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I wrote this peice of egotistical, uneducated trash.

One Cup Of Stew

November 18th, 2007


The light flickered on and off. Continuously. Everything she felt was so deep, so buried, so hidden that she wondered weakly if she ever even felt at all. She knew things she did and did not like. She liked the darkness, she didn’t like his screaming. She liked being able to hide without the illumination of the pale green hum. They were cheap lights, florescent but gritty, with a thickness she had to wade through when they were on. In the darkness she stopped moving all together, and touched fingers that had been broken and healed multiple times to the spots on her body that she knew to be discoloured in the light.

Everything was always dripping in his apartment. It must have been the cheapest apartment in the city.
The sink dripped filthy water into the drain.
The roof dripped, and relished the rotting floors with rain.
The window let in sludge from the city passed it’s pane.
The chemicals from beaker to beaker dripped all day.
Evenher eye dripped. She stood in the familiar darkness with her finger stuck up her lid. When he punched her earlier that morning, the eye just about popped out, and she could imagine it with disconnected, girlish fascination, swinging off the tendon like a bungee and resting on her cheek. Now, the circumference was coated with black. She could feel pain in her nose and ear, that’s how hard he’d hit her. It was bloodshot and dripping nameless fluids, or nameless to her and her lack of education. It didn’t matter. Her thirteen year old body was fresh and resilient, she healed fast in the darkness. He told her from his hiding place, in a droning, nihilist’s tone, “Lucky. You’re lucky. You’re lucky that I’ve given you a place to sleep and ********.” That was his justification.

She was emotionless. Pain and feeling sort of blended together, and when she unconcentrated, she didn’t notice either. She stood rigid in his apartment, her fast healing body was still built on frailty. Her arms hung forward like an ape’s. He was crashing. First it was the test tubes, and then it was the plates. “There’s nothing to eat.” For a moment he sounded afraid, but one comment erupted into more, with mad direction. “You’re ******** useless.” He whispered. “You’ve spent your days wasting away. Submitting to nothingness in the blackness of our hole. I go outside. I do everything around here.” She bit down hard, clenched on her cheek, feared internally with survivor’s instinct, but displayed nothing. “Do you cook?” An authoritative, angry voice. Forming a reply was like playing chess, except she lost regardless. It was best to forfeit in the most non confrontational way possible.
“I can’t cook.” He threw something across the room which shattered, slowly, into a million beige fragments.
“Learn how to ******** cook.”

Memories seemed timeless to a girl who had grown up that fast. She sniffed and smelled blood, standing in the middle of the miserable apartment. It was another lapse where the lights were off. She didn’t know how long it would last, but didn’t have the energy to pray that it went on for a while. She licked her lips and tasted metal, but knew that it was actually dry blood. They were the cracked plateaus of fading beauty, she aged like she was forty but hadn’t even hit puberty yet. She used to reminisce and live in the memories of her family, back when it first started to get bad, but after a while it didn’t make a difference where her mind went, as she remained in hell regardless.

I think I need to go to a hospital. It didn’t feel like she was shaking, but more like her skin was shaking. It felt like there were a million wiggling, invisible bugs underneath the surface that all vibrated at a hyper frequency. She didn’t need to check their bad-luck broken mirror to know that her pupils were fully dilated. She supposed that she wasn’t entirely useless, like he said, as he seemed to think she made a good test subject for the s**t he made when there were experimental, crack head buyers who didn’t want to pay extra for safe drugs. She didn’t know much about drugs, but she knew when she’d ingested the bad stuff. Her whole body felt like it would die but her mind craved the sweet release of more for days later.

There wasn’t time. Only the vague understanding that she’d been in the same clothes for days. She gripped the thin fabric of her black tank top. It was stained from vomit, which she assumed was hers, but didn’t know at that point. People had been coming and going, but they seemed like mirages in the desert. They were throwing themselves all over each other and her. When they moved her, she didn’t feel like she’d traveled. When they slipped their hands down her pants, she didn’t feel the pleasure. When they put her hand down theirs, and paid him ten dollars, she didn’t feel the revulsion. She didn’t even feel like she had blinked.

