Disclaimer: I don't condone the actions of the characters. The story is Very Heavy. It isn't suitable for children or people who are easily disturbed, hence the highest rating. This work is like a self-callout post to me, mixing my fears with fiction, straight-up lies and what was really happening, but isn't most of the fiction like that?
A girl looks in the mirror. She sees the changes that happen in her body. She likes only one of them but hopes it would stop soon. She changes her attire from skirts and sundresses to over-sized hoodies, flannels and pants. She craves maturity without being adult.
A girl rides a bike in the forest and she isn’t alone, there are so many wonderful people in her head. A werewolf in shimmery blue cloak that promised to protect her. A white ermine that is a partner for when she needed to play a game with someone. An extremely sporty red-haired lady. An old woman who taught her how to plait hair from more than four strands at a time and was like mother. Triplets, one acting, one singing, one writing prose, a disheveled astronomer with short, curly hair and a cute vampire girl that she likes to play with.
She breaks her arm and she feels so alone again. She doesn’t feel a lot of pain but now the friends other than the ermine and the werewolf have forgotten about her. She can’t ride a bike for a year. She forgets the fleeting visages of the friends’ faces.
Girl’s voice drops a little. Just an effect of becoming more mature. It makes her happy. She wants to be taller and stronger. Faster. She wants to endure more. She doesn’t have friends other than those in books and two others still living in her head. She discovers the word „androgynous” and decides that’s who she wants to be, what would have made her happy.
Girl stops developing. She looks in the mirror, takes off her three layers on the top, uncovering the change she wants to turn back but she can’t. Bones don’t shrink and while tiger stripes at the chest are a bit of a hassle, they are as permanent as the stress-caused constellations on her back and pale spots on her forearms that were once pink scars and before that scabs, and before that – self-inflicted wounds. She wants to burn the tissue with tiger stripes to the bone, no matter the pain, but stops herself for a while. Adults would have talked about it as mutilation, something bad. Is what she has craved for that scary, that even adults don't understand? She really wanted to stop the “mutilation” as adults talked about it. Her flowing blood is something shameful too. It was unmentionable, and if something doesn’t have a name, it doesn’t exist, right? She wants to become nameless.
She takes her hair out of a tight ponytail. It falls down, covering the shameful part with five stripes on each side. It doesn’t really feel like hers but it’s the body she was born in. She doesn't have "men's parts", she is seen as a woman, she has female voice, she dresses pretty feminine, she has long hair, she has wider hips than men do and the awful part with tiger stripes that is the most female thing there can be. She must be a woman or she will disappoint her family and friends.
The girl researches minds. She stops only to sleep, and even then she isn’t restful and she walks in the worlds created by her own brain as easily as in outer world. She is intrigued by mind control. She is intrigued by altered states of consciousness and planting memories, and amnesia, and introducing disturbingly great happiness where there was not. Where lies the line with “too happy”?
She discovers stoicism and cynicism and realizes it isn’t for her. She looks into the sky and into her own mind and she is filled with dread. She notices that some things, when tested on her own, do not work in the slightest, and others have to be stopped soon because she feels just a little bit too good and that is bad. Pleasure is a bad thing because it takes the focus off the thing that is necessary or from almost nonexistent faith. This type of pleasure is also unnecessary because she cannot imagine herself sharing it with anybody and that was selfish. The ermine confirms. It is awfully selfish and she should be ashamed.
The girl is dragged into competitions while she would rather become another person for a moment on stage. The wild irony gets back at her when a month later a workshop takes place and she has to dress up as an animal and the “mask has to help her show who she really is”. A hokey trick. It causes her to lock down more, her friends the only people she talks with about problems. She apologizes too much, is too quiet and too nice.
Parents send her to therapy. She learns to fake happiness so convincingly, her parents stop sending her there half a year later. She is still calling herself “fat and ugly” sometimes to her mother to show she is indeed, like other girls and there’s no need to worry.
The girl changes who she is around and immediately notices another girl that is broken in a similar way she is. She tells her that they’re awfully similar, she doesn’t believe her. A girl begins to fall in love, one step at a time.
