TW: mentions of sexual assault

Opening the door, coming home, to who? The answer is apparent. It wraps around me as I step in, as I swing the bag off my shoulder and let it crumple at my feet, as I sit at my desk, not bothering to chuck off my boots. I place my elbows on the desk, pushing the heels of my palms into the sockets of my eyes and letting the cold sink into my head. Tangles of thoughts unravel, endless threads of questions and answers falling away from me, no longer saving me from myself.

In the heavy darkness beneath my hands, colors bloom around me, growing and shrinking, not knowing how much space to take up or what form to take on. Oranges and blues and browns waft in the gloom, my only company as I sink into black nothing. I draw my hands away, push my fingers into my scalp as light starts to prod back in, sunlight unwantedly infiltrating a thick forest, finding me, left there, deep within.

A girl is sitting in the backseat with her backpack set beside her. In the front pocket, in a little red pouch, she keeps four dollars, given to her on account of her four missing teeth. 

I realize I forgot to turn the lights off when I left that morning. This depresses me, forgetting to turn off the lights. No one to tell me to remember next time, no one to tell me not to waste electricity. The mistake curls into itself, a scrap of plastic shriveling near a flame. Nowhere to go, no one to see.

Her mom is putting on the blinkers, turning the wheel, winding them off the gravel road. The girl fidgets with her leggings, brown with orange and blue polka dots. She remembers his hands over top of the fabric.

I am sitting at my desk, staring at the wood. There is a loud secret hunched in the corner of the room, murmuring and shaking.

Her mom says something, looking at her through the rearview mirror. Are you okay, my angel? Angel angel angel. She repeats the word in her head. A cacophony of wings and feathers and bright light. Angel angel angel. The word usually calms her–like tea with milk and honey–but now it makes her throat dry. She crosses her legs. Words clamber around in her head, letters swirling together and apart, losing order and meaning until they assemble again and change everything. 

He touched me.

Little angel girl spun into the web. As her legs splay open, chains of thoughts break down in her head. She is frozen. She lets him touch her. She feels pleasure. Little insect drained of all color, her body sagging and bleeding across an infinite web of white, locked in the hold of his clammy fingers. Inside the web with no one, no one, no one to blame but herself. 

“I am safe, I am okay,” I whisper into the room, laying the words at the feet of that dark secret, that shaking girl in the corner. The words rest between us, I hope, like a rope of reconciliation. She never takes hold, however. The line severs. Nobody knows, nobody holds you, little girl.

She says she is fine, just tired. Her mom looks away. The girl wonders if there is something wrong with her. She swallows down the taste of pleasure, the confused silence, the anger toward her parents. Where were they?

I wish the lights were off. I remove my hands from my head and tendrils of hair drift to the ground. The light in the room keeps the girl in the corner, always at the walls, but she flickers when I look. I want to grab her, shake her by the shoulders, wring her of his hands, throw her under the sun, let it flay her body. I want her to flake apart, to turn to dust, to go away.

She never said the words, “Go away.” She practices them now, rolls them around in her mouth. Such easy words, she thinks. They twist around and sink down into her belly, stones that do not skip, tumbling to the bottom of a lake. 

The little girl is pinned to the basin of my body. The faint flapping of wings, banging against his web, his sticky fingers, the pinpoint focus, stuck stuck stuck.

Bella Capezio is a writer and junior editor for the Nassau Weekly.