Her Next Summer
I remember meeting Penny for the first time, how could I forget that head of fiery red hair. We were so young, she isn’t the quirky, creative little girl I knew and protected. Instead of expressing herself on paper she now uses her body as the canvas. Perhaps she is still fighting the demons that followed her when we were young, so young. Her copper penny necklace catches the sunlight off the football blenchers and I am reminded of that first day.
‘So weird.’ I said as my brothers and I spied at her from our hideout. My brothers paid no mind, but kept on at their game of ‘cowboys and Indians.’
‘Ace? You coming?’ they shout as they chase my sisters, who are dressed as the Indians. They never wait for an answer. I am walking towards the green jumper not knowing what I am about to say, but I must know this girl.
She doesn’t look up from the sidewalk on which she sits, left hand cupping tarnished pennies and the other holding white sidewalk chalk. She is laying each penny down on the cracked sidewalk and drawing a very fine circle around each penny. Pointless to any onlooker, but behind her glazed eyes reads something of importance. She doesn’t even look up as I approach, as if she is the only child on this street.
‘Hi.’ My voice is cheery in the quiet of the street. Her body goes rigid, as if I have sent lightening through her frail body. I sit on the browning grass as she continues drawing the even circles around her pennies. Looking closer I notice something is off, fading green bruised patches on her pink skin, small bones hardly covered by her stretched skin as if her skin is too small for her body, her tummy is grumbling, her lips parched. Mama always said she had suspicions about Penny’s mother, Chesi Copper Silver. Claimed she abused her position as a mother and Penny was the one to suffer, I wouldn’t find out till later what actually went on in that madhouse.
‘Penelope…. Penelope Calliope Silver.’ Her voice is small, barely an audible whisper. ‘Penelope Calliope Silver,’ she said again this time in an eerie tune of music.
‘That’s my name.’
She went back to drawing her circles.
‘My name is Ace. Ace Fletcher’ I say, I can see her pale, puffy baby lips mouthing the words over and over, as if tasting my name upon her tongue as children do with rare sweets. The breeze blew between our spirals of silence, not awkward or strange, just nice. Everything would have ended in that simple meeting if it had ended with that silence I probably would have walked away.
Screams, high pitched screaming coming from the house. Her father had left for work, I had seen him leave that morning, Penny crumpled upon the ground, small hands scattering the pennies and cupping her ears trying to block out the echo of her mother’s yelling. Her lips muttering the same thing over and over again, ‘Penelope Calliope Silver.’ Saying her name in some kind of mantra to stop the yelling.
I couldn’t just leave her, she needed a protector and at the age of six I knew that Penny needed protection from herself and the confines of her family. Thus would birth a friendship.
Penny’s Shade of Blue
I only know of the color blue, something that must be feared. I don’t remember being any different. The color was everywhere, pouring into my mouth, ears, nose, and eyes. It bleeds from the eyes of those that witnessed the brutality and did nothing to save me. They watched as the world faded into the deepest of blue.
The lady that tucked me in at night and sang the oldest of country songs when making breakfast, mother was what she was called. She tightened my seatbelt and ignored my cries that she once calmed when I cried out for her in the night. She stayed so calm, muttering under her breath as blue drowned the car, and she went with undying faith as the nose of the car sunk beneath the waves. I have always been this way purging the bleeding of blue.
It’s wrong, they have the wrong story…it is all I have ever known so it can’t be wrong. The ‘droids’ tell me otherwise. Daddy touched me and Mommy tried to take my life. But, they don’t have the whole story, that’s not how it happened. They don’t know how strange Mommy was. She yelled at people she couldn’t see and threw things at Daddy. I ended up in places I shouldn’t have been. Daddy would find me neglected and hungry in a deserted room of some eggshell motel, locked in the closet. My family wasn’t ever broken, just different, but once she disappeared from the picture my family was better. Just Daddy and I…He mended my hurting and I healed his.
They…the ‘droids’ don’t know the whole story, none of it should be wrong.
A few years later, Penny still sits on the sidewalk drawing the even circles around tarnished pennies found under the couch, pockets of jeans, and on the sticky floor of the car covered in a film of coke. It’s been two years since the day of the accident. Since they pulled her unconscious body from the frigid water. The image is still burned into the back of my brain; I still dream it when I sleep at night. Penny is different, no changed since that day. She doesn’t engage in the outside anymore she hardly comes outside and I worry.