The girl in glasses is smart but weaker. She bleeds a lot from her nose and is pale. She has messed-up family relationships too. Not so much that it would need a deescalation from outside, but still unhealthy. The girl wants to help her so much it hurt her, but doesn't realize the ermine has the same relationship with her. Demanding far too much. Guilt-tripping.
The girl notices that she is falling in love with her in October and questions her whole existence. She tells herself that the pretty girl with glasses might be straight but still tells her she has fallen head over heels. She is rejected but still promises to protect her from harm.
She buys herself a knife. A switchblade, to be exact. It’s sharp and she uses it to her advantage. There is still a pinkish scar from where the curiosity took over. She hates the feeling of metal on her skin and she wants to avoid it but the pain and the anticipation of the red droplets feel good and even the ermine is satisfied, even though it has white fur that it doesn't want to stain in any way and is completely innocent. The guard-werewolf notices how bad that is and tries to swat it out of her hand, but as with constellations on her back and small pinkish scars on her forearms, he is unsuccessful.
She takes the knife to the bathroom with her and, looking at one of the changes, decides to remove it from her body and drink every drop of blood, that sweet and savory liquor that gets spilled while doing that. She doesn’t succeed but at least she doesn’t feel the odd craving for something she has always felt.
She washes the rest of the blood diligently, the thin, delicate wounds stinging lightly when in contact with water. She stops bleeding, her blood is too thick for her own health but at least wounds close quickly.
She parts with friends who think they are more adult than they were and immediately falls into despair.
The girl contemplates masculinity. She doesn’t have the outside parts for that that would be easier to reach. She drops the idea quickly because becoming a man makes her uncomfortable. The androgyny still calls her but she decides to look as female as she can. It hurts her until she can’t take it anymore.
She is taken to the psychiatrist against her will, like a puppet after family notices something wrong happens. She has only said she thinks about death. She indeed does but more from a biological and consciousness standpoint.
She is given awful medicine that makes her sleep “better” and another one that she lies about the success of. She feels even worse after the one that makes her sleep in the day and contemplates taking all of it at once because maybe the dose is too low and that's why it doesn't work properly. She tells her mother about the awful feeling when she takes it and the sleepiness.
The mother shrugs it off and says that she needs to take it only three days more to make sure it's the medicine.
And then are another three days. And another, and another, until a month passes and she goes to the psychiatrist again. She tells everything is okay other than the fact she feels wrong with her body. She gets yelled at by her mother and gets another prescription.
She feels as if the ermine was gnawing at her bones in her sleep. She shuts it out. She shuts everything out. She is no longer protected by the werewolf and is on her own. Was it even real? They aren't real, they are figments of her imagination that seemed as if they gained a life on their own.
She saw the Cartesius's thought written somewhere "Cogito ergo sum". If thinking equals being, the werewolf couldn't have been alive. It is nonexistent. But whose blue velvet cloak is she wearing when she visits her dreams? She buys a notebook and makes writing in it about her research and school her everyday ritual. She thinks of a code but she doesn't implement one. She hides this notebook under her bed. In a month, one hundred and twenty pages are filled with chicken scrawl and knowledge. Of world, of what happens nearby, and, most importantly, of herself.
She lets the werewolf in again because she feels lonely. He hugs her and makes her promise she wouldn't leave him again. She says she can't promise anything and proceeds to interrogate him.
He has some of the memories she forgot she has. She feels odd with that knowledge and asks him where he came from. He doesn't know. He knows he wasn't there before she was in primary school. He knows he was already during the regular bike trips to the forest.
She asks him again, this time about ermine. He doesn’t know anything about it past their bickering and fights over who was to help her. He tells her about what he felt when she shut him out because that wasn't a simple dormancy of all of the people she met in the forest. That was something that she couldn't comprehend, just as people usually are unable to understand nothing.
She cries herself to sleep that night and sleeps in without taking the awful medicine, and for the first time in two months, sleeps peacefully.
Maybe even too peacefully.
