and gold. A flutter of glitter and silver. A high-pitched squeal.
The dichotomy.
She is too tall for her eight years and too beautiful for eleven or twelve. Her shrill voice gives off her age, however, and her boisterous ways belie them both.
Shira’s happily-ever-after end is a major differentiation from the usual fairy tale in that, there isn’t one.
i won’t lie to you. That’s not my job as a journalistic writer. i simply tell the truth as i see it.
No happily-ever-after, but she did, however, get her wings. Hey, what’s a fairy tale without fairies?
She lives in the House of rainbows and fire and is one of our resident pixie people. As far as we know, she and her new father are the only true fairies in the house, but that theory has yet to be solidly proven.
The biggest tests are
A) Do you have wings? (Both Liam and Shira have a myriad of pairs for every occasion.)
B) Are you wiling to wear them in public? (In both instances, not just willing but adamant about it. A true fairy should not be ashamed.)
C) Do you respond appropriately to the most important and telling of the tests-(and every faery-foe’s favorite): When a faery-foe says “I don’t believe in fairies” [i do believe in fairies- clap, clap, clap, clap, clap] do you drop dead immediately until called back to life by a faery-friend? (I hate it when Marke’ or other faery-foes say the words in public. It’s pretty crucial to see a fully-grown male fairy fall dead in public and stay dead until people clap and yell. I assure you, however, that Liam cannot get enough of it.)
I don’t know. Maybe you can call that a happily-ever-after ending.
Whatever.
At least it’s happy.
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