. . . . sometimes it hurts
Chapter 1
Simone was beautiful.
The water sprouted from the faucet in multiple splashes, soaking through the black hands that lay cupped against the sink, reemerging, dripping down the arms of the young girl. Each hot touch dropping cool to her feet.
To her, the space of the bathroom made her feel miles away from the door, and even further away from life. She had not been bruised in a long while as the shadows from her hands covered the water in her palms, again soaking through her fingers, striking the bottom of the sink as a black liquid. She could feel the heat of the water snatch away her skin color.
Tomorrow was a new day, and maybe she would be ok from the beast that lay within the house, staring through the mirror of her reflection at the noise that originated throughout the house.
The door slammed, and then the car door slammed.
“Simone.” There was a long pause.
She had thought to answer, but the silence. She felt the cool of the hot water against the silence. She had thought it had been black in color.
“Yes, I’m in the bathroom.”
“Simone, honey, are you here? She said she would come home right after school, and now she’s not here.”
“I’m in the bathroom. Wait a minute. I can’t hear you,” cutting the water off, watching the black liquid turn into a swirling disappearance. She remembered they had made plans for a dinner that they weren’t invited to.
“Maybe she’s upstairs? Simone? Simone?”
That was her father. She could tell his voice by the way her mind raced for some sort of explanation for some trouble she had caused . . . and it wasn’t even her fault that the boy had cut his hands on her mirror, but the anger in her father’s voice, and the blood on her clothes said otherwise. Had she been suspended from school it probably would have been worse, and at a young age Simone had already grown use to the abuse. She had only been slapped a couple of times that time, the last slap cutting through her skin, knocking her to the floor. It didn’t really hurt, she had told herself.
From the corner of her eyes, she could see her mother move in from a watching position. Simone breathed in deep, her mother kicking her in the stomach as her father watched. After a couple of weeks, she would not remember, plus it didn’t hurt. The vision of the stained pants and shirt reflected the tears of the young boy who had cut himself.
There was another strong kick to the back of her head, her head hitting the side of the couch.
“And what if he had died, Simone? And then what? They’re talking about suspending you from school.”
She wasn’t crying. The blood stains appeared larger than her life, the circular patterns of red walking down her shirt, hiding itself on her pants.
Her father picked her up from the floor, throwing her into the living room chairs. The chairs flipped over on there sides as the young girl began to cry, but they didn’t hear her . . .
“I’m in the bathroom,” raising her voice through the quiet.
“I just don’t know. She's hard headed. She never listens. Her bedroom stays cluttered. Her school work is below average.”
“Give her some time. She’ll be ok. Young people today deal with a different type of life than when we were in our parent’s home.”
“It doesn’t matter. And this time when she comes home, I’m going to let her know how I feel.” The tiny drops of hot black water traced her feet in the floor as she walked toward the bathroom entrance, opening the bathroom door to the cool air of the hallway.
And both her parents had done well for themselves. Even at a young age, she knew that her parents had money, looking down the hallway that stretched the length of the house in both directions.
“Simone, are you up stairs? I thought I heard the bathroom door open. Did you hear it open?”
“Calm down. We’ll get there on time. Besides, we weren’t even invited. How do you think they’re going to feel when we show up with no invitation, and you know Simone hates these kinds of functions. Everybody will be old, and she’ll be the only one there by herself.”
There was a brief pausing look of disgust, “It’s not about Simone. She is a child. This is about us. This is our night, and we were invited. That’s why we’re going.”
“I’m upstairs,” her voice trailing through the hallway over top the stair entrance. “I will be down in minute.”
The black drops of hot water followed as footprints, the young girl walking across the hallway into the comforts of her bedroom . . . And there was space everywhere for her to decide what to wear. Dresses here, shoes there. The night would be long, and exciting. Full of people with adventures for the future, and contentment for the past.
And she listened, and she loved to listen. The way the stories would take her mind, and shape her love of herself, and place her in different places, listening to different people. And she was lucky . . .
“I have to say this, young lady. You are extremely lucky. Some scrapes, a few bruises and swells, but no fractures or broken bones.”
She tried to inhale as little as possible to stop the pain in her chest from going into her head. The tube extended from her nose into something that drowned out the encouragement from the doctor. She listened to the black man in the white overcoat intently, wondering how long it would take for her to heal where she could forget.
The tube from her nose increased in agitation. The bruise to the back of her head pulsed against the pillow.
She had lied as she watched her parents lie, and she wanted to be a doctor. She would never be one now.
“It was a dark blue vehicle with a funny colored front,” she had told the doctor.
“And when I woke up, my father was picking me up from the street, hysterical. I guess he thought I was dead.”
She had been told to rehearse the story many times before.
Her father, and mother watched from the doctor’s view. Both parents looked tired with tears flowing from a different type of place.
It had been hard to talk, and not cry, and concentrate at the same time, but she had done it.
And through it all, she was convincing as the doctor called the police into the room, explaining the description of the vehicle.
The voice of her father rose against the commotion of the doctor and police. “And I want to press charges,” her father had said. “Who slams into a young child, my daughter, and keeps going without stopping. We want to press charges, definitely.”