Her mother comes into her room at eleven thinking she harmed herself in some way. She didn’t but her mother is still suspicious of her and yells at her to just clean her room.
When one day she tells her mother that she may like girls, a sudden realization, a truth of the moment, her mother says it’s disgusting, just a phase and that she would never be in a relationship with another woman, so she deems it unthinkable. The girl closes the door behind herself and tries to believe in being able to love a man.
After some time a mask becomes natural. Boys give her flowers, she paints her face delicately, like they like and avoids all sorts of unthinkable things. She doesn’t stop her research though, as if the notebooks are a stable connection with her past. Her mother notices notebooks but thinks they are just journals and not the thing she needs to see through.
The girl merges one night in a fitful sleep with the werewolf and the ermine, and she feels whole and complete after waking up. A sign of maturity, forgetting about imaginary friends. Maturity that comes at a price of loneliness and the want of finding someone else to bother.
The girl finally becomes legally an adult, yet her heart is still young and merry.
She marries a successful man at twenty-five, just as she ends college, at a recommendation of the closest to perfect guy made by her extended family. She transports all of her notebooks into her new home. She resents her husband but puts up appearances, the greatest act in the theatre of the world. Her husband gets her red roses every week but she thinks violets and white lilac would be better. She doesn’t complain, no man wants to argue about the gifts.
The girl treats her husband like a house-cat, and when a cat brings a dead mouse from the basement, you treat it as a gift, not argue with a cat because it meant well.
She makes him breakfasts and dinners. She doesn’t argue and acts warm but every night she imagines how better would it be if she was the one going to work every day and if she lived alone.
There is a certain kind of intimacy in putting up an act of loving and telling secrets that are the ones that the husband needs to hear, yet it isn’t what she craves for. She writes about her troubles of being basically locked inside at all times and playing a perfect obedient wife and she still researches the mind, but this time, she looks for signs of manipulative behavior in relationships. She still behaves like a good lover.
Her husband begins to come back from work later and later and stops being interested in her in bed, for which she feels grateful because she doesn’t have to fight the repulsion and disgust. One time, she smells a feminine perfume on him and she knows it’s not hers because she doesn’t wear perfume. The delicate composition of wisteria and jasmine, while usually would be perfect in a candle in her room. On the husband it was just wrong. She stays silent but shows fake jealousy that is a mask for disgust.
She notices her husband ordering an at-home STD test. She goes to a gynecologist next day and it turns out, after a test, that she has chlamydia. She doesn’t let her husband into their bedroom for the next two weeks, for his own health.
The girl treats her husband like a house-cat, and when a cat defecates under your bed, even though its litter box is in the next room, you clean up the mess and lock the door so it doesn’t have an option to repeat it.
Her husband says that he’s sorry for treating her badly after the second week but she doesn’t believe him. She puts up a scene, their first “real fight”.
Three days of peace later, her husband decides to come to her and apologize again. She lets him in and asks him if he’s clean. He treats it as her asking him to go and “make love” to her and tells her that he is.
She doesn’t tell anyone about what happens in their bedroom. She is all sore and cold next day. She doesn’t say anything because her mother genuinely thought this man was the best possible one for her and it would make her sad. Even the best of therapy in her childhood didn’t help that instinct of immediately jumping into guilt and blaming herself.
She hears one of the politicians in dreaded by her and loved by her husband TV admit that a woman may enjoy being abused if it’s done right. She gags at the thought and thinks about destroying the giant screen. She stops herself and just moves to a different room, telling that she needs to get some tea. She brings the tea to her husband and leaves to get a notebook. She tells him to buy them in bulk notebooks for her. He asks why. She tells him that she likes to organize her life to be more efficient. He agrees that it’s a good thing and doesn’t mind it. He buys them in bulk to save money on shipping, unknowingly letting her hide the secrets even better.
She begins to notice her husband’s presence a lot more in the house and she feels threatened. Even though the relationship seems to be budding outwardly and her mother is glad they are speaking to each other again, the feeling of being watched in every place doesn’t leave her even for a while. She feels alone with no friends to talk to and at the same time she feels smothered with all of the affection given by the cheater mixed with constant fighting.
