by Lierre Keith
(first 10 pages)
My first memory is him, on top of me: there is light and then there is darkness, and the ground is so hard beneath me. I fall, I fall, I keep falling, past air, past sound, a bird without wings, a wing without feathers, a bone hollowed and bare. Then there is only pain. He takes everything, giving pain.
He is swollen and grunting, his hand crushing my mouth. I have one thought before the darkness, like the last tiny star at the end of time: I hate him.
This is the beginning, my first memory: the world, ending.
One by one they come to me: stepfather, uncle, cousin, I don't know who was first. They each have a name for me. My stepfather, smelling like the meat packing plant, calls me a bitch.
"You're not crying for your mama, you’re crying for me like a bitch in heat," he laughs. Then he slaps my face. "You want the rope again, little girl?"
That's when I see the dogs, huge and black in the corner of the room, so soundless I know he can't see them. I can't tell where the dogs end and where the darkness begins. Teeth gleam. Eyes stare. Jim weighs me down with one arm, shoves my legs apart with the other, the one with the missing finger. He slides the stub up against me, up and down, up and down.
"Stubby loves you," he laughs. I stare back at the dogs.
My Uncle John calls me a slut. He caresses the word, rolls it slowly off his tongue. His mouth is always open, hungry. He devours the world when he speaks.
"Come here, little slut," he says, his fingers tightening around my wrist. Jim's lying on the couch, sloppy with sleep. My mother works nights now at the hospital. She says the money's better. Uncle John likes her room. He likes her things. He yanks me on to the bed, unbuckles his pants. It's always the same. He opens her drawers and holds up her underwear, digging to the bottom to find the lace ones. Then he strangles me with his own hands, denying me air, denying me breath. He wants to be God. He's in a frenzy when I finally pass out, fucking me and killing me. When he's done, he dumps me in my room, the leftover waste, the refuse. All he creates is himself.
Eventually, I want to know what the words mean. I want to know why. My resistance: the question why. There is a dictionary at school, a huge book filled with thin pages and tiny black words. During reading, I leave my desk and walk to the window where the dictionary waits. My footsteps are the only sound beside my heart. They will surely hear my heart, beating fear not blood through my body. Then they will ask, What are you doing? Oh, yes? And what word is it that you're looking up? Their questions circling like a noose. I need a word to offer them, a sacrifice, a submissive throat. All I can think of are baby words. Stop. Go. Dog. God. Maybe I will say I am looking up God.
But the teacher doesn't ask. She doesn't even notice. Why would she? I'm the quiet little girl with the long black braid in a tired brown dress. I do what I'm told and I do it well. I can multiply, do long division. I know who is president. My handwriting is light and fine.
I stand at the dictionary. It's dark outside from the clouds, low and fearsome. The air smells like rain. I am afraid of everything. Thunder. Lightning. The sound of water. The reflection in the window. I keep my eyes down, down. It's all I can do to breathe. The words run in level lines across the page. I can follow them. Follow the words, I demand. B. B for bitch. 1. Female of the dog or other canine animal. 2. Wench; hussy: an abusive epithet. I still don't know anything. Wench, then. I open to the W's, my fingers trembling. The pages are making too much noise. A wench is a young woman of lowly condition. A female servant. Any female child: girl; a young woman. It comes from the word for orphan. I'm still trembling but now it's with rage. S. S for slut. And the first thing it says is: A female dog; bitch.
That's why they do this? Because I'm a girl? Or girl who is a dog? The dictionary isn't in lines, it runs in circles, and there's no way out.
And so I look up God.
The one supreme being, self existent and eternal, the infinite maker, sustainer and ruler of the universe.
I am going to rip this book to shreds. I'm going to break every pane of glass in the room. I am light condensed to fire, matter compressed to energy. All I can hear is the rain, finally, little pieces of water breaking on the ground.
In the corner of the room I see two black dogs and it's not nighttime. I start screaming.
