by Su Williams
Jesse pursed his lips and looked to Ivy for support.
She pushed him aside. Unbalanced, he toppled to the floor with an “ooph.”
“You are such a wuss, DeLaRosa,” she scolded playfully. Then she rounded on me. “And you. You don’t have to be brave all the time. You don’t have to protect everyone else all the time. Let someone protect you for a change.”
“Ives—it’s not about being brave. Being brave is doing this in front of an audience. I need—I need to vent all this shit that’s penned up, curse God for just one more shitty thing—I need to fall apart so I can put me back together again. Understand?” Her scowl told me ‘no’.
I dropped my fuzzy, aching head into my hands. “I need you both to go,” I said with all the authority I could muster.
Jesse pulled me to my feet and wrapped his arms around me. His body trembled against mine. “Em, please?” He tried one last futile attempt.
I buried my face in his chest, and despite the pain, I held him even tighter. “Jess. I love you. You know that. I can’t,” I sobbed, “I can’t. This is too hard to do with either of you here. Understand?”
His whiskers combed through my hair as he nodded. He shuddered again and buried his face in my hair. “I am so sorry, Emari.” His voice pitched up under the strain.
We stood in each other’s arms, our shared heat drew sweat to our skin. Finally, I petted his back. “It’ll be okay, Jess.” He nodded and released me. I squeezed his hands to reassure him as he leaned down to kiss my forehead. I flinched away and he stepped back.
“Emari, I…”
“I’m sorry, Jess. It’s not you. It’s me.”
He smirked at that. “Yeah,” he sighed, “I’ve heard that one before.”
I reached for his hand, squeezed it and willed him to be okay. “Okay?” I encouraged.
“Yeah. Okay,” he gruffed, then shuffled to the kitchen door to wait for Ivy.
Ivy was an ice princess, cold and rigid in my embrace. “I don’t like it,” she argued.
“I know. But we’ve done this before. Please, Ives. All of this is bad enough for you to have to go through. Don’t let me make it worse. Just give me some time. A day or two, maybe—a week. Please don’t make me do this in front of you.”
Her arms crushed around me. “Fine,” she said as trembling and tears drowned her. I held her for several moments until she drew in a bracing breath and she stepped away. Slow and reluctant, she headed out the kitchen door with Jesse’s hand clutched in hers. I made a show of rearming the alarm system, and waved goodbye drowsily. I blew her a kiss and mouthed to her “Love you”. She raised her hand and curled her fingers into the ‘I love you’ sign. Tears spilled and sparkled down her cheeks as she turned to leave.
Jesse’s scowl drew my attention as Ivy brushed past him and tugged on his coat sleeve. My poor Jesse. I pressed my hand to the window and forced a quick smile. “I’ll be okay,” I said loud enough for him to hear through the glass. A jet of misty breath erupted from his nostrils like the snort of an angry bull, then his face and eyes finally softened and his shoulders sagged with resignation.
“Finally,” I murmured once the car rolled out of sight. The sound of my own voice in the silence startled me. Finally alone. Alone, so I could fall to pieces without scaring the hell out of everyone around me. Alone to plunge with abandon from the cliff I teetered on since the day the troopers came to my home with the news of my parent’s deaths.
Alone by choice. Alone by chance.
Alone by fate. Evil fate.
Alone by volition. Alone by violence.
By preference or providence.
Decision or divinity.
Twenty-five acres of glistening snow lay before me as I sat in my window seat. Yet I didn’t see a yard of it as I stared bleary-eyed at nothing for an eternity. My body felt filthy and crushed, like going through a trash compactor. Hot water would feel so divine, and I momentarily contemplated the bleach. But I decided against the sting. I shuffled stiffly to the bathroom and gingerly stripped away my charming oversized green scrubs from the hospital. The police had taken mine as evidence.
