If I Am a Bird, Then You Are My Wings. A Pity We’re Both Broken.

Content Warning: Contains themes of domestic abuse, sexual abuse, illness, and murder. Please proceed with caution.

I loved poetry.

I loved the way it flowed, the way the timing and prose could change the story behind the words. I loved poetry that rhymed and poetry that didn’t. I wasn’t any good at writing it, though.

“How’s the latest poem going, Sunshine?”

My pencil squeaked forlornly over the my journal paper as I turned to look up at my mom with a grimace. She leaned against the door frame with her arms crossed and a smile that always made me feel safe and warm. Mom always called me Sunshine, but she always felt like the sun to me. Her curly blond hair that I had inherited was tied back at the nape of her neck, framing her pretty face like an angelic halo. She was beautiful and bright like a sunrise.

“Terribly!” I groaned as I held up my journal and flapped it in the air between us. “I rhymed ‘us” with ‘musk’! What even is that?!”

Mom laughed, drawing a reluctant grin from me like her laughter always did. “That’s not that bad. It could probably be worse.”

My grin dropped into a grumpy scowl and I dropped my journal onto my worn and paint-chipped desk where it thumped and flipped closed. It didn’t want me to write anymore poetry, either.

“I should just give up on the whole thing.”

Mom’s smile flickered and her eyes, the color of a summer sky, moved back to my journal. “Don’t quit, baby. Never give up on your dreams.”

Never give up on your dreams. She had been telling me that my whole life. When I looked around at my small room with the cracked plaster and the water-stained ceiling, at the holes in the walls of the living room, the shattered mirror in the tiny, dingy bathroom, I wondered when she had given up on her dreams. I wondered if I already had.

“When does he get home?” The air settled around my small, scared words.

Mom stiffened and straightened, her head turning slowly to look into the darkened hallway behind her. She pulled in a shaky breath and stepped further into my room, shutting the door behind her. I almost smiled at that. We both knew that doors were no deterrent to the monster we lived with. After all, it had done nothing to keep him away from me and had done less than nothing to keep him away from Mom. We both hid our bruises and pretended we weren’t broken inside.

“It should be late. He got paid today so he’ll be at the bar tonight.”

When I didn’t say anything, Mom reached out and lovingly brushed her hand over my cheek. “How about some lemon pound cake? We can have some sweet tea with it and watch some trashy daytime TV?”

There was a spark in my chest that felt like resentment. I looked out of my bedroom window and watched trees sway in the wind, watched birds take flight and soar into the sky. I wished I was one of them, that Mom was, too. We could leave and never come back. We could be free, instead of burying our misery in lemon pound cake and sweet tea.

“If I left, would you come with me?”

Mom’s hand dropped like I had taken a nip at her fingers. When I turned back to look at her, her face was frozen in fear. Fear that I would leave? Fear that one day he would hurt one of us beyond anything empty smiles and pound cake could fix? I didn’t know, but that fear swallowed Mom whole and would never set her free, and she would never set me free. It wasn’t her choice to keep me trapped, it was my love for her that kept me trapped.

“Never mind,” I said easily as I stood from my desk. “Lemon pound cake and trashy TV sounds great.”

“Only bleeding stumps remain where you used to be. I’ll never touch the sky again.”

She left me.

The empty husk laying cold and pale in front of me wasn’t my mom. It was a cruel facsimile of someone I had reached for at my weakest, even though she was weaker than me. The high neck of the cream sweater the funeral home had dressed her in might have hidden the necklace of bruises around her throat, but I knew they were there. I knew they were an exact copy of his fingerprints pressed against her windpipe hard enough to crush the tiny bones within. The makeup on her face did nothing to conceal the hollows of Mom’s cheeks or the bruises under her sunken eyes. What he hadn’t bled away from her, cancer had.

He stood at my side, cold and unfeeling, stinking of liquor and something pungent. Maybe it was the rot inside of him bleeding through his pores. My thighs and the space between throbbed painfully with the memory of his forceful body that had shoved itself there the eve of his wife’s funeral. Acid still burned in my throat and churned in my belly, likely the result of the three birth control pills I had swallowed in a small act of defiance. If it ruined me for anyone else, that was okay. I was already ruined. He had made sure of that.

My clothes felt itchy and too small for my body. I wanted to tear them off of me. I wanted to tear my skin off and keep tearing until I was completely unmade, until I didn’t exist anymore. I felt far removed already, like I was standing apart and watching a small, sad girl stare down at her mom’s dead body without shedding a single tear. The tears wouldn’t help. He hated it when I cried.

“Let’s go home.”

My mind echoed with screams as his hand closed around my wrist and squeezed, but I didn’t make a sound. My home laid dead in front of me. The only thing that awaited me was hell.

“If I cannot fly, I will become something that crawls and devours. My small polished beak will become teeth that tear and sunder.”

Someone was screaming and I thought it was me, but I wasn’t sure. My ears rang with sound and my whole body ached and cramped. Something wet and sticky was coating me, chilling my naked, trembling body as I hunched into myself. There was a brief and brilliant burst of pain that sparkled in the dead meat of my brain and I blinked down blearily in dim surprise. My hand was clenched around a knife and, when I had drawn my arms into my body, the blade had scraped into my bare thigh, slicing it open. I couldn’t tell if I was bleeding, though. There was already so much blood.

I was stained with it like gruesome war paint. Underneath me was the conquest of my battle- a body of red ruin that I barely recognized. My eyes slid sideways and the screaming stopped, cut off so abruptly that the silence was eerie. In the distance, I could hear the sound of sirens rising and falling but it was meaningless to me. Maybe, finally, they would do their damn jobs.

Falling backwards off of his body, I croaked with laughter as pink tears slid into my hair and joined the slippery pool of blood I reclined into. Blood to blood. Protectors that always came too late and cared too little, until I decided to wound first and draw the blood that was owed to me.