Your Love

By Amethyst Turner

Do you only love me 

Under my skirt

Where I'm 

Open to you

And vulnerable?

Would you love me

There

If I were

Hard for you

And aggressive?

Do you only love

The high tones of my voice

And the softness of my hands

And the slightness of my bones

Or do you love

Me?

I'm so afraid to know

XXX

Charlotte stared because she could.

The girl had such a strange face, horribly ugly and wonderfully angelic all at once. There were repulsive bruises and burns, purple like rotted fruit and green like molding ceilings. Charlie almost wanted to touch them, but each time she got close, her hand jumped away as if afraid they were contagious.

Instead, she knelt beside the girl, close enough to touch her, but far enough away that she could have been a doll rather than a real person.

What had Owl said her name was? Amy? Charlie examined her flushed cheeks and the black skin in her ears; what was that? She felt like she might have learned about this at some point in school, but now, she couldn't recall what disease black skin was a symptom of.

The girl turned her head in her sleep, muttering something through her chapped lips. That was enough to snap Charlotte out of her trance. They were going to be here together for the next six hours. She couldn't spend the entire time just staring at her face.

Charlie couldn't have been happier with this arrangement, actually. Basically, she was being paid five bucks an hour to sit on the floor in this quiet, clean apartment and make sure this battered, sleeping child didn't somehow escape.

If anything, Charlotte felt like she should be paying Owl instead. It wasn't often that she got to sit somewhere quiet and think.

In the Lewinski household, quiet was a joke, a myth, a folktale. A moment of silence was a rare and hallowed thing to be savored with utmost reverence.

But Charlie liked it here in her neighbor's condo. She didn't know Owl very well; no one around here did. What she did know was that she used to live with Amaya before she died, and now she lived alone.

Well, did she? Charlotte sat down beside the couch and began to wonder. Was this her daughter? Sister? Niece? She had seemed rather distressed when she knocked on Charlotte's door. I'm so sorry to bother you, Owl had said when Charlie's parents called her down, but would you mind doing me a favor? Before she'd left for work, she leaned down to kiss the girl and said that she just didn't want her to wake up alone.

Charlotte opened her journal and decided she would draw the girl the way she probably looked when she wasn't so beaten and bruised. Girl: Resurrected she called the drawing. When she was finished, she closed the journal and sat back to stare for a little while longer.

XXX

Now that she couldn't, Maggie started thinking of all sorts of things she wanted to tell Melissa.

She would see a story on the news about an autistic boy playing the keyboard for a rock band and think to herself, Melissa would love this. She'd see a shirt in the back of her closet, still in brand new condition because she'd never worn it, and she'd wonder, should I give this to Melissa? She'd wear it, wouldn't she? The kids in her class would say strange things to her and she would laugh and think, I'll tell Melissa about that later.

Then she would stop laughing and remember.

It seemed like these thoughts simply existed to taunt her: now that she couldn't talk to Melissa, she suddenly wanted to, all the time. Or maybe she'd always thought these things, but they were subconscious, unimportant.

Maggie had gone to the wake but not the funeral. When she saw Melissa's body in the casket, it didn't seem real. She felt like she was being tricked, like this body was only a zombie hand coming out of the garden at Halloween time.

But when she got closer, she could see the wrinkles around her eyes and the gently arcing bow of her lips and then she knew. Melissa, young and tortured as ever. What's wrong? Maggie was constantly asking her. Just tired, she'd always said. Maggie shook her head to herself. What a relief it must be to sleep.

XXX

For a moment, she was in the wardrobe again.

Pitch darkness, biting cold, everything aching, the smell of urine and the sound of howling wind outside, slipping in. Just as she had so many times with the gag in her mouth, Amethyst screamed. Only, this time a sound came out.

Her eyelids flew open like shutters flung aside. Light flooded her eyes, warmth enveloping her. Relief crashed over her like a wall tumbling down, leaving her to weep in the dusty remnants of her memories.

"Whoa, hi."

Amethyst shrieked, her heart bouncing wildly in her chest. It was a voice she had never heard before, deep but feminine, almost rubbery at the edges. She flung her arms over her head as the peculiarity of her situation hit. Where was she? Who was this person? Where was her father, her mother, the dark attic walls?

"Don't be afraid," said the voice. "I'm not going to hurt you. See? I'll stay all the way over here."

