by Tess McInnis
THE REASON by Hoobastank
I am leaving the definition of me as a scarlet letter for my own beloved children to endure. I am crying. Not because of a murderer's will, but because of my own lack of will to have lived better. Why couldn't I have stopped the madness? Why couldn't I let go? I let the past consume all which was good in me...I shriveled my greatness in front of my children daily. I watched as they walked on eggshells around my crazy moods and actions. Regret comes at death. This I know in this moment. It comes at death, because we are too unaware of it's complete totality of destruction and if we were aware, it would devastate our soul entirely. My hand is grabbing feverishly at the trunk of the car as he continues to drag me down. Like there was anything to hold onto there. I think I am still fighting back, but fear is in me so deep I am vomiting. I am my mother, I have wet myself because of red. Because I cannot save myself now. Yesterdays were for saving, and not killing myself off, not leaving myself of emotions...it is too late. I see my children crying at my grave, I see them crying when a song plays, I see them crying and falling apart all because of who I am. He has managed to face plant me into the ditch. My arms hurt and may be breaking. I taste grass and dirt. Rocks have embedded in my skin. A sharp one in my throat. I am confused, but still experiencing the sheer horror of being murdered. I recognize the sharp rock is a knife. The irony of knives. And now my life will end with a knife slippery in red across my throat. I feel the cold air on my legs. My recollection of my pants coming off is fading in and out. But there it is, the burn. The driving force of evil between my legs. His spit of words in my ears and the knife stinging on my skin. All the hate in the world being shoved deep between my legs in painful rolls of rhythm. I am sucking dirt and tears. I am lost in mind and body, somewhere looking down at this beast. I think I see a huge beast of hair and horns with black fire rolling out of his mouth. I think I see me as a small child begging 'please, no more, not again...” I am seven. I am thirteen. I am sixteen. I think I see the whole world watching this and laughing. Applauding the jester. I am the joke. I think I see my children screaming “let my mommy go” like they have screamed before to police, to boyfriends. I see the horror in their little innocent eyes. I am watching the unraveling of a life. I have no fight. I am okay now with the demise. I have fallen in terms of God's punishment for my inability to have somehow appreciated the life I was given, despite the ugliness bestowed upon me. I know I should have been an over comer, a survivor...I should have waited for my victory, my vindication from God. My mind wouldn't let me. He is torturing me with sticks and I hear him laughing. Pain. Numb. More dragging further into the trees. This is it. He is finished. This will be the knife I cannot pull out. In fact, I will no longer be required to pull out any more knives in my life. I will no longer look at each one stabbed in me, identifying the evils of red upon it. My madness will end here. Naked, bloody me. I think 'well, this is what I wanted, right?' I have lived a life of so much pain and demand for attention of it. This is the big release. The final curtain. Perhaps there will be a fifteen minutes of fame anyways. I will be a statistic, but people will know I lived once. That I did matter. More tears, this time for me. For my heart which wanted desperately to love and be loved. My self loathing has finally been replaced by self pity. I am crying in this dirt for me. I just wanted what I thought everybody else had. I just wanted the embrace of genuine arms of love. Love me. Love me. Love me. Please. It is too late...I draw up to fetus position when the knife plunges my stomach. He stands up. He squats and pushes at me, maybe to see if I am dead. His uncertainty marks two more stabs, this time in my back. I am over. He walks away, I hear him panting and zipping up his pants. I smell the sweet smells of dew on the grass, and my own blood. I taste my color. In the distance, I hear the old car beg it's chug to start. And just like that, I am a crime scene. My thoughts are slim, fading and my whole being is tired. I lay in this dark, beautiful place waiting my last breath. All that is in my head is my children. I am smiling at all the memories of their childhood flashing through my mind. Their giggles and their expressions of delight in the newness of things. Christmases, and birthdays. I remember their clothes of their childhood. I remember everything they ever said. I bear earth in dying, and in the stillness I heard only one song I had left to give...I am sorry that I hurt you, I never meant to do those things to you....I am sorry I hurt you, I wish I could take it all away and all the pain I put you through, that's why I need you to hear. Famished bugs are forming armies across my body, little straight line formations towards the blood. I wish for the ants of the crazy place instead. I pray. I pray for God to forgive me, and to take me anyways despite my down failings. I pray for God to cover my children's pain and take it away. I even pray for a second chance. I tell God I am done running. I am done running. I am too late my mouth says. The ache in my gut is bleeding out my darkest corners leaving them to live permanently upon this grassy spot. I have been released.
