“Dear father-”
The flickering light above makes me wonder if God is watching me.
It reminds me of all the blinking I did. On. Off. On. Off. Off. Off. Off. Turn it off. The light is taunting me, I swear, mummy. Please, daddy, turn around, and you’ll see how it’s laughing at me. Its movements are mocking my constricted body and the cotton ball in my mouth.It’s not fair. The light gets to jump around as it likes, and I have to hold very still.
I’ve never been so jealous of a flickering light. You see, the needle in my eye socket is making it awfully difficult to blink. And that arrogant light is my sadistic lover refusing me my sweet release. If only my daddy could move the sharp tool he has plunged into my eye, I’d be able to shut them, and forget the audience of people my parents have invited to this feast.
It’s probably better this way, my mummy, the doctor, knows her way around my sick body, and when she stuffed my mouth with fluffy white cotton she did it, so
I wouldn’t swallow my tears. They’re glued around the metal needle, anyway. And how would that taste? Like a poor labourer’s meal, salty and bitter, mummy knows I’m better than that.
That’s part of the reason why I’m lying on this table here. “You’re so arrogant and selfish, no one will ever want to marry you”, as my mummy and daddy always say. If my smart father is lucky tonight, he’ll be able to extract the foul, rotting bits of my brain and fill it with orange peels.
I admit the thought of that scared me. I still felt like the little girl in that classroom. I killed her a long time ago, but whenever I kneel in front of the toilet and my fingers dig too deep to search for food crumbs, I rip out my heart and just for a second I put it by my ear. The fast beating is still the same from all those years ago, and I faintly hear my begging cries from I was a child and couldn’t swallow that orange.
I hope that by putting the peels in, I will like the fruit my parents gave to me.
And I hope some boy will love me now, but the audience around the table are no frigid teen morons. Wolf-men are circling me. The white robe my mummy put on me just for this special moment is my sheep’s skin. I drown in the wide fabric, and I’m disappearing before their eyes. But my being doesn’t matter. The table I was put on is the dinner table, and my purity is served on a silver platter.
The girl who throws up her meals is the flesh you desperately desire to bite in.
I’d laugh at the irony, but again, the needle is anchored in my skull, and I worry that if I move too much, I’d spoil the feast my parents so carefully put together.
Instead, I focus on mummy and daddy. Eagerly, they rotate around me and fight about how much they should remove.
- We shouldn’t take out more than a handful. You know what could happen if we rupture her brain matter.
My mummy is obviously a very knowing doctor. She read about the surgery in a book once. It reminds me of that day she found out I had tried to kill myself. “Oh, I know all about your kind. Well, normally those children have a reason to be depressed. I don’t see how I’m the problem in your situation. Must be some cry for attention.”After her monologue she refused to hold my hand. I think she feared I might get blood on her. This was years ago, mummy, I promise you can touch me. My fingers are clean, I swear, I scrubbed them very hard after the man had held them.
- I know I don’t want to do that either, but it’s what she gets for acting like a brat. Maybe she’ll lose some weight if I take out more.
My daddy only wants the best for me. But I was always a fat cow, and I don’t know how else I could make it up to him than by letting him thrust the needle into me and draining me whole. I always thought that by emptying myself, that by spooning out joy, I’d be able to repent. If I’d follow his path blindly on my knees, I’d learn to be just as good as him, or at least be a worthy believer. But forgiveness is like the snow I used to brush over me as a child, desperate to hide my traces. And when it melts away, I long for the same fate. I pray to be forgotten. Please, don’t remember the girl no one loved.
My mother starts humming a song. She and my father, the lovebirds who are so engrossed with each other, can’t spare any affection for their wretched daughter. Smoothly they entertain the guests, feed them lies and cut open the fruit of their loins.
- This reminds me of all those years ago.
- I know. We used to be so young then.
This wasn’t the first time they had cut open my brain. It used to be much more difficult. Drilling a hole in my skull always made a horrible mess, and I had difficulties cleaning up behind myself. But we grew together, and today daddy can stab me with the needle whenever I turn into an ungrateful child. I wish they hadn’t cut out all of my memories, though. It takes a lot of effort to remember the past, and I can’t make the difference between reality and fiction.