Lying on the cot in the nurses' room, I'm exhausted. The nurse turns on the water. The sound makes me jerk. She brings me a paper cup. I want to drink. I don't want to get in more trouble. But my throat is too tight. Terror is like my clothes, my skin, wrapped around me until it’s part of me. I don't know what they're going to do.
The nurse sits down. She looks at me before she speaks. She has gray hair and she doesn't smile.
"What happened?" she asks.
She expects an answer but I haven't got one. I have nothing, no thousand and one stories, no friend to betray, no gold coin. I am a soliloquy of silence. Bitch. Wench. Slut. God. There are four words in the whole universe, and all of them are lies. I don't answer.
But nothing happens to me. They don't even call my mother.
On Thanksgiving we go to Uncle John's house. It's in the same town but it feels like another country. Because there's trees here, and rocks, and tall grasses, brown and gold. There's geese flying high above, calling each other home. I am lost and wild in Uncle John's field, instead of empty and gone. Inside, the men drink beer and yell at the TV while the women, tired and grim, serve food. But outside the silent earth whispers itself to sleep. I lay on the ground in my good dress. The grass bends and sighs. If I could let go of myself into the grass, the sky, nothing would ever hurt again. I breathe into the grass, trying to be nothing but breath. I breathe. I breathe. Grass. Sky. Geese. Breath.
But my cousins are upon me. I hear them coming and jump to my feet.
"Your mom's mad ‘cause she can't find you," laughs Johnny. Jake and Matt laugh, too, their faces sharp and exposed beneath their half-inch hair. But exposure doesn't make them vulnerable. It peels back a soft layer of pretense, baring their edges, ready to cut. And I am the flesh they crave. They'll scrape to the bone then suck out the marrow.
"We want to see your pussy again," Johnny says. They can't stand still. The effort forces a sound out Matt, half laugh, half yell. It's not a word, not a part of a word, just a noise to mark the air his. He does it again. Jake laughs. Johnny steps toward me, grinning, all teeth. His eyes are teeth, his hair is teeth, his grabbing hands are teeth.
I run.
I’m fast and I'm terrified but they're bigger. The grass isn't a refuge of whispers now, it's an open range with no way to cross and nowhere to hide. The house is a broken promise at the far end. A sound collects in my throat, spills out each time my feet hit the ground. Johnny's right beside me, running easily.
"Where you going?" he laughs. Matt and Jake circle to the front, yelling more of those not-word noises, staking their claim. I don't stop running. I slam into Matt. But he doesn't fall. He grabs me hard and they are at me in earnest, all laughing. My fear is there feast, their wine, their sacrament, pure oxygen in the blood. Six arms hold me, six hands pry at my clothes. I start screaming. Johnny slams his hand against my mouth.
"Shut the fuck up," he growls.
I bite down, hard, as hard as I can. I am starving, drowning, and I am enraged. Johnny shrieks, a strange, lost noise, circling around and around. I taste blood. It's not mine. And the thought explodes in my brain: they can bleed, too. I bite even harder. He's trying to yank his hand free, smashing my head with his other hand, shrieking the whole time. My jaw loosens from the impact. He throws me to the ground. When I hit it, I start screaming again.
"You fucking bitch!" he shouts.
He's going to kill me and I don't care as long as I can keep screaming.
But the blows never come. Instead I hear a slap. It's my mother, smacking Johnny in the face. Once, twice, three times. He howls in outrage.
Then Uncle John is there, and Jim, and Aunt Val and Grandma Carnes and everybody's shouting.
"Fucking animals!" my mother's yelling. "What the hell were they doing to her?"
"Get your hands off my son!" Uncle John yells back.
"Look at her!"
My torn dress. My tights ripped half off. My missing Mary Jane.
Through it all I keep screaming.
My mother scoops me up. I don't care. She can't help me. It's way too late for her to help me. I won't ever stop screaming.
"She just started biting me!" Johnny says. "She's fucking crazy!"
"She's lost a tooth!" my mother howls.