STOP CRYING YOUR EYES OUT by Oasis
“It's a beautiful day” I say to them. They are picking flowers for me because it is Mother's day. They skip off into the hill of blues and purples, picking pretty things, even the pretty weeds. I am sitting on the blanket pulling out the sandwiches for lunch and the juice boxes. The juice boxes were a new thing in the stores, so of course we had to try them out. The sun is warm and the yellow falls across their golden halo's of hair. They are fighting over a particular flower, laying claims for their bouquet to give to me. My oldest daughter is a heart on fire as she pets her dog and talks to it. My son shy with his movements away from me as he keeps looking back to make certain I am still there. My youngest girl barely walking, but seriously talking decides to eat the flower instead. “okay you guys, come and get it...” I laugh as they run to me talking about teddy grahams and the sandwich we brought for the dog too. We all sit together and we are in a heavenly bubble of perfection. This is life in a glorious moment. Laughter, sun, and us. We are beautiful creatures I think. I look up, smiling to catch more of their shine and they are crying. Each face is a great sadness. And finally, my oldest looks at me and says “Why mommy?” My son weeps in... “Why did you have to die?” In a floating second, he is eighteen and I am coddling him on my lap. He is a man-child, tears pooling, dripping from large blue eyes. I cannot speak. I can only rock him in my lap with his head against my neck. His beautiful auburn hair rippling through my fingers over and over. I am telling him I love him, but nothing is coming out. I will my arms to speak for me as I grip tighter. I with eyes to see the whole world around me witness my youngest go from a delicate toddler to fifteen and she is wanting her mommy in the worst way. She tells me with her face to hold her, to not disappear from her sight forever. The bite of their sorrow has become a physical ache deep in my soul. The screams of their love all singing in unison the highest pitched sadness not ever known in earthly realms. I am surrounded by wails. I am enveloped, shielded with their desperation to stay with every play they have. Their hands, their kisses, their tears...all clinging to mommy. I realize why. I am being pulled by a force greater than three. My oldest curses to the heavens and then falls to her knees in prayer. She is overwhelmed in faith, yet human still. Cold. The sun has gone for the day. I am looking down at three pairs of hands long in reaching, and faces so frightened it forces me to look away. The wailing song continues and faints into blackness.
Beep.beep.beep. Continuous sound mixed with shuffles and whispers and smells. Smells like a dying place but medicinal. I am burning inside, the pain kicking me in rhythmic punches. It is so hot in here. I cannot move but only succumb to the sweating of my flesh. And the repetitions of beep. I try
to open my eyes, but cannot. I think I have been attempting this effort for quite some time. Whatever time is. Uncertain about anything. If I am dead or alive. I know I feel syrupy thick in the head. I know I feel like I am just a head. My body weakly disconnected to acknowledge a thought process. I hear. I don't see. Pain. My gut is stinging and something is stabbing my back. Mo
re beeps. More shuffles. And I am so hot. Once again, I will my eyes to open. Nothing. I hear voices. They are familiar voices, voices of warmth and acceptance. Someone is holding my hand...I do feel a tear hit the back of my hand. One thought is a banner crossing through my mind... “who is crying for me?” A powerful epiphany in those five words. Words which could be seen as a plight of self-pity or words embedded so deep in me they have live there all their life and just now surface to ask the world. “Who is crying for me?” I asked the universe. I asked God. I asked myself. I asked my past. I asked my mother. I asked my murderer...wait, I remember. I am sickened. I survived. One more knife, and yet I survived. I will have to bear witness to another Pandora's box hidden inside me. I lived to overcome this too? Hold on, hold on, don't be scared, you'll never change what has been and gone. What is God's reasoning for the continuous joke of burden? To make me strong or strongly insane. I decide to not try to open my eyes, to stay put in darkness. It is easier to avoid the unavoidable. Time has me rolling in and out of lucidness, not able to differentiate between real world events and my own messed up, parallel-universe mind. Get up, come on, get up...why are scared, you will never change what had been and gone. It is a quiet morning. Quite early in fact. My eyes open as if it was a normal morning. Groggy, I roll my head around the room and confirm it is a hospital. No bars or locked doors, just a regular hospital. I see the beep machine and it is still beeping. I am puppeted with all kinds of lines running into my skin and back to some machine close to the bed. I am hesitant to move, afraid the jerking will cause alarms to go off, or something seemingly awful. There are corners of beauty here. Flowers bloom in a white place. Brilliant colors of my favorite kinds. A weird yellow get well balloon dances in the corner. A stuffed animal, I think a black cow...smiles at me in warm welcome. There obviously has been life moving throughout here. My mouth is so dry, I am in need of water and soon. My tongue is thickly glued into the crevice of my mouth. As I attempt to part my lips to let the fat tongue out, I realize at some point I have bitten through half of it. It hurts in the same rhythm as my stomach and back. An ant peeks in.