But remembering comes in waves. And tonight I’m drowning.
Take apart my brain and rummage through the wires of burnt out aspirations. Threaten me with fire, still I won’t crawl back into my cave. The flames don’t hurt my charred body, I’m used to my father’s insults. Push me into the sea, I’ve long drowned in the waves. I’m sinking in nostalgia, swallowing memories I’ve never lived. My past belongs to someone else. I keep poisoning the berries on my path, I hope the little girl swallows them when she’s chasing after me.
But you can cut open my chest and rip my heart apart. For I’ve never been loved. This pain would be new to me. The embarrassing agony of being seen.
- I think I’ve found something.
My father’s voice overpowers the howling of the hungry men, and a pregnant pause follows.
He rips out the needle, barely grazing my fearful eye, and the sharp pain reminds me of all the women who clawed their nails into my fleshy arms, their tight grip burning me. Love means holding on to something, hatred means hoping blood will flow from not letting go.
On the pin, a black parasite is impaled, the murder weapon still in my father’s hands. Impressed sighs leave the mouths of the arrogant men, cheering on my father’s achievements. They sneer at my repulsive body. They’re wondering how many flesh eating creatures are hidden inside of me, edging each other on, on who can devour me first. My mummy takes a closer look:
- There’s a leg missing. It’s probably still inside her, infecting what’s left.
- That can be easily dealt with.
My chivalrous father, who always has to prove his superiority, removes the sticky gloves from his big hands and shoves his fat thumb into the little hole he put in my eye. Not pleased with what he finds, he presses his weight on my forehead, allowing him to squirm around the tight space. It reminds me of all the times I squeezed myself into the crevices of his heart, praying to find a space uninhabited by my little brother. Rhythmically he pulls in and out, and it brings me back to the flickering light above.
Is God there? Can he see me? Is he crying? I’m not crying. I’m a good girl, I swallow what you give to me. Is he laughing at me? The tragedy on the dinner table almost seems comical. He’ll say: “Isn’t this what you wanted? To eat with mummy and daddy? You said you were willing to give up everything if they’d play with you again. So do it.”
Why do I see God? Why do I want to see him?
I don’t believe in him. What good has he ever done for me? If there is a God, and he blesses me with death, we can play ”daddy and daughter”. I’m daddy and I will spit at him. Clean my shoes, God. Beg for forgiveness on the floor, like you watched me do all those years. When I look up, I only see my father.
Is my father God? Is everyone’s father God? He is above me, and I’d pin myself to a cross for him.
God, is my father a fallen angel? Is this an inferno? Is this my punishment for my sinning? This is hell, I’m certain of it.
Still, my fallen God can’t find the leg of the black creature eating away my brain. He grows frustrated, and his plunges are sloppy with liquid gushing out when his finger circles around the same place he searched through just a moment ago. He won’t stop. I am my father’s daughter, we take pleasure in hurting me, and we ignore the desperate pleas of the blood flowing out of my frail body. Don’t stop, daddy, you’re almost there. Just look harder. It’s hidden behind the walls I built up, destroy them. Find the little girl you loved before your son was born. I wish I could tell him this, but lobotomies always make me nervous to move around. I feel his nails cutting through brain tissue and fastening themselves on something. He pulls out. Please, let it be something good.
Vomit forms in my mouth when I see it. My mother faints, the men jump on the table, trampling over me, eager to look at the hole it has left. Disobedience, arrogance, selfishness and disrespect all in the form of a letter. Hundreds of parasites crawl out when my father unfolds the text that assures my death sentence. I open my mouth to resist, “Daddy stop”, but I choke on the black ink of my writing that now gushes down my throat. The light flickers, someone laughs and someone starts to read, God and father are there, I can’t tell them apart.
I inspect the white fabric of my underwear and smile at the pure canvas between my legs. The piece of cotton twists around my limbs like poison ivy, and it tells me to stay seated. My finger follows the hem, and the dryness of my knickers makes me smirk; how arousing drought could be. How is it that lustrous tears flow in parched hearts?
