HOME | DD

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The street was small and cramped, with houses and buildings crammed in right alongside one another, too close, their ugly brown sides touching. It was where she grew up - the rusted old truck in the garage was the same one that her mother had left her in once when she was four years old- forgotten as she napped away the afternoon, waking up frightened and alone with sweat soaking her thin yellow blouse. They'd found her eventually, when it was time for dinner, but by then her face was soaked too, with terrified tears, the tears of a little girl who believed she'd been left forever. She was too young to know that she could have just opened the door; instead she was left to wait until her father lumbered out and took her into his arms, running his hand over her head, drenched with sweat, her thin curls clinging to her scalp…he'd been her hero. That truck hadn't run in a long time.
And there was the vacant lot, just three houses down, where the weeds grew and all of the neighborhood children spent summer afternoons, running around and chasing each other, collapsing into happy piles of bodies as the sun sank lower in the sky. And later, when they were too old for that, the vacant lot was where she learned to spit like one of the boys, where she said her first curse word, low and dark in her mouth, like some ancient rite of passage. It was there too that they told her that they could no longer play with her, explaining to her in the language of children, (because that was what they still were, even for all their tough words and their stoic looks) that she would never be allowed to be one of them anymore, because she was a girl, and they were boys. There, among the tall weeds that had been there longer than she or any of the other children, she'd spat in their faces just like they'd taught her, and then she'd cursed at them and just stood there, stoic and pretending not to care until they shrugged and ran off home, to their mothers who would scold them for being late for dinner, swiping viciously at their faces with wet dishtowels to swab the dirt of childhood off of them. After they'd left, of course, hot tears poured down her face, and she ran blindly, shame burning at the very heart of her, shame for crying and shame for not being "one of the boys", and she wouldn't even notice as her bare feet stepped on a broken bottle, wouldn't notice the bloody footsteps until she reached her own front porch, when she started to wipe away the tears.
That was where she grew up, with the crowded houses and the too hot summers, and the broken glass, and the bloody footprints leading right up to her front porch.

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And her childhood was a childhood of feet stumbling over themselves that led, inevitably, to a sense that she was forever stumbling, never able to put her feet on solid ground. Sometimes, it felt like her world was one of those paint-by-number pictures, the kind where, if you weren't careful, the colors all bled together, a sad caricature of what it had been intended to be. Her life was just one big blur - the buttery yellows of the daylight mixing in with the deep, lonely hues of her nights. Of course, there were other colors, the pale peach color of her mother's hands deftly twisting her thick hair into braids every morning before school, the soft, lingering pinks of her father's lips on her forehead every day when he arrived home from work. And then there were darker, deeper, meaner colors; the earthy colors of the gravel she threw at the old man who sat on his front porch in his wheel chair, or the reddish, angry color of her brother's hair between her fists when she pulled it when no one was looking, knowing he wouldn't tell on her. That was the color of power, a fierce orange that was the color of knowing that she could hurt someone just as simply as that, and that was her favorite color.
She needed it. It was what made her feel human, the surge of power, like biting your lip and tasting the blood. Without it, she was nothing, and she would stand at her window and look out at the flat, imperfect night and not know who she was. But when she thought about it, that power, flickering like a little flame in the deep pit of her being, she existed, she was real. It was that orangey color of power that was forever on her mind when she looked out her window and only saw the soul-dampening brown of dead and dying grass, so brittle and dried out that it was hard to believe it was ever alive, hard to believe that there had ever been a time when it didn't just break off and spiral away in the hot, dry winds. She would dream of the orange, at night, when she lay under thin white sheets, her too-big nightgown hanging loosely on her as she tossed and turned only to be stifled by the heat of the summer. She would just lay there with her heart pressed up against her rib cage beating stubbornly, as if just to tell the world that she was still there, that she wasn't gone yet. Or during the day, whenever she walked out onto the dry grass and felt the brittle blades snap under her bare feet, leaving the taste of captivity in her mouth. Those were the times when she longed for the power, every fiber of her being pulled taunt towards it.
But then she would wake up, the harsh morning shining too brightly on her and she would remember that she was reaching for something that she would never reach, and she would go back to pulling her brother's hair, to throwing gravel at the old man in the wheel chair who sat on his front porch not bothering anyone but her and her anger. She would wander down the cracked streets of her childhood home, and she'd kick her feet at the cracks – the imperfections – with bare feet that caught on the cracks and scraped and she would watch the bits of grass float away on the wind as it blew past her in all of her unhappiness.

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Later, the pale daylight blew past her as she wasted away her life standing in the doorway of her kitchen, just behind a screen door that, to her, served as a barrier of protection from the rest of the world, as if standing behind that thin layer of mesh would protect her from what the world had to offer, what the world was. She could feel the grit of dirt under her feet, bare as always, as she stood there, unmoving but for the wisps of hair that caught and fluttered in the breezes of the dying daylight. She'd watch the rest of the world go by, living out their lives as simply as that.
There was a housewife, sweeping the dirt off the stoop everyday even though she knew that it would just come back to settle again during the night. Or there was a young boy, maybe five, with a little rubber ball, yellow, like his own personal orb of sunlight, and someday that ball would pop and all the air would leave it and maybe the little boy would cry, or maybe he wouldn't.
She watched all of these things happen everyday, like scenes from a silent movie, the actions carried out without a word spoken. She would have stood there and watched everyday, but then her father started coming home and he smelled like beer and cigarettes that he held between his thick fingers long after they needed to be stamped out, and her mother started coming home and she looked like exhaustion, her hair hanging limply around her face and her clothes droopy, wrinkled. And the girl couldn't just stand there anymore, because the weight of her own misery was pushing down on her so hard that she could barely breathe.
So she went out into the world and created more misery for someone else, just so that she was not alone in her loneliness, not alone in her anger and her denial and not alone in the aching feeling inside of her.
She no longer threw gravel at the old man who sat on his porch because he no longer sat on his porch. He'd died years ago, all of the painful memories that had hidden deep inside him finally becoming too much and snuffing out the life that was barely there in the first place. She no longer pulled her brother's hair because now her brother carried a switchblade and he gritted his teeth and he talked tough and he wouldn't even look at her. She just wandered the streets of her neighborhood with her barely suppressed rage sitting there, on her shoulder, its little sharp claws digging too deep into her shoulders.
Then one day, it got up and it flew away. It flew away and for just a moment she was free, with a sort of unfiltered joy pouring into her and filling her up so that she could barely see through it. But then it came back, her rage, and it carried with it a metal pipe, the kind that you found on the sides of the roads in her neighborhood, with the rust that flecked off in your hands and the evil intentions nestled right there inside of it. She picked the metal pipe up off of the ground and her rage settled back onto her shoulders with a satisfied rubbing of its too sharp claws as she turned the pipe over and over, little orange flecks rubbing off on her hands. Orange. Like power. Orange that flooded her vision, along with those little snippets, those scenes from her own silent movie, the ones of her father, with day old stubble littered across his cheeks and cigarettes in his fat fingers, and her mother, shoulders bent forward so that she was almost falling in on herself, and her, the girl, standing there at her window and there at the screen door, watching the world, and watching the boys leave her there at the vacant lot and seeing the bloody footprints, her bloody footprints.
She bit her cheek hard and tried to stop herself but she didn't really want to. And before she knew she'd done it, it was over, and the pipe clattered down, down, clanging against the pitted concrete. Glass littered the ground and there was blood in her mouth and blood on her hands, right there, next to the orange flecks, orange like power.