Sheets

I'm going to be brave. This piece is a newer one. It's disturbing, offensive, vial, and the first chapter to the book I'm writing. This particular chapter is about abuse. Don't worry, the whole book isn't this depressing. If you're easily offended or would rather read happy pieces only, please don't read this one. Thanks.




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He opened the door without knocking and started unbuttoning his pants. I was already naked under the thin sheet. I was thankful dad had turned the heat on today. I had been begging him for weeks but he refused to turn to turn it on till the water in the toilet had a thin sheet of ice across the top. That's when he knew it was getting cold enough to freeze the water in our pipes. He didn't want to pay to fix them if they burst again.

I turned my attention back to the man, now standing naked, in my room. I liked Ricky better than some of the others. He was nice to me. He liked to pretend like I was his daughter. It used to make my dad upset when he watched the video, but Ricky was a regular, and paid in cash, so he got over it. Ricky smiled at me. I smiled back. He got under the sheet with me and started stroking my hair and telling me about his week. He smelled like beer today. It was a comforting smell. Dad always smelled like beer. I listened intently to his story. I focused on keeping my eyes wide and interested. I mmm-d and ahhh-d at all the right places, and when he was ready I closed my eyes and let myself wander. I though about Wisconsin, I thought about my mom, and what my life would have been like if I had chosen to move with her. I thought about her next email, about how excited she seemed about the new man she was dating. His name was Bill, and he worked at the same hospital she did. He was a doctor. She was a receptionist. I remembered the picture she'd sent of the two of them. He was short.

And then I realized it was over. Ricky was standing at the edge of the bed, pulling his pants on. "I've got to run love. I'm meeting Suzanne for dinner after this." He sounded apologetic.

It stung a little. Suzanne was his real daughter, and she was prettier than me. He reached down and kissed my forehead. Then he turned and opened the door to leave. I jumped up to follow him and wrapped the sheet around myself as I went. I could hear him arguing with my dad already.

"Listen bastard, the price is fifty, it's always been fifty and that's all I'm giving you." Ricky was practically screaming. I assumed it was the alcohol.

"No," my dad replied with surprising cool, "She's got tits now. It's a hundred."

"What the fuck!? Those aren't tits; I've got tits bigger than hers!"

I cringed. I looked down at myself and wished I could be more for him. Maybe then he wouldn't be so angry.

He slammed the fifty-dollar bill down on the coffee table and turned to leave.

"If you don't pay, you'll never touch her again. She'd worth a hundred and you know it." Dad was getting red in the face.

Ricky turned to me, considering. I tried to smile some encouragement but it came out more of a grimace. He turned back to my dad. "Forget it, you greedy son-of-a-bitch." He slammed the door on the way out.

It felt like I'd had the wind knocked out of me, and I could feel my heart slow. Like suddenly it was trying to pump blood with the consistency of tar. It hurt. Ricky was one of my favorites. And now, I'd never see him again. I looked at my dad. He pushed past me to my room and I could hear him fiddling with the camera. I hoped Ricky had remembered to turn it off. I had forgotten to check and I didn't want to get in trouble for wasting the battery. He came back with the tape and slammed it into the VCR. I just stood there, staring at him. How could he raise the price? He'd cost me one of my best friends. He was sitting on the couch now, settling in. He half smiled at me then, and waved me over. Ricky must have remembered to turn off the camera.

Ricky.

A whole new wave of grief and loss washed over me as I joined him on the couch. I used to sit on his lap when we watched our movies. I got too heavy though. Now I just curled up next to him. As soon as we were done watching, dad would upload it to his website. That way people could pay to watch me with his friends.

He put his arm around me, and I stopped being mad at him. I knew it wasn't his fault. If I were a better lay, Ricky would've paid a hundred. I was only worth fifty dollars. Dad pushed play and pulled me closer. All the yelling had gotten him excited. I could tell by the way he touched me that my night wasn't over yet.

Scrap Metal

This is another really old piece. I'll try to post something more current soon. I'm just nervous ;)


I wanted to get my foot out from under my butt to put both feet on the floor, as if somehow having good posture would help the situation, but inertia seemed to pull against every logical movement. As the second truck hit us, it felt as though half of me obeyed the commands of this sudden change in motion, and the other half was left behind. My seat-belt caught, and it cut into my chest like the two inch wide strap had suddenly become a single stretch of fishing line.

The sounds of metal ripping from the body of our car seemed only amplified by my little sister’s screams, and I wanted to tell her to use her inside voice. The sheer intensity of sound filled my ears and nose and mouth. It was suffocating. For a moment, metal, rubber, flesh and asphalt were equal and fought to remain most untouched. I knew, with sudden certainty, that if I lived through this moment, it was by no fault of mine. So this is what a really bad wreck feels like.

