Baby girl got a nasty wakeup call from the world last night. Her nightmares consisted of scratched swing sets and flying saucers, of being kidnapped and broken fire extinguishers and existing elsewhere.
The boyfriend went from screaming that she was a slut to beating her face into the bedside table with his iron hand every night. But she was a silent sufferer and she still went to work with her hair pinned up in a bun, all the same.
Sometimes though, there were sunny autumnal days that brought back the sweetness of a former life. This was years ago, when cell phones were not permanently fused to palms and working hard was a bigger necessity than outward appearances. She was never the type to fall starstruck into a realm of plastic splendor, but she secretly enjoyed how the city lights were laced across the skyline and the hushed whirling of film inside cameras.
He killed that for her, though. He smashed her inner brightness down with an aluminum bat and asphyxiated her irises into murky purple smoke. The moon fell down in the east and Jupiter exploded somewhere near northern Africa, yet Baby Girl kept her lips sewn shut with barbed wire and shoved needle points up her spine to numb the stinging feeling of noteverbeingenoughtomakehimsmile.
One day, she got sick of being the rotting sugar on somebody else’s yellow teeth. She grew tired of sleeping on the tattered couch and staring helplessly at her scarred fingers from when he put an iron to her snow-white skin.
One day, Baby Girl walked out of that godforsaken house and went directly to a good friend, someone she knew would help her.
After countless moments of gleeful torture, he is finally in jail. She is now permanently in a wheelchair. Sometimes, I can catch glimpses of her gnarled fingertips or the vines crisscrossed around her corneas. But she is a silent sufferer and she still goes to work with her hair pinned up in a bun, all the same.
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