Aki

You came on a night late in August. The twilight and heat faded from the air, replaced by cold air moving in from the ocean. The red sky died out into darkness over the fields, stretching still in its thick immensity to that ocean I’d never seen but which I vowed to see someday before I died.

I lay upstairs on burlap covering a filthy mattress, itching from bug bites and bleeding again in my crotch. The one window hung open allowing the night wind through because Carl had smashed through the window after I had bitten him.

It must be characteristic of our age for victims to develop a sense of humor even in the midst of abuse. Degradation is not always abuse. I frankly supplemented my rent with carnal favors. I had been beaten before by men and was not especially afraid of anything they might do to me. And so I had bitten Carl hard on his scrotum as he was filming and had laughed as he went pirouetting through the window, hitting it with his hairy shoulder, breaking it. There was glass on the floor. The thick warm air went over me, over the top of my collarbone filthy and over the tops of my freckled thighs. With my orange hair, Asiatic eyes and thick bones, I could only ever imagine what was thought of me, a girl.

I remembered that young me. I could remember feeling pure.

After that however I saw the men look at me as sexual and I didn’t care for them. I saw animals. I didn’t care for them.

I wish I could’ve stayed with that family up north at the edge of the mountains. Their house so unlike these rooms of depravity and stupidity and filming. Carl in his camoflage. The old lady smoking, watchful, watching him, me, watching the window, sitting, staring.

I awoke to the dry flaking face of the old lady smoking in the space in my bedroom door and saw glass fear in her eye and felt cold beneath the flat pale skin of my stomach. The smoking lady’s mouth a dark hole moving, informing. I turned my head to look out the window.

Red sky. The white ocean miles distant. Cool breeze.

Then rough bitch palms on both of my wrists, pulling me like anchor rope, up from filthy bed. She threw me down the stairs. On the way down I cracked my head on the banister and it felt like a drill bit in my temple and the drill bit was your finger as you caught me.
I turned to look up the stairs as you held me in your hot arms, up the short narrow stairs to see her face and neck, veins small erupting, her yellow teeth flashing in the dim orange of the fire you’d set. I couldn’t hear for all the screaming and barking but the force of her gesticulation caused me to turn in your arms and look left. You’d slit Carl’s throat and his head hung off. I saw his crushed ribcage and a dark pool at his feet.

You clamped your black hand over my mouth and drew me to you. I shut up. The old woman threw herself down the stairs and crashed into your hand. She fell to the stairs and did not move. Then we were out side and I saw the the boy hanging in the tree, his shadow against the red sky.

And you held me. I felt you wanted me to see what you’d wrought.