[Week 13] [Day 7] [Dream] I've been treated so wrong/ I've been treated so long
There is a story to be told.
No.
There’s a moral to be told.
The moral is this: don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t pretend that you’re not, don’t fuck before marriage, don’t be deviant, don’t drink, don’t go out at night, don’t be with fangers, don’t be with Muslims, don’t be with Methodists, don’t be with Catholics, don’t believe in evolution, and don’t you ever, ever, be something less than a woman. Because if you are trying to be something un-woman, you are the Devil’s sweet little sinner. Trash. The moral goes on, see. The more the deviation, truer the reality everything you have embodied as a God-sent lesson from Above.
So, therefore: there are no stories.
Just morals.
The story is this: you are six years old and you want to play. You ask for one thing in particular: a car. A nice toy car: blue, to match your eyes, with red flames for your hair. It’ll look nice, is your reasoning, even though you are at the age where you don’t really care about looks, only playtime. But you like about how people look and you want to reflect that.
You ask and beg, and your mother gives you a doll with a light blue dress and red hair, almost like you. Her face looks like that: an ageless face with kind but distant eyes that is sometimes close enough for you to give comfort. But not today, somebody is distracting her - something bulging in the stomach.
“God gives dolls for little girls to play with. Look how she has pretty red hair, Jessica, just like you.”
You like the doll and you agree, it looks just like yourself. You go to your room and lock the door. Then you climb on your bed, rearranged the blankets and pillows and you pretend along with the limp, smaller version of you that you are driving in the fastest car in the world, so fast that it leaves behind flames that start forest fires.
There’s no real moral to it, because you never understand it until later on and by that time it’s too late - you wanted to play with dolls with imaginary cars. But never the real thing.
Never the real thing, especially.
In between the birthdays in ever single year, you hear your mother’s sobs over your father’s yelling.
She doesn’t do anything to stop it for herself.
She doesn’t do anything to stop the yelling for you or your sister.
You are in your room, behind the closed door. There’s something building up inside of you, something tiny and fast and scared that wants to run but you can’t - there’s nothing outside and the world is vast and scary and terrible, especially when you saw the cat getting run over by a speeding car.
So all you can do is to curl up and cry at the noises Mommy and Daddy are making.
You have a hard time understand the point of all this.
Ten years to your birthday, you went to Lori’s house for a sleepover, and she’s your best friend. Dad picked her out, so he must be right, right? You are ten and you are starting to grow out of dolls, but Lori still plays with them, so you play with them right back. Friends stick together no matter what, that’s the rule in life; one of the few rules that Jessica personally agrees.
So you and Lori are together and suddenly she makes her to homemade dolls - a man and a woman - slam their faces against each other and Lori makes smooching noises. You blink at her and say, “Are they married?”
Lori doesn’t look at up with at you, completely focusing on her dolls. Her dark, slightly greasy black hair hangs limply, covering her eyes. You can’t see the real truth in her face. “Not yet. But they love each other and that’s important,” she says in a low tone, as though realizing this for herself.
The option of loving before marriage or even being married at all is a new thing for you.
“But don’t people marry when they fall in love?” You are genuinely interested.
“Most do,” Lori replies, making the dolls’ hands caress touch each other’s hair. For make-believe, it looks really passionate. “Some don’t.”
Lori’s mother knocks on the door before entering and Lori quickly and with a little shame in her movements, tore the lovers apart. She instead pretends for the woman to go one direction while the man goes the other way.
Twelve years old and there’s blood in the tub.
You scream and scream and scream, because you don’t know what’s wrong but something is because you are bleeding so much. You scream for Mom, but your little sister comes in instead. Enraged, you cover yourself up. “Get Mom, get Mom, get Mom!” You howl with pure panic at yourself and rage at her just staring shamelessly at you like some dumb cow. And the girl starts to cry and giggle at the same time, just a little kid, see? So stupid. You yell and your sister stands there bawling, and this scares you even more and you scream louder because there’s blood emptying out your body and you’re dying.
There are two girls in the bathroom and both of them are scared, bawling and screaming.
Your mother finally arrives and gently ushers out your sister, who’s crying because she doesn’t know what to do. Who gently tells you to get out of the tub, it’s alright, it’s completely normal and you look at her and scream, No, it’s not alright stupid! because she has no idea just how scared you are. How slow she has been in reacting, how she’s not there when it happened.
“All girls have it at all point in their lives, sweetie. Old blood leaves the womb and new blood replenishes it. It’s a way for us to make our bodies clean, even though it’s painful,” she explains after she dries you up and shows you how to use a pad.
“Why didn’t I know this earlier?” You demand, spent from the high the terror gives off.
“We decided that it might be better if you see for yourself first hand.”
“We?”
“Your father and I.”
At that, you never talked to your parents about your period.