But in the back of the noise of the hospital room, Simone could see the evil. She was crying, but the tears were dry. And through the dry tears, she saw a wicked laughter grow on her mother’s face as the lie became more convincing. They continued to stare at one another, Simone knew that her parents were sick, and that there was nowhere she could go. And for the first time, as her mother stared at her from the comforts of the hospital chair as the police looked on, she was scared.
If there had been any pain, she would have known. They would have known, but no one to understand.
“Simone! Why are you running that water again? Just look it over, and cover it up. You don’t need that much water.”
The hot water dripped heavy across the blush bruise of her elbow black into the drain of the sink.
She would vomit next, wiping her mouth against the blotted stain of flesh. “Don’t flush that toilet again! I said get out the bathroom!” Her mother was screaming.
Through the screams, the silence was eerie. The window to the bathroom slid open quietly, the flush of the toilet muffling the watered sound.
Closing the window slowly, Simone walked to behind the bathroom door.
She could here her mother’s heart beat against the door.
“Simone, I said . . . .”
The door opened slowly as the young girl walked into the hallway.
“Let me see what happened,” looking at her daughter’s face. “Simone, if you tell people you fell then they will believe you. If you tell people I hit you then what do you think will happen?”
It was now pain. The swell extended from the bruise of her elbow to the entire of her hand. The eerie of silence all around. It was ugly in the dark with her mother, seeing the black water hot in its pour. Everything peculiar to a young child, and the complexity of circumstances not natural.
The slap cut through the hallway darkness, striking her across the face. “Answer me young lady. Answer me!”
The young girl turned her face into the approaching fist, hitting her against the thick of her lips; the blood dripped the stain colored shirt. It should have stopped, but it didn’t.
She didn’t think to often about nothing, a young girl growing in a house by herself. She wasn’t something of a strange person or some child that was lost in theresponsibility of the world. She didn’t really have friends, and she did. She played, and she laughed, and she didn’t. She had sprouts of anger towards herself, and outside people, and she liked people, and she liked herself, and she hated herself.
She didn’t really know what it was to like boys, but she guessed she looked as good as her mother, and she would be with someone as her father and mother. So when she would go off by herself, and forget about her life, she was not absent in thought. It would stop. But Simone was no longer there in the house or there in the car or there in the school. Wherever she was, who she was, she was not. She was destroyed in the silence of the thought. She knew she was a young woman, but how could she not be human or feel human.
Why her touch was cold to everything. She couldn’t feel the water hot, seeing the black liquid swirl in the bottom of the sink; multiple splashes staining her top, the black liquid continued in the catch of the drain. It wouls stop.
. . . But what if she turned into how she told herself she looked? She would look how she felt about who she was; that inhuman feeling. Her life was no value or maybe she was doing something wrong all the time. Should she hide around the house when her parents came home? Should she hide from the people outside her family?
In her lies, and lying to cover up, she couldn’t hide. And how could she have lied? Something had happened. But now the dark presented itself as a place to be unseen; inhuman.
Simone rubbed over the tips of her toes.
But sometimes she felt human. When she looked at pictures of when she was younger. She was a beautiful child; her mother, her father, and her, all together. They were family, to not remember those times as something apart of her life.
She was a stranger in a house with no one, not absent in thought, with people that said they loved her.
Her lip bruise blushed to the innocence of her feet. She bit down hard to taste the sting in the swell, the cuts in the back of her mouth, bitter. She had bitten down on her tongue as her head slammed against the bed post . . .
The baby picture where she had on only her bottoms, the imprint of nipples defining her as a woman. Her father held her tight with a certain pride that said he loved her.
He had loved her. Her mother had taken that picture, with a smile she had said. But that was a long time ago, Simone thought. She couldn’t remember.
The way each individual toe curved into something brand new. She had really loved herself when she was a baby. She could tell from how she smiled that she had loved herself.
The water swirled into the drain from the faucet. It was black in color, and hot to the touch. Now she was older, and the house was no longer an illusion of child imagination. She had grown, and everything had stayed the same.
“Daddy’s big girl,” her father had said. She thought he had meant it.
The long hallway walks were no longer a mind’s wander into lights from darkness . . . The hallway led to stairs that led to the downstairs of the house. The climb down no longer included the stair brace that her hands held onto. They had become something that displayed the beauty of the complacency in the stairs that simply allowed into the rest of her silence.
The living room was no longer windows, and no walls, but were walls to the outside. The dinning room was where she ate with her father, and mother, and guest, and not lights that captured her ambiance. They had been lights to a little child, she had finally concluded; just lights to a little child.
The kitchen had become an obstacle, in her life, of confusion, the smell of pizza seeping through the kitchen into the living room. And as with her growing, the child had long ago left from how her parents saw her, the thin
slice of cheese, and onion pizza dropping on the paper plate into her lap.
She loved pizza. The way the cheese, when it was really hot, oozed and dripped. The smell of tomatoes, and onions, and peppers, and garlic. The crunch of the crust. The splash of grease over melted cheese. The way her mother made pizza for her only child. But change had gotten in the way, and home cooked pizza was no longer the dominant fixture.
So she had grown to love the delivered pizzas. The flavor was not the same, but the smell of melted cheese, and grease always took her back into the kitchen, the love of watching her mother cook.
“Look at yourself now. You did this. Why would you cut yourself, Simone? Look at this blood.” As she looked into her mother’s face, she couldn’t see anything that said they knew each other.
Her mother held the knife in her hand, the strain in . . . . continue