One night, he comes home drunk and tries to kiss her while she is in the kitchen, making dinner for them both. He reeks of cigarettes and cheap vodka beginning to be broken down by his liver. She puts up a fight and accidentally cuts him. He yells at her and breaks a plate over her head. A fight and the screams start not the first time in their whole marriage.
But certainly this was the last time he won.
The girl treats her husband like a house-cat, and when a cat pisses somewhere it shouldn’t and marks its territory when there’s no reason to because it’s the only male around, you castrate it.
She runs into the bathroom and tries to call the police, but her phone dies on her right before she can do it. She cusses and stays inside for what feels like eternity. She hears a thud and opens the door.
The drunkard lies on the floor, unconscious. She drags him into the bedroom and takes her nightgown to change into, skipping dinner because of lack of hunger. She also brings her phone charger with her.
When she wakes up, her phone tells her it’s four in the morning. She hides all of the ingredients into the fridge and washes the knife with the drunkard’s blood under hot water.
The girl decides she doesn’t want a man who is like a house-cat. She decides that the next time he will try and get near her with malicious intent, she will repay him for all of the time she was locked inside and for all of the abuse. She decided to fulfill the marriage vow and wanted the death to part them, in one way or another.
She thinks about murder and the thought of killing someone makes her feel sick. She writes a lot about it. Then the day comes. Her husband comes back home early, just in time of making lunch by her. She doesn’t expect him. He puts his big, callous hands on her waist and pulls her close to him. He kisses her neck and she squirms and tries to escape. He finally lets go and she grabs a knife that is near her. She turns around to protect herself.
He taunts her instead of attempting deescalation and she lashes out. The rest is a blur of screams, redness, black and colorful spots dancing before eyes.
She sits on the floor, breathing heavily, tired and hungry. Her hands tremble and she sees a pool of blood. Her phone screen is cracked and destroyed into oblivion, so is his. He lies on the floor, battered, in the pool of ruby redness spilling from him and forming flowers, leaves and rivers on the tiles. She smells the characteristic odor and she feels hunger in her bones.
She counts visible stab wounds.
Six, one in the stomach that he would have lived with if someone intervened, three in his torso, quite sloppy, one right in the femoral artery in left leg that was actually lethal judging by the amount of blood, and the last one one in his hand. The last one was the messiest and that’s where the knife stopped.
She feels the fluttering in her stomach. Motilin doing its proper job at the wrong time. She takes few deep breaths but her heart doesn’t stop.
The girl feels the old craving, from the time she made all of the almost faded, pretty constellations on her back and pale spots on her forearms. She thinks it would look ugly, but his blood even with toxins from cigarettes was quite clean. She takes some blood from the floor in her hand and she drinks it, dirtying her outfit even more. It tastes awful, bitter and sour, but she has no recent comparison to know if it’s really bad or just her tastes changed. She stands up, her head spinning and she runs away to the bathroom to wash her hands. She remembers how she played Lady Macbeth once and she digs through her memory to remember the obsessive washing of hands. In another play, she saw the medical side of Lady’s compulsion. She sneers at the last thing she remembers her say and… “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.”
She feasts on the muscles taken from his legs, prepared as if it was chicken but fried in his own fat. She takes out his liver to bake into pie, but she is hit with the guilt once the exhilaration of trying what is forbidden and savoring the revenge ends. She checks the phones and only one of them is working. She says sorry to her mom, who doesn’t pick her phone up.
She writes a letter and then she laughs until her head spins. She feels exhilarated after those two hellish years being locked up and she feels ready to get another piece of knowledge that was locked before her for all of her life.
She wouldn’t have said she wanted to end her life. She was interested in what’s on the other side and that was the only reason she needed to do what she did.
She gets the rope that has been used to tie her up while the man did what he wanted with her body and makes it into the last restraint put on her in her entire life. She then calls the police, who is always just a little bit too late when it is needed.
Curiosity killed the cat, but there wasn’t enough satisfaction in the world to bring her back.
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