The magnetic pull of the bathroom mirror drew me. I wanted to see—and I didn’t. I braced myself for the worst but nothing could prepare me for the image that stared back at me. Both of my eyes bulged like a prizefighter, my left puffed to barely a slit. My coppery spikes were matted against my head, a dark, saturated red. The anvil of fists had re-forged the contours of my face. In junior high, I wished for fuller, poutier lips, a little more Angelina Jolie, but I hadn’t quite had this in mind. The tiny curl at the corners of my mouth, my secret smile, receded beneath the swelling. I wondered if I would ever smile again, or if the brutal hammering purged any sense of happiness out of me forever.
The water streamed over me, as hot as my tender skin would tolerate. I scoured myself all over, desperate to remove the stench of him, though I doubted I’d ever feel truly clean again.
My wrist felt naked and weak without my parent’s gift, as though the gold heart was the source of my strength. My heart contracted at the loss and my legs folded out from under me. I crumpled to the floor of the tub. My emotions reeled out of control, careened precariously with grief. Hot tears spilled down my face mixing with the stream that rained down in steamy torrents over my shattered body. I hadn’t believed the pain could be any worse than what I suffered after the crash. Now, I knew better. Hyperventilated breath wheezed through my raw throat. Peace betrayed me, my body and soul roiled in a storm of agony.
Finally, I drained the hot water tank, a mammoth task considering Dad and I installed a high-capacity heater. Dad knew I loved long hot showers. I dragged myself out of the tub, toweled off and dressed in my fuzzy black pajamas with green scowling skulls. I’d save the laughing skulls for when I felt more optimistic.
I was greeted in my bedroom by the usual suspects; werewolves and zombies and vampires. I turned on the black and white filmstrip lamp next to the bed, illuminating the eyes of my faithful sentry in their constant vigil over me. I knew all along these weren’t the real monsters. Not all monsters are make believe; not make-up, latex and costumes. The real monsters truly did lurk out there in the real world in the dark and secluded corners. Waiting.
But even with the glossy gazes the bed wasn’t safe. It was open on three sides, leaving me defenseless and exposed. I had to make it safe. My ribs and shoulders screamed in protest as I pushed the bed into the corner. Perhaps I should have let Jesse do this, but the vulnerability hadn’t occurred to me before. Last night, huddled with my friends, my bed felt safe.
Wrapped in the comfort of flannel sheets and fleece blankets, I pressed my back to the wall and closed my eyes. Steeling myself with shaky, measured breaths—I took the plunge, released my breath and my hold on sanity. The tenuous ties that anchored me snapped and stung like heavy rubber bands. The darkness broke through my fragile walls, the stones of my heart crumbled under the force. So I let it—too weary from fighting, too broken to care.
That was it, all my poor heart could endure. Gloom curled slowly through the cooling embers of my soul like the smoke of a dying fire, filling every recess.
I knew I could never—would never do it. Though, sometimes, I closed my eyes and imagined the shining, silver blade. A scalpel-sharp edge as it dragged down the length of the tender flesh of my forearm, flaying it open, releasing my inner torment.
I had tried to return to school, at Adrian’s behest, after my parents died. But kids can be so cruel. The psychedelic press of hormone-driven bodies had swirled in a miasma around me. The Shadle Commons were crowded with jostling heat that smothered me; sent me running for freedom and fresh air. I sat on ‘the hill’ with my head between my knees, grounding myself to Earth.
“Whatcha doin’, loser?” Who knew a cheerleader could be such a bitch?
I glanced up from my spiraling orbit.
“Hear you’re an orphan now, Sweet. How’s it feel to be all alone and a loser?”
>
My God! I’m having a Harry Potter moment. “Where’s yer mum, Potter? Is she dead?”
But I didn’t have a wand, or magic. If I did, I’d use it to bring them back from the dead.
“I trust you know no magic can bring back the dead, Harry.”
And I wasn’t nearly as brave as the Boy Who Lived. So I just walked away, with sole possession of the dementors that stalked me.
The normal world can’t handle people who are different. And Ivy and I were truly different. We liked who we were, and most days, what ‘normal’ kids thought of us was irrelevant. They were cookie cutter kids, so alike in their sameness. We were unique, and it scared them.
They called kids like me ‘emo’, and naturally, if you were ‘emo’ that meant you’re a cutter as well. But like most ‘emo’ kids, I wasn’t truly suicidal. The fantasy of the cut wasn’t about death at all, but release, a physical pain to commute the emotional pains of life that found no other outlet.