Penelope C. Silver: age 8
Daddy used to sing me a lullaby to coax away the nightmares that would drown my mind from waking. Daddy made the small music box that played the sweet tune as Daddy would sing with the husk for his voice.
‘ Indigo girl wrapped in silk
Red ribbons soaking through the milk
Calling…calling
For opaque boy
Laying coldly in his bed
Dancing…dancing
Both hold hands
Across the meadow to dead men’s land
Round and round they dance
Holding hands on their last chance.’
I don’t understand they eerie, beautiful lyrics that have some outspoken meaning, but it plays on my nightstand as Daddy sings. Over and over it plays harboring the demons of my night. Daddy can hear me calling, as the sweet tune doesn’t help. Daddy cradles me in his arms rocking back and forth; his hands are warm as they run over my body- holding some magic power that sucks the images out of my skin
Present Day: Penelope
The old professor with the mugged nose and thinning mustache groans on and on about dead ‘droids’ that preserved a so-called government that still works today. I don’t pay much attention, even with Ace watching me across the row, as if I needed watching. I’m not five anymore I don’t need protection. I twirl my curly red hair between my black sparkled nail polished fingers. The turquoise steaks are fading from the curls, time for another color. I look across the next row, dark hair and coal holes where eyes should be, nothing but black.
Black is better, black eyes go cold and dead when the life is sucked forcibly from the ‘droid’s’ body. Just as the human body goes dead so do dark eyes, dark eyes don’t hold the light of life. Blue eyes are the worst, so is green. Even when I sketch I can never do colored eyes. Colored eyes hold on to the light when one’s heart stops beating, I would no better than anyone. I still remember how she looked, how cold her body was and how her eyes kept staring, catching the light and holding on to life…my life. She still haunts me, Daddy likes to think I am better and so does Ace, but they don’t know what I see at night and how she calls to me even when I am awake.
The boy across the row, nods and smiles showing his pierced tongue and nose ring, not really my type of bad boy, but I am also eager to learn. I mean that is the only thing people are good for these days, providing me with in- depth experience to accomplish my needs. Anything to help me cope and escape the ghost of my mother, if you can even call her that. Whether it be sex, drugs, more sex, or physically thrilling rushes, anything to escape. A girl can only do so much.
“It’s a wonderful thing to hurt a human being, something that lives.”
A line from the Window of Arles, I only read that line once a very long time from my past. The Lady would read me the greatest of American poetry just before bed. She loved the meanings and symbols of the classics. Window of Arles intrigued her, she said she understood Van Gogh. “A brilliant man drunken into insanity,” is what she always said after reading. She quoted the poem several times through out my childhood that “It is a wonderful thing to hurt a human being, something that lives.” I wouldn’t know the meaning of this until years later. Is this what Mommy, felt all the time and is this what she was doing to me all those years?
Mom hurt me in some abstract twisted way. Doing things so often I didn’t know what hurt was anymore. Perhaps she was even more like van Gogh than what I originally knew growing up. Did she get some sort of rush starving me and hurting me? Did she experience euphoria when at times it seemed like she was crazy lady rather than my mother. Was she trapped within her obsession and obsession that would over the course of years haunt me? Did she know all of it was it all a game?
I snap back to the lecture as soon as the bell rings, the boy is still at his desk listening to his heavy metal music. I approach him holding a sticky note that I had doodled on and also written my number in hopes he would escort me to the party this evening.
“ Party tonight, we are going.” Is all I say, he takes the paper, his coal black eyes staring deep into mine. His teeth are yellow, but his smile is mysterious.
“ Impress me, I’ll be there at 8.” His hand brushes my hair back from my face and brushes my exposed collarbone; Ace’s face of disgust lets me know that I have accomplished my goal by providing me with fun and just making him mad. Perhaps this change in type will provide a thrill, one that will leave my ghosts in the afterlife.
After school I spend the afternoon smoking a joint and avoiding Dad. I lean against the old wooden fence that encloses our pasture; the horses are grazing in the diming afternoon sunlight. My head is spinning with every breath of smoky arsenic and nail polish remover I inhale through my lungs. It’s a good kind of spinning, because at least for the first time in a long time I can actually feel the pounding in my head and the burning in my chest. Pain, a thrill I haven’t experienced in a long time, its nice.