Weeks have passed since the blood stopped flowing from between my legs. I think one desolate night I sewed the hole shut, and now the loose threads sprout like the hair of a child that’s crawling its way out of its mother’s lap, tearing everything down from the inside. Nibbling on her ribs and pinching her heart, a wolf-child feasting on mummy-sheep. But I will have my own baby soon. The headaches, the dizziness and the throwing up now make sense to me. I will proudly get to carry an atom bomb in my fruit basket at the crowded market, and I will be awarded with medals for swallowing down cyanide air. I will bear another mean father, because he is half of me. Two months sober, I’ve become tainted pure for my impure baby.
Desperately, I thrash around with my legs to escape the cotton constraints, and when they’re lying on the dirty floor, I pick them up and greedily place them in my mouth. The soft knickers comfort the rumbling of my now growing stomach, and I can taste the salty sweat and greasy pleas when I bite down on the fabric that separated me from you. How thin thousands of stitches seem when you’re ripping them to shreds with your teeth, and how filling a blank page is when you swallowed down your tongue and there are no words left to say.
I chew on my knickers and count until I reach sixty seconds, after all, this what the magazines whispered in my ears I was eleven. “Chew until the drool drips down your dainty chin and the liquid food burns your throat when you finally swallow. Only then you become less hungry, and only then are you worthy of the food you put into your mouths.”
I think of the Devil when counting gets boring, and I pretend that we were childhood friends, playing hopscotch on our fathers’ graves. I knew that once I’d reach sixty, I’d be lying in my own.
One, two, three, four –
The putrid smell of blueberries, cucumbers and coffee swims around the basin. My leaking nose cries when I push my head inside the bowl and the tip of my nose brushes against the dark red water. Through my glassy eyes, I see half-digested oranges floating around on the surface, and I think the seedless fruit caused me to never root myself in the earth and grow from the day the woman’s sharp nails clawed themselves into my soft arms.
-Seventeen, nineteen, twenty.
I push my hand between my legs when acid tears burn my sleeves. I have to keep my baby safe, the maternal instinct follows me like my shadow. But this child will be secure. I’d perform a christening in the white bowl, sing lullabies in deaf cradles, and clothe it in hand-me-down dreams that are now only insurmountable for me to guard it from my fate. Motherhood will take me on my final ride, and feast upon my girlhood, but I will serve it to her on a silver platter and cut out pieces of my heart if she asks for more. I’ve dreamt of this, and no sad meal will take this away from me. I know it for the better.
Thirty, forty, fifty.
The heating in the bathroom is turned on, and the warmth spreads through my entire body. Outside my temple, hell is frozen over, and the door is locked. The white glow of the basin smiles at me, and I think it is God, urging me to move closer. The heated floor melts when my knees touch the ground, and I feel my brain liquifying in the boiling bathroom. Preachers like the cold air, it’ll make sinners like me who look for warming fireplaces in TV screens doting believers. This bowl will give me no comfort, but I own the control here. I get to choose here. This is for the better. This is for my baby. I pull out a white thread from my mouth.
When I turn to look at myself in the mirror, I smile at my sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. I open my mouth like a creaky door, and white juice spills from my lips. The cotton knickers have melted under my burning tongue, and now I’m finally ready to swallow. I imagine the demon in my stomach stretching its jaw to allow the liquid to purify its charred interior. I keep feeding the mean father of a little girl who isn’t me, and I look forward to seeing him rip her to shreds. I’m bearing a monster, and I will name it after myself. The warmth of the bathroom hugs me tight, and I feel in control.
My creature-baby does, too. It’s starting to cry, and I feel the tears running down my legs. More and more, my baby starts bawling. I try to comfort it and stick my finger in the sloppily sewed up hole, but my lullabies and stories don’t seem to quiet it down, and the tears won’t stop flowing. Like a good mummy, tears leave my eyes, too, and when I try to wipe away the snot, my painted white face turns red.
Like a bad mummy, I know what this means. I stretch my upper body down in the cramped space, and see the blood gushing from between my legs.
Reader, stop watching me. I pull the curtain of this tragedy down, and rub the blood away with a dry towel. I rip apart the seams and pull my bloody baby out. Leave me.
Eighteen, sixty.
I’m no longer clean. The bleeding is back. I’ve burned down the dirty towel, and I will try again. I push my fingers down my throat. The toilet water is red. In the basin, I see my baby-father smiling at me, and I flush.