We started tipping, and with a loud crack, my window broke away from its frame. It was half shattered, and our van slid unsmoothly across it as we continued toward the field of barley below us. The windowless gaping hole kicked up every rock and pulled many lungs-full of field dirt into the vehicle. It billowed in dark, thick clouds that seemed to muffle out all details of reality. It wasn't until the van came to a final resting place that the dust settled and the volume rose again to a rightful panic in the intensity of the situation. I called out to my mom.

She didn’t answer.

Walls

This is a pretty old writing of mine....just putting it out there to test the waters. :o)

One night Dillon and I were watching a movie. The lights were out and the soft glow of the TV illuminated his face. Okay, he was watching the movie…I’d glanced at him momentarily and somehow hadn’t yet forced myself to look away. I yearned to reach up and trace the long line of his jaw with my fingertips, but the act seemed too intimate and I wasn’t sure how he’d react. His lips looked soft and full and though I dreamt of kissing him for the first time only after an engagement, part of me longed for them. My cheeks flushed at the thought and guilt turned my attention quickly back to the television. He peeked back and smiled. His gaze lingered and I let out a small giggle at being caught.

“Look at me,” he whispered gently.

“I can’t.” My face and neck burned, and I tried to look out the window, to concentrate on how the wind whipped the through the tree branches and their tiny new buds. The pull was too strong. I turned to him and it was as if in an instant he looked into my eyes and saw every part of me—parts that I had yet to understand. I gave a nervous laugh and leaned my head against his shoulder to break the tension between our eyes.

I was hesitant to fall in love. My last relationship had been purely physical toward the end, and I’d broken it off only to try and salvage the last wisps of my virginity. That was part of the reason I’d been so interested in Dillon. In those last few months with James, I’d grow to realize that it came down to choosing between my relationship with Christ and my relationship with him. I chose Christ and we broke up. Dillon wasn’t like that. One day he and I had talked for three straight hours about God, what he was doing in our lives, religion, and the importance of having a relationship with Christ over simply going through the motions of church life. He was the pastor’s son, which intrigued me only because he seemed to know a lot more about the Bible than I did. We both had a passion for Christ; he was just farther ahead with the intellect.

For a long while that was what made our relationship all that it was. We fed off each other in our enthusiasm. His last relationship ended because she wasn’t ready to let him push her in her walk, and that was something that I desired from him more than anything. I loved having that accountability in him, and we were growing quickly by encouraging one another to chase after God whole-heartedly. We were friends first, and slowly we began to recognize the great attraction that God places between a man and a woman. We began to appreciate the romance, and revel in it.

My eyes were heavy and I felt as though the weight of my head was beginning to dig into his shoulder. I grabbed the pillow to my other side and lay it in his lap. “May I?” I suggested at lying down, and he nodded, in a way that seemed that he was only trying to seem absorbed in the movie. I got situated and lay my head on the pillow, immediately appreciative of the cushion that separated me from the more intimate parts of his body. Still, I enjoyed being close to him and pressed my cheek to his chest in a brief moment of courage and soaked up the atmosphere, listening to the rise and fall of his breath. The soothing rhythmic sounds of his heart and lungs lulled me quickly into some comfortable place of half-consciousness and I slept easily.

What seemed a moment later, though my eyes only opened in slits with lashes framing my view, I could see that darkness filled the room and only the soft tick of a worn clock trumped the silence. The television had lost its vivacity and because my eyes hadn’t adjusted I closed them to see the outline of his face from memory. He’d recently shaved his head again and my palm tingled at the recollection of its velvety feel. Though the temperatures outside dropped with every howl of the biting wind, it was warm in the room, and so as my body began to recognize movement, I was puzzled to find him trembling.

“Why are you shaking?” I whispered, just loud enough to wonder if I’d truly said the words or merely thought them with great force.

As the ticking of the clock padded lazily through the night stillness, it was only the quickening of his heart that made me think he might have heard me. Seconds passed, and more, before my ears reached desperately to grasp the recognition of words in his breathy answer.

“I’m crying,” he said.

I waited, nuzzled my head softly into his stomach, hoping that he’d hear my silent plea for him to keep talking, to go on, to explain, in the soft expression of safety that I tried to communicate. More marking of the time by the distant clock, and I hoped I’d not fall asleep before he spoke again, pulled by the heaviness of lethargy.

“I’m just…,” he took a long, shaky breath, “happy.”

With the confession of his raw emotion the silence seemed to swallow up the moment, hoping to drown it out and rebuild the walls that we were supposed to shake but not take down. I let the reality of what he’d said settle in to some deep place of human understanding. Dillon was the strongest guy that I’d ever met. Physically he could take care of himself and protect me from anyone that I’d ever need protecting from, but even emotionally he rarely let people see more than a lighthearted smile and never showed weakness. He had the ability to keep people at a distance, and even the few that he’d let in weren’t allowed to truly know him—who he was and who he desperately wanted to be. It was almost as though in an instant I’d caught a glimpse of every part him—even parts that he had yet to understand.