You are thirteen and you have the sudden, vicious desire to go to the library. You don’t know why, it’s just a whim, but you want to go there so much. Maybe it’s because you suddenly saw Lori’s book collection and got jealous and want to have a bigger collection than she does.
Mom needs to go to some Christian Women meeting and pleased that you have the right interest to make her way in her life, a positive step forward, so she drops off Jessica at the public library. You immediately zoom into the section for teenagers and read the ones that didn’t look too thick. You read about horseback riding and monsters in the closet, of beautiful men who will love you forever after seeing your face just once and it’s beautiful. It’s like you see beyond the dreary and terrible and wonderful world that’s in the Bible. There’s something else, and you can’t wait for it. You want more, more, and you know people will make fun of you to be a geek, a bookworm, but as you read the letters and words and sentences, you see something else. Something that escapes from the lessons of being a proper lady, from Daddy’s belts, from your little annoying sister, to everything in the world you sees in an eschewed vision.
But Mom said you can only pick up one book. Why one, you don’t know - it’s not like you are buying the book. Is there a limit you can borrow?
So instead of picking out a book from the teenager section, you decide something a little grown up, you impress Mom and Daddy that you can read like a grown-up can. You browse along, looking at something that looks cool. A white cover catches your eye, and you drag it off the shelf.
It’s all white but with some kind of a skeleton on it. You don’t recognize it at first, but then you realize what it is - a dinosaur. Some animal that people claim is real and had lived for millions of years ago, but people say that it isn’t real. Just a hoax, something those liberal people cook up for no good reason. The world is only five thousand years old, after all.
The book says, Jurassic Park by Micheal Crichton.
It looks interesting and grown-up looking, you decided. Plus, it’s just about dinosaurs, and they aren’t real, so it doesn’t really matter. It’s merely fiction, and the library labeled it so. So you take it, borrowed it, and take it to the house, and Momma doesn’t seem to notice the book you got, so you figured it must be okay. You flip though the pages and some names come out to you - Malcolm, Harding, Timmy, and Allen - and it looks exciting enough.
Then Daddy comes home from work and sees you reading at the couch. You are in the part where a little sweet girl is attacked by some tiny dinosaurs. “Why aren’t you with your mother in the kitchen helping dinner?”
You gesture to your book. “Reading?” You’re reading the part about a girl encountering an animal that’s the combination of a lizard and a bird.
There’s an ugly look to your Daddy’s face and you immediately know it’s the wrong answer. He yanks the book from your hands and with a downward swing, backhand you straight in the jaw. Before you could make a sound, he takes a glance at the cover and scowls even deeper. “You’ve been trying to learn about evolution?”
Your jaw stings. Somewhere in the kitchen, you can hear your little sister giggles and you want to kill her.
“It’s just a book, Daddy.” You say, touching your face but it’s too late, there’s gonna be a bruise there and it hurts. Your eyes feel like they are on fire.
He hits you again, this time across the temple. “No daughter of mine is going to learn some godless trash!” He roars, ripping the spine in two and tossing it to the closest bin. You protested that he shouldn’t have done that, that it’s a library book, there will be a fine and they will have to pay it back. Daddy yells back at you, saying that you will pay it back but you have no money on you because now Daddy won’t give you the allowance for three weeks straight.
He shoves you in the direction of the kitchen. “Help your mother and sister. That’s what you are supposed to do. And stay there.”
When your sister starts giggling, you exploded with the rage directed at your father for hitting you, for tearing your book apart, so you shove her to the counter. Your mother turns and admonish you, telling you to be a proper lady but fuck that, your book is gone and then Daddy comes in to the kitchen again with belt in hand and hits you again and again until all you smell is leather and feel is fire and then he drags you off into your room and hits you again, saying there will be no dinner and no breakfast because you should have know better.
You never go back to the library again.
Fifteen years come, and you and Lori are in your house, and she manages to sneak in some Teen magazines. It’s the best thing ever - it has words you don’t quite understand but you know they have filthy, wonderful intentions. It has to be so good but so bad. You learn more about your own body than your own explorations at night, underneath the covers.
There you and Lori read something about safe sex, and how it works; how having a pill that can make all those periods goes away for good.
“Which one of us will lose it first?” Lori suddenly asks, out of the blue.
You turn to her, flushed from reading one article about tips on romantic dates. “Lose what?”
Lori looks at you like you’re stupid. “Loosing your virginity, duh,” she mockingly rolls her eyes at you. You throw a pillow at her and she laughs. “No, seriously, who do you think?”
“I will,” you say because you never let down an opportunity to a challenge.
“No, I will!”
“Pssst, as if.”
Several months later, you hear from your mother’s grapevine that Lori won the bet. Everyone knows that it’s her first time because her belly is swelling.