Before the crash, sometimes, I fantasized about a duller blade and shallower cut—just to feel the pain—though the deed was dangerous, a precarious line to cross. What if the first cut didn’t suffice? What if the pain wasn’t enough? And I didn’t want to become one of those girls—a cutter.
I did it once—after the crash, on accident. Sort of. I’d slashed the new key to the cottage across the delicate skin of my wrist. Unfortunately—or fortunately, the key still had sharp metal edges, to my shock and elation. The pain was heady, intoxicating. Morbid triumph welled inside me. And, I wanted more, more of the sweet ecstasy. The savage jubilation coursed through me at finding an external testimony of the internal pain for which no other remedy existed.
I never told Ivy. I never told anyone. Most of the time, I could ignore the urge. Sometimes, the lure required indomitable effort to deny. Occasionally, it dogged me so rabidly that it took everything in me not to relent.
And, it had always been enough, to imagine.
BLEEDING OUT by Emari Sweet
Oh that I could rend the flesh to ribbons
Outer portrait of the condition of my soul
Eager death
For freedoms sake
Release the grief held captive in my heart
For claws to rip the tender flesh
Consumed in fire
Cut to ribbons
Oh for release from the pain
That my heart daily walks in
For freedom from the pain
Like heaviness upon bruised skin
Like salt within an open wound
Oh to claw within my breast
And wrench the tattered soul within
To sever arteries torn from flesh
Crimson flood
Pool of blood
Upon the floor
For pain and grief cohabit
No release for me
Imprisoned by duty
Shackled by right
I cannot rip the flesh deep enough
Cannot rend the tissue wide enough
To extract the tattered soul that lies within
CHAPTER 5 Tourniquet
I was done. All my reserves tapped. Time to shut down. My self-imposed prison gates thundered downward, the echoing boom as dungeon doors crashed to the floor in rolling succession.
Safe.
Safe inside myself.
Yet, was the inside of me any safer than the outside world? With my eyes wide open, my reality was clear and without any kind of comfort. No knight battled to free me, and even if one championed my cause, there was no freedom to be won; no refuge from my tortured truth.
In the real world, outside my dramatized, traumatized brain, the doors to my little cottage in the woods remained bolted.
I texted Ivy once: “Doing fine. Safe and sound. Don’t worry. Love you Baby. Thank you for everything. PS Shutting off phone…‘til I’m ready…I’M SORRY… ” and shut down my cell. I knew my silence would wound her, as if I’d crashed my life so violently into hers and left the scene, hit and run. I’d abandoned her to deal with her own damage—so I could succumb to mine.
“Baby,” I whispered so my own voice didn’t frighten me, again. In junior high, Ivy started calling me Sweets or Sweetie. She loved my last name. Unfortunately, the nickname stuck, and other people picked it up as well. In retaliation, I started calling her Baby. We became Sweetie and Baby, the dynamic duo; well, maybe not so dynamic. More like the dorky duo, but Baby made being a dork okay. We even dressed up like vampires, wore our realistic custom fangs to the midnight releases of the newest vampire movies, and when it wasn’t Halloween. She loved to drag me along to Rocky Horror Picture Show. She even supplied the props and a script, warped and waterlogged from the torrential squirt gun downpours. The memory of her friendship warmed a tiny unbroken place in my heart that I hadn’t thought still existed.
My bed became my paradise and my perdition. I’d shoved it into the corner of my room; the corner where I lay so I could feel one wall with my feet and one wall with my head. Safe—where no one could sneak up behind me. As long as I had something solid at my back, I felt vaguely reassured. I would never allow my guard down again.
Outside, freezing gusts howled through the trees, lonesome wolves baying mournfully at the sky. My little house shivered from the cold. I stared through the darkness, wide-eyed, and wondered if he was out there, if he knew where I lived, or had followed us home. What if he was waiting for a moment to come in to get me, to hurt me again? Fear drove me to my phone as I reconsidered my decision not to let Ivy or Jesse stay with me. But no, alone, secluded was better—for them and for me.
“Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” hummed through my lips. For some strange reason, the simple lullaby bestowed a superficial comfort. I hummed myself to sleep but the grace of the song wilted into the hell of the nightmares. Once again, the crunch of fists, the pounding of the violence overwhelmed me. My sleep swam with images of torture, terror and blood. The filth of his touch, the vileness of his words, the threats made to silence me.
“If you so much as breathe too loud I will snap your neck. And your little amiga will be next. Understand?” In the dream, Ivy entered the room and his fists went to work, breaking her like a porcelain doll. He forced me to watch while he took her.
I awoke thrashing, my body entombed in blankets. Tears soaked my pillow. Silent tears that evolved into a mournful whine, ricocheted into a scream that wrenched from my throat as the rage and anguish ravaged me. It severed from the deepest chasm within me; the audible sounds of my heart disintegrating.
“No. No. No. She’s okay. She’s okay.” I rocked, manic and desperate as I struggled to convince myself. Scrabbling through mounds of used tissue, I hunted up my phone, and stifled the wail that warred in my chest.
Baby, u there? I texted feverishly, and waited insufferable moments, the cell pressed to my heaving breast. “Answer. Answer. Answer.”
Right here, Sweets. I can come if u need me.
NO! I just…needed 2 know U R OK.
I’m fine. R U OK???
Yes. Bad dream.
I can come.
No. Just needed 2 know. ILY!!!
I can call.
It’s OK. No voice.
R U sure??
Yes. I love you, Baby.
Love u 2, Sweets.
Such simple words appeased my stricken heart.
*
Time eked by in hazy patches of waking pain and dreaming torment. Awake or sleeping was of little consequence, the pain thrived in some form in either state.
The images of my parent’s fiery crash scorched my heart, left me singed and blistered; my nerves raw and tender.
The death of my parents blew a gaping hole in my chest. And now, this—this monster placed its cruel claws on the ragged remnants and rent me in two.
My torture chamber of night terrors tore me from sleep. I huddled in a blanket in my window seat, stared blankly at the swirling eddies of snow. It all looked so innocent and unassuming. Right now. But
I remembered that day, eight months ago, that changed my life forever.
I’d been out in front of the house, washing my urban-orange CX9, and waiting for my parents to return from a house hunting trip in Cali—their snowbird home after I graduated. I worshipped the sun, absorbed the warmth after its long hibernation. Winter’s chill melted off my bones like thawing glaciers. The sweet scent of pine filled me. Birds filled the trees with preening and the air with song.
Pop! Pop! The staccato pop of tires on the gravel driveway drew me out of my tropical reverie to the police cruiser edging toward me. The cold stone in my stomach forewarned me, but I chased it away with denial.
Please, God, let it be an invitation to the policeman’s ball.
But I knew.
Please, God, let it only be minor injuries.
But I knew when the troopers stepped out of their car and donned their hats, stern-faced and reluctant in their strides. The hose dropped to the ground, where it hissed like an angry serpent. I’d wanted to run away, but my heart surged, drew all my blood from the rest of my body, and encased my feet in ice.
No! Don’t say it. Just don’t say it!
I wanted to rush them, to shut their mouths, to keep them from saying aloud what I already knew, as though unspoken words constrained the truth. If only I could silence the words I could keep them from being real.
But I knew. I knew my parents were dead.
I always knew things; my gift, or curse, of foreseeing outcomes. Not quite predicting the future, just knowing the end of a situation before the rest of the world. Unfortunately, most of the time, my foresight involved a death.
“Are you Miss Emari Sweet?” asked the blonde deputy. R Blair glinted from his name badge.
“Yes.” I sounded like a strangled mouse.
“Your parents are Zecharias and Jane Sweet—driving a maroon 2012 Cadillac?” Blair asked.
I folded my arms around myself, already held myself together as the troopers delivered the news.
“Miss Sweet, there’s been an accident on I-90 near Fourth of July Pass.” Blair’s eyes scanned my face and filled with hesitation. I nodded, too numb and racked with pain in the same instant. “I’m sorry to inform you, ma’am—that both of your parents were killed.”