Walking back to the house I can hear the sounds of blue jays intermixed with the sound of the football game on the television, it definitely felt like and was home. Opening the holey screen door I quietly close it behind me, not wanting to interrupt Dad and his friends argument over the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles. Beer reeked upon every exhale and it filled the room. I silently climb the wooden floors safely up another set of winding stairs to my loft of a bedroom. The simple white room reveals nothing about me as a person. No posters, no pictures of Mom, no childhood memoirs scattered upon my desk. A white wall to match my white desk and chair, the only color is the faded yellow of my bedspread and blanket. Every line is clean and simple which I suppose is what I want my life to be, but isn’t. My closest is really where I express myself. Opening the door reveals hard and edgy intermixed with soft and classic. I like having the combination of every phase in my life I encounter.
Tonight I will have to dress to impress my current prey. I immediately grab my dark gray fishnet leggings and my deep cut little black dress. Perfect. I smoky eye my lids and add a neutral lip, hair in loose curls. If looks could kill, as cliché as it was, my whole household would be rotting corpses. Looking at the clock I only have minutes until Skye comes and picks me up, adding my black boots and my sleek motorcycle leather jacket I scamper down the stairs.
Dad hearing my fast footsteps, staggers into the hallway, his drunken eyes looking me up and down as best as he can. He holds a half empty Corona bottle in his left hand, using his right to balance against the doorframe.
‘ You gonna be back…late?’ He asks, his lips struggling to form the simplest of sentences. I stare at him seductively, smiling with my eyes, the way he likes it best.
‘ I’ll be back before sunrise. Don’t wait up.’ I sweep my pale hand across my curled hair, making my hair bounce in the darkness of the hallway. Dad nods his head and stumbles back to the football game. I smile and leave my house, walking down the steps toward the driveway. I keep walking not looking back, afraid of what will meet me if I do look back. I meet the road at the end of the lane and wait.
The mountains are black and still, to any other person it would be frightening but it’s not for me, I have grown up in the mountains. The sound of Skye’s motorcycle disrupts the eerie humming of the woods and I find myself falling back.
The car is sputtering, the exhaust pipe spitting the last reminisce of oil caught in its throat. Puff the Magic Dragon played over and over again on the cassette tape she had put in, as if knowing it would be the only thing that kept me calm whenever I was in the car.
‘ Puff the magic dragon lived by the sea.’ I sang positioned in my booster seat, my hands clapping at the sound of my favorite song. She sat up front caressing the yellow scented tree from the window, her lips muttering something I can’t remember. Song lyrics perhaps or Daddy’s name, voices that I don’t hear? She starts the car and drives, picking up speed. Going fast frightened me; Mommy only went fast when the voices would get louder, I start to cry. She doesn’t even look back her eyes never wavering from the road, I cry louder and louder the music skipping as the car accelerates. I pull at my seat beat, the button is stuck, and my baby fingers are too weak to push anymore.
Over the bridge that provides safety for those avoiding the blue, it provides no safety as the car crashes over the wooden railing. I don’t even scream, the people standing by watch in horror. The nose of the car dives, the impact chokes the seat belt around my middle, mimicking the tight squeeze of the garden snake earlier that day that choked the life out of the field mouse. I am scared; she looks so content with her eyes closed and mouth open in a finally happy smile.
Windows, shatter…. seat belt gagging my scream. Blue flooding the car, soaking my jeans and sweater. I fight, I scream. I choke in the blue, into my lungs and through the strands of my hair. Tears intermix with the water. Still she sits the water up to her face, she inhales, her body spasms out of control. My fingers are cold so are my toes. The water, the blue air is disappearing as the blue water spews out of my ears, nose, mouth, and eyes, I hit the window. All goes black.
‘ Penn? Penny?’ I snap back. I inhale breaking the surface and finding air. Skye sits on his bike, holding out his red helmet. He doesn’t even look concerned.
‘ Yeah, sorry lets just go.’ I say. I push the helmet way, his eyebrows raise in suspicion.
‘Don’t like the closed space.’
‘Ok? Hop on we don’t want to be late.’ He slides his ripped jeans over the bike and I follow, my dress sliding seductively up my thigh, his eyes stare and his lips toy with his pierced tongue. It wasn’t going to be hard to persuade this ‘droid’ tonight to get what I want. I have that affect on people. Tonight he was in for more than he could chew and he had no idea…
To be continued Part 2
