With one hand wrapped in my hair, she is dragging me through the tall grass, sand spurs clinging to my legs. “You think you can defy me? You think you can say no? I own you and that scrawny, little body. If you don’t want to give it up to who I fucking tell you to give it up to, I’m going to make it so no one will ever want you again.”
Back in the house. Handcuffed to the radiator. Each burn of her cigarette. Each stab of her knife. Every time she slowly drags the rusted blade across my body, I jump back against the steaming radiator she’s purposely set on high.
I am waking up.
I am passing out.
I am waking up.
I am passing out.
I wake, and my mother is no longer over me. She’s across the room on the couch, tying a tube around her arm and shooting the needle into a vein by her elbow.
“Abby has been a bad girl, Vinnie. She screams when I punish her.”
My mother nods to a man sitting on the floor, leering at me. He isn’t wearing a shirt. He smiles and his front teeth are missing, the rest of them a mixture of yellow and black.
“She needs to learn how to shut that mouth of hers. Think you can help?”
The man stands and throws me onto my back, my hand still cuffed to the burning radiator, blood drips down my arm. “Come here, darlin’,” he says. He smells like the bottom of the trash can behind the Chinese restaurant. The one where I’ve looked for food.
He slowly unzips his jeans, and before I can wonder what he is doing, he shoves himself into my mouth, pressing his hands against the back of my head. He holds a knife at my throat. My screams are muffled. I choke once, twice, three times. Then, I’m throwing up, but he won’t pull out of my mouth. He just laughs. The vomit spills out the sides of my mouth and splashes down his legs.
Suddenly, I don’t care what happens to me. A feeling of not being meant for this world washes over me.
I bite down. I bite down so hard my teeth meet in the middle. The man jumps back and screams. Blood and vomit coat his lap. My mother is passed out, her chin on her chest.
The man lunges at me, knife raised and sinks it into my shoulder so deep he hits carpet before standing and running outside.
It takes me a few minutes before I am able to calm myself from the nauseating pain enough to wiggle my hand out from the cuff and remove the blade from my shoulder. Strings of flesh and thick carpet fibers cling to the rusty blade.
I look over at my mother, and for a moment, I contemplate shoving it deep into the back of her neck while she sleeps.
Instead, I run. As fast as I can I run into the night, down the road, three miles to the fire station. Naked, covered in blood and vomit, I knock on the door, and when it opens, I fall into the arms of a large black man wearing a blue t-shirt and red suspenders.
I went for help.
I was hoping for death.
Jake needed to know all of it. He needed to see. I sucked as much air into my lungs as I could. “Can you turn on the lamp, please?” I asked. While Jake leaned behind him to do as I asked, I lifted my shirt over my head and tossed it to the floor. I wasn’t wearing a bra, so he could clearly see all of me. I sat on my knees on the bed and waited for him to see who I really was and what I really looked like.
No more hiding.
When he turned back from the lamp, his eyes went wide. Matching slashes covered the tops of both of my breasts. The redness of the injuries never truly faded to white as I had hoped they would. Burn marks, patches of uneven and stretched looking skin—from cigarettes, from cigars, from lighters and the steaming radiator my mother had once handcuffed me to—ran down the length of my right arm and my upper back. In contrast, my left arm was virtually mark-free. The worst damage was a jagged, red scar that ran from below my left breast down to the top of my right thigh, traveling through the inside of my legs, only a half an inch or so away from doing real damage.
My injuries hadn’t been inflicted to cause me to not function physically. They’d been meant to scar my body.
I held my breath.
“These are my punishments,” I said. A hot tear ran from the corner of my eye. Jake leaned into me and licked the line it left on my face. He was trying to take on my pain, consume it.
He sat up on his knees and reached out for me. Slowly, he ran his hand over each of the scars on my right arm. He bent his head and kissed along the lines marring the tops of my breasts above each nipple. They weren’t kisses meant to titillate.
They were meant to heal.
“Mom’s in prison. She got life for what she did to me and for the drugs they found on her. She had a ton of priors so they threw the book at her, no parole.” I exhaled and closed my eyes.
I was done. Exhausted and done.
Jake cupped my face in his hands. He looked me right in my eyes when he finally spoke. “You are so fucking beautiful,” he whispered.
It wasn’t what I expected him to say. I expected him to run.
“Just the way you are, Bee. These scars don’t make you ugly. You don’t need to hide them from anyone. Fuck anyone who thinks anything on someone like you could ever be anything but beautiful. You should be proud of them, baby.”