A few days later, you go to Lori’s house, to hang out with her, to be with her, give her support like a good friend should. You have her father instead - a heavy-set, slightly overweight, bearded man with slatted eyes like your own father’s, as well as having the same expression of something unpleasant underneath his nose.
You ask for Lori. You have a Bible in hand, but in your handbag what you really have are the newest copies of her favorite magazines and make-up and even chocolate. Behind Lori’s father, you hear a woman sobbing somewhere in the den.
“Lori doesn’t live here anymore.”
The door slams into your face.
In between the birthdays in ever single year, you hear your mother’s sobs over your father’s yelling.
She doesn’t do anything to stop it for herself.
She doesn’t do anything to stop the yelling for you or your sister.
You ignore it now, but with something swelling hot in your belly, like something is growing inside, as though you are pregnant as well. Something terrible and massive is dying for a chance to be released. In the same spot you always sit, just behind the door in your room and you hear a screech and something crashing.
You stare down at the palm of your hands and find many of the tiny crescent-shaped marks, all of them red.
You don’t remember how old you were when this happened, but you know it’s not too long ago, and it starts with the simple fact: Mommy hates guns and Daddy likes guns.
It must be a stupid guy thing, you decide.
One day at the dinner table, Daddy told a visiting cousin that there’s a shooting range close by and he wonders if Cousin Johnny can come. Johnny agrees. You say, “I want to come,” but your Mother says “No, sweetie, you’re need to go shopping for some new dresses for church.”
For the first time in ever, Daddy disagrees and says you can come.
So you did.
And you want to try it out, but Daddy says no. He just wanted you to watch, men can hold their guns better because they are stronger physically and can handle the backlash better. He did show you how to take it apart, though, but it was just too easy.
So you sat down on the end of the truck, taking a bullet out while Daddy’s friends shoot at some human-shaped dummy for target practice.
It’s in the church and the preacher says, “Those non-believers say, ‘God is dead,” he says, making a pretend-snarl for the show. “Well, I say that they are the ones who are dead, with their souls withered from God’s love and their pride taking over their hearts and minds.”
You hear murmurs of agreement from your father and mother, but nothing from your little sister. She’s too busy staring at some girl in the third row who’s staring intently at her hands. You stare at the blonde boy next to the inattentive girl, thinking, Piece of shit stays at home while Lori is in the streets and hated him afresh.
You don’t seem to care what the preacher says next about love and forgiveness.
It’s hard to take that seriously when people kill God’s truth on family by betraying their own kin.
Your parents drop you off at the church for the weekly bible study group. Everyone is in their chairs, all in a circle. There’s soda and chips and cookies on the table adjacent. All kinds of bibles are in the many hands, in various degrees of splint spines and torn papers in constant use. Yours, on the other hand, doesn’t have a crinkle. It looks as neat and orderly as though it was freshly bought. There’s a strange pride in that.
And they started to talk.
You don’t even know what they are talking about. It’s like they are talking in a different language.
Looking out at the window and you find the moths slamming their squishy bodies against the glass to be far more interesting.
You are alone in your room, wearing only your bra and panties. All alone in this house, you look at your long mirror before you, the frame covered by little hearts and stars and phrases like “friendship”, “love”, “hope” and you hate it all. The pink covers on your bed and the beloved teddy on the foot of it; the wardrobe filled more with Sunday dresses than anything else; the baby blue curtains; and the cross above your study. Hate it all.
You stare at your reflecting with your boring white bra and your boring white panties. You stare at your breasts and wonder, vainly, if her parents preferred to have them smaller if they had any choice in it. You pull your red hair and wonder if your parents will protest if you dye it black, and whether or not you give a fuck.
Most of all, you wonder why you don’t see the bullets when they are fired from a pistol, like the one you are holding in your hand. You figure, it must be the speed from the bullet, or does the gun do something to the bullet? Is that type of question something like the chicken or the egg?
You never know, even as you raise the gun to your temple. You stare at this new you: a girl in her underwear, staring at her own reflection while holding your Daddy’s pistol to her head. It must have look scary, sad, even pitiful, but all you feel is elation. Elation because this is not the person you see yourself in the mirror every day..The girl with the red hair is not the same, her eyes are the same blue but they look so different, the body looks larger but smaller at the same time.
It’s truth at its finest.
One night, you sneak out of the house with a few friends who finally got smart and decided to do something good for once in their life. You put on your best Sunday dress - a light blue one with small, darker prints of flowers on them - and told your parents that you and your girlfriends are going to the church to work on the pageant.
But instead you are going to a club that only opens after dark.
It never occurred to you then, but it was the last time you been inside that house.
Unwittingly, you left.
[The Hitomi turns on, showing the view of a vampire sleeping, or a dead girl lying with her eyes closed. One of the two, both the same thing.]
This time, Jessica doesn't wake up, despite her little dragon's anxious tugging on a strand of hair, with a worried expression on its face.]