“Yes, yes, yes...you have finally come to us” she says merrily, like a holiday she is. “You have been sleeping for a long time sweetie...do you know where you are?” still chirping to me as if I was a child.
I try to speak, but can only nod instead.
“That's alright, don't expect to talk right away, your tongue is a little sensitive right now...how are you feeling....are you in pain?” She is singing one question to the next as she checks all the machines. I nod.
I also mouth “water”.
“Water? Yes, yes...I will go get some for you, but only little sips at a time. And I will notify the doctor you have woke.
I believe your children just left, they will be excited to...”and on and on her words fed my head. Too much. Too Fast. Too damn happy. She was patronizing me with her kid gloves on and I knew why. Fear. How frightening it must be to attend to a murder victim, knowing damn well it could happen to her, to anybody. How the hell do you create a bedside manner appropriate for each ailment. Someone with a broken hip is probably a shit of a lot easier to talk to then someone who is hospitalized for a brutal rape and attempted murder. I saw her horror. I saw her questions float out of her into the air about all the gory details. Humans are so curious to dreadful things...on one hand their desensitized side wants to devour the story, and on the other they don't want to know because it feeds an unspoken tremble. Like the event is contagious. In her sugar niceness she had revealed her nervous cognition into thin air. Now more than likely, snooping mortals will gather in jest and pity will come in jars. How many times have I seen that scene before? The pity marvelers. They stare with thoughts falling out of their pinhole eyes, sometimes unconsciously shaking their head or making a tsk tsk sound. I can read it faster than I can a book. I know pity marvelers. I remember. For every time I picked my mom's drunk ass up off the ground when she fell out of the bar. For my little body trying to hoist her up to the car which was only four feet away but seemed like four miles. Not one person caring enough to help an embarrassed little girl reach that car door. How many times in a once childhood had I done that? And yet, I still remember the pity marvelers, one even stepping over her in disgust and shaking condemnation at me, the child. For my reward of doing so, was waiting in the dark house when we got home. The trailer of hidden secrets. The place of evil laughter being fed to me right along with the moldy, sour roast beef dinner I had ate for six days in a row. Even she was a pity marveler...she could do things with her glares that would eat away at my soul in panic of what was coming next. It was my fault she fell. It was my fault she was out of booze. It was my fault if anger oozed from my father towards her. I believed she was here now, sitting in the corner in her yellow stained house dress laughing at me. I could see a smirk of complete satisfaction for the righteous events that had occurred. I bet she was happy. The niceness ant returned with my water, nicely holding the straw to the inside corner of my mouth, and politely avoiding the huge, ripped tongue which just laid dead there. “The doctor is on his way...easy sips now, don't want you to get sick from too much” yet backchat lips saying something completely different. I am okay with it, for now. I am content to have water. Her hands are shaking, her bracelet clattering against her wrist exposes tension. I turn away when I have had enough. “Well, okay...”she smiles with a tete-a- tete “I guess we will wait until the doctor arrives and see what else we can do to make you more comfortable” she stands and straightens her green cartoony smock. I think I hate these smocks, especially the kind with snoopy dancing around all fucking happy. I have no doubt she will hang around to hear as much as possible, more in a personal than professional motive.