"I'm gonna teach her a lesson," says Jim and that's when I stop screaming. Because I see the dogs behind him, and I pass out.
My mother calls me nothing. Not even my name, Dana, which means X X.
"You been in my things again? I told you to stay out of my dresser!" she yells from the door of my room. I'm sitting on the bed doing my homework.
"No," I say, a worn, useless word.
But she wants more. She has to have more. Her drunk husband is barking at the television. Her hands smell like antiseptic. There's no color on her cheeks she puts it there.
"Is it too much to ask? Is it?"
She's beside the bed, yelling down at me.
"I didn't!" I wail.
She grabs me by the shoulders and starts shaking me. Fear is the thing that remains when we're gone, and it is made of claws. My homework, all straight lines of answers, creases and crumbles beneath me as I struggle. Her fingers are ten indictments against my flesh. My blood will answer her tomorrow, rising to the surface of my skin, blue with outrage.
"Then who did?" she demands, shoving me away in disgust.
“Uncle John," I cry, a desperate grammar, a forgotten tongue. His name echoes and echoes in the empty space that should be me.
"0h, Dana, for God's sake--" she begins. But she breaks off. Because she's met my eyes and seen. I am eight years old and no longer a child. What I am, I don't know. And neither does my mother. She stands still, perfectly balanced between truth and knowledge. If she breathes, if she blinks, there is nothing to break her fall.
Then she turns and leaves me to my bruises and my school work.
But later she comes to get me. She's in her uniform, her hair fixed tight.
"Bring a book or something," she says, running a hand across her hair. "Or a pillow. I'll get you a flashlight," she promises vaguely. Then she really looks at me. "You better put on something warmer. You know, like layers." She stands like she can't move, her arms at strange angles to her unbending back. Then she opens my dresser. "Here, put this on," she says, holding up my gray sweatshirt. But she doesn't give it to me. She touches her finger to a hole in the sleeve.
"Sweet Jesus," she says with no emotion. She looks at me again. I put on the sweatshirt.
"Let's go," she says.
In the hall, she stands in the doorway to the living room.
"Jim," she calls over the TV. "I'm leaving. For work."
"Yeah," he yells back without looking. He's lying on the couch with his belt unbuckled, arms and legs spread wide as wings. But if the air holds him up it's because he makes it.
"I'm taking Dana," she adds, her fingers tightening on the door frame.
"Yeah," he yells again. Then his head turns to look at us. My mother doesn't blink.
"What?" He struggles upright.
"Well, honey, I know how you hate babysitting, and actually they've got a place now in the staff room to bring your kids when you're working the night shift, just a place for kids to sleep. So now you don't have to babysit anymore," she says, her words like running water, smooth, clear, effortless.
"Yeah," he says and she's watching him, watching his mouth twitch, watching his hand grab itself into a fist.
"We'll see you tomorrow," she says and he doesn't reply.
Outside the dark street is quiet. It's crowded and empty both. Crowded with small, crouching houses separated by slender driveways filled with cars and fire escapes from second-floor apartments. Empty because there's no one here, no one outside, no one I could ever know. The air is cold, the moon is dark. The night is vast, the world is vast and there is nowhere for me inside it. I am not just alone, I am forsaken, and there is no way back, as I climb into the old Impala. I stare straight ahead as my mother drives, inured to vision since the world cannot pass into me without making me part of it. I think very consciously: I wish I was dead.
My mother doesn't ask, she starts telling.
"I was only seventeen," she pleads. "It's too young to have a baby. I barely finished high school. Your father wasn't gonna marry me. Then nobody would. Nobody's gonna raise another man's child. Nobody wants a girl who got herself in trouble. It's not like I'm even pretty. I was so tired of being alone. I was just plain tired. Jim wasn't like this then. God, don't you remember? He seemed so mature. He's so much older. And he had a job and that whole family and you'd have grandparents and he didn't mind that I had a kid. He said he didn't care." She doesn't cry, she just stops to catch her breath before the next sentence.
"So I married him," she says and it's the end of the story.