She had thought she was desensitized to all the agony he pressed unto her. Or she didn’t even think it, she was in the state of it. But when she found herself in a new darkness, an unfamiliar and cold darkness, fear actually started to become real again. “Wander home with the money when the sun comes up. If I see you before then, you mousy whore, I’ll ******** shoot you in the foot.” It would just be another gunshot in the array of that filthy, city street. No one would even call the cops. In fact, the cops didn’t even bother over there, where the prostitutes scattered like vermin in the light, and the drug addicts slunk into the sewer. She almost wished they did patrol there, juvenile detention had to be more pleasant. A car slowed and a smile appeared like a Cheshire grin from the driver’s side.

She held her hand to her crotch. He fanned himself with the money but still seemed generally displeased. “This isn’t a bad source of income, kiddo.” He said. “We should’ve been doing this sooner.” She put her finger down her old panties and felt the dirtiest kind of blood there. It was diluted with semen. “You seem good at submitting to ecstasy in the rawness of that hole.” She didn’t know how to whimper, but her eyes remembered how to eject tears. She wiped them away in the shadows and felt a word hiss through her veins: Injustice. She’d been raped for money, endlessly that night, and though she tried to shut down, her body seemed hell bent on echoing that pain.

She was kneeling by the bed and biting down on her pinkie finger. She was a girl who had seen more in her small life, but felt less than any other human in the pits. A string of misfortune seemed fitting, and she wasn’t the kind of preteen to wonder, “Why me?” Life just was cruel, sometimes. She didn’t wallow and regret, or compare her past pain to her current. She mostly focused on trying to exist with the least amount of heart put into it. Only, despite her greatest attempts to feel absolutely nothing at all, she found her mind starting to wake in the dark times of the flickering lights. And as he lifted her up by the hair, moaning well strung yet insane sentences, as he’d long gone crazy from his own concoctions, she realised that he was starting to irritate her.

Each time the lights went out, only a fragment of her life was revealed. The opposite of casting light onto a situation. There were hours and days gone to details that were never reformed. That’s how she felt. Not whole with only glimpses of herself that were actually real. She stood in the corner, webbing and knotting her fingers together. He was growing worse, much sicker, and he was going to kill her soon. He’d dump her body in some massive green trashcan and be done with it. He’d find some new young thing off the roads, running away, sweet and vulnerable, to exact his ***** lusts and abuse upon. She’d be forgotten by pretty much everyone who’d ever touched her grimy pores.

“Why don’t you ******** cook?” He growled. He pushed her up against the wall, and the only thing that’d been hanging there fell to the floor. They fell to the misshapen tiles, brown tiles that were loose. “Why don’t you do anything? Why don’t you ******** answer?” She hiccupped as he shook her violently. She almost frowned. He slammed a pot down on the oven, which miraculously still worked despite it’s age. The room rattled once more and he flicked on the stove. “You’re going to make me something right now, aren’t you?” She felt her ribcage clench. Her body told her to wakeup, that she had reason to be afraid again. She nodded slowly and he let her down. “We need to find something you can do right before you start going, my little whore. We need to find something you can do to make up for all the space I’ve wasted on you here. I know that you want to please me before you die.” The lights were about to come on, there was a tinkering sound in the back wiring. She scuttled over to the burner and gripped the handle. He was looking with eyes that were unfocused, glazed and rotten. She gripped it tight and remembered one little detail from her life before: swinging hard in grade four baseball.

She lifted the spoon up to her delicate and cracked lips. Her head stayed still in the darkness before the green light began buzzing, and came on. She didn’t mind the light that time, and despite it’s relative gloom from low watts, she liked the scene it cast light to. She tilted the plastic and let the liquid flow into her mouth. It didn’t taste bad, and she swallowed, automaton, and felt a warmth that she’d never had before. The lips that were more scab than stretched flesh curled upward, mimicking what a smile was as she wondered if the emotion that seemed dully ignited in her was joy. With her starvation rumbling in her beaten soul, there was something about the stew she’d made that was so satisfying. She looked back to the grill, which smelled like burnt hair and glowed red, faintly. There was still skin on it from where she’d pressed his face down. Her pink tongue protruded to drag along the tool. Freedom, elation, joy. It was the best stew she’d ever tasted. If only she had someone to enjoy it with.