Aimee dared to peek out from behind her arm. When she moved, pain shot up from her toes, springing into her arms and ears and eyes. She yelped again, moans leaking from her throat. "Help," she murmured. "Help me."

"Help you? With what? Are you okay?"

Amethyst opened her eyes, or tried to. One stuck, veins jumping and pouting. Her heart began to pound again when she saw who the voice belonged to.

It was a girl, eyes wide with alarm and eyebrows furrowed with concern. She had wild curls that stuck up around her head, the color of burnt cinnamon. Her eyebrows sat obtrusively above her eyes, thick and almost red. Her eyes, shocking in their depth, peering at her as if suspicious. Her nose, too long, almost overlapped her top lip which was full and dark pink. She had a tapered but firm chin, dimple carved into the center.

"I'm okay," she said carefully. "Who are you?"

The girl leaned closer, lips curling into a mild grin. "My name's Charlie," she said. "Owl said you're Amethyst?"

"You know Owl?"

"Yup." The girl's smile faded. "Are you sure you're okay? You look pretty . . . well, I dunno. Does it hurt?"

Amethyst grimaced and sat up, careful not to put any weight on her feet. Her wrists throbbed, the rubbed-raw combination of bruises and cuts on her arms blazing with pain. Her stomach felt agonistically hollow, a dark, echoing chamber opened inside of her. Every word she spoke made her throat scratch and close. "Can I have some water?" she asked. "Please?"

"Yeah, yeah, of course," said the girl. "Stay right there."

Aimee nodded again. Where else did she have to go?

XXX

Richard had told himself he would go to visit her every night, but as he came off the highway, he found himself passing the road that would have led him to the Riverside Condominiums, speeding toward his own home instead.

But, he thought, why was he going there, anyway? What awaited him at home, other than a mute, angry wife and empty rooms, unheated?

There was his beer, and the promise of a long, undisturbed sleep and that was enough right now.

He imagined Amethyst probably didn't want to see him, anyway. Richard couldn't pretend to understand his daughter, but he did know that she took into account the actions of the past. She would be skittish, flinching and jerking away each time he tried to touch her. She would be marred and bruised, marked with the battle wounds of her last week spent in the Turner house.

Richard couldn't believe that his wife, such a frail, bed-dwelling woman, could be capable of such damage. Where was this devil who had marked his daughter's face so catastrophically? Surely it wasn't the wretch he had woken up next to this morning, the sharp elbows and stringy hair, the protruding ribs and the thin lips? It couldn't be.

Lights zipped by, each marking another minute that he spent avoiding the truth. No, he decided, she would be much happier left to Owl and her own strange devices. She was better off without him.

XXX

The night before her first day of school, Kris sat in the rocking chair at the front of the room and tried to imagine what this carpet would look like full of children.

It was new, and Kris liked it more than she'd liked anything in a long while. Adverb Carpet, the description had read. And yes, it was a carpet with adverbs printed all over. Kris didn't know why, but the scattered, colorful words made her happy to the point of laughter. Wildly, amiably, smoothly, frighteningly. Which children would select these words and sit on them without a clue what they meant?

The walls were different now, too. No more posters to teach the colors and emotions and shapes. She'd heaped these all into one corner of the room, plastered not a centimeter apart from each other from floor to ceiling. Go, go learn your colors and shapes, Kris imagined herself saying, go to the Learning Corner!

She'd put up her own posters to replace them, stuck up around the manilla walls in a crazily overlapping collage. Rock bands and children's books, directions for origami animals and sketches of flowers, poems written in big, angular cursive and song lyrics decorated with flowers and butterflies and devil horns. Kris looked at it all and smiled to herself. They were going to have some fun this year.

On the day of her interview, Kris had not felt like the pencil skirt and pastel cardigan that she put on. She'd felt like her collared button down and khakis, braided brown belt and shined-up loafers. But she knew she had to sit the interview as the Kris of ponytail-ed hair and lacey black bra and heeled, buckled boots.

Now that the interview was over, though, she was back to deciding for herself again. Kris leaned back in the rocking chair and listened to the drip of a leaky sink down the hall, her only companion in the empty school building. She liked it, though. The sink didn't know who she was or wasn't, and it didn't care. Kris preferred things that way. 

XXX

You've got your mother in a whirl 
She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl

Hey babe, your hair's alright
Hey babe, let's go out tonight
You like me, and I like it all
We like dancing and we look divine

-Rebel Rebel by David Bowie