Castles: A Fictional Memoir of a Girl with Scissors

by Benjamin X. Wretlind

  I closed my eyes in the trailer that night as the boys continued to play poker and ignore me. I tried to focus on the dream images more and more, willing them back into vibrant colors and sharp contrasts. Was that dream I'd had so long ago a premonition or was it just a collection of random thoughts?

  I focused on the man on the table, on his eyes . . . and I found myself focused on Steve.

  I opened my eyes just as the glass in my hand was about to drop to the floor. Steve was at the table, drunk and slurring his words with his fat tongue, with his forked tongue, with his devilishly wonderfully and exciting tongue. He reared back at some joke another boy had told and laughed.

  I wanted to kill him right then. I wanted to clean up my mess, to give the dust eels what they wanted. I wanted to build my castle in the sky, brick by brick, tongue by tongue.

  My eyes darted from Steve to the giraffe boy to the two others around the table.

  They were all bricks.

  They all needed to die.

  2

  The second time Steve invited the boys over for poker, they brought more alcohol than the four could possibly consume in a given night. Even if I helped—which I wasn't averse to doing—there would still be copious amounts left over. Vodka bottles, whiskey bottles, bottles of gin and a bottle of Hennessy littered the center of the kitchen table and nearly took over the open spaces on the kitchen counter. Within an hour, they had all been opened, mixed with each other and the boys were noticeably both drunk and vile.

  I didn't participate in any of the festivities, but I did have a few drinks. I remember it being a humid night, more so than the last few, and the subtle increase in moisture in the air was a sure harbinger of storms to come. I sat on the couch again, this time dressed in Grandma's nightgown. I found its openness very liberating, pulling the moisture from my skin and cooling me off with the gentle breeze that blew through the open door.

  Steve was in a fouler mood than before. He'd lost about twenty dollars the first night and was already down an additional forty. I didn't mention it to him, but the fear inside of me grew every time I heard him curse at a poor hand, another loss. There were bills to pay, there was food to buy, and who knows how much those bottles of liquor cost—or if they were paid for at all.

  "Fuck!" Steve screamed. He threw down his cards on the table and pushed back. "That's three in a row!"

  I watched from the sidelines, the anatomy book on my lap and a glass of vodka and cranberry juice by my side. My head was a little fuzzy after the first drink and the second drink was quickly working its way into my system.

  "I guess you're just not lucky tonight," said one of the boys with a toothy grin. He wasn't as lanky as the giraffe boy, but he was spotted with acne and pock marks. In fact, all of them were with the exception of Steve. The features of the boy's blonde hair, cut like a silly Mohawk, and the almost orange complexion to his skin made him look more hyena-like than anything else. His laugh just made the comparison more solid.

  "I hope your Mama rots in Hell," Steve mumbled. He walked to kitchen counter with a slight stagger, poured a drink of something mixed with something else and returned to the table. His eyes flicked at me.

  "What are you looking, Mags?"

  The hyena boy turned to me as well. "You're looking mighty hot in that moo-moo." He chuckled to himself. Did all drunks think their jokes or their sarcastic remarks were funny?

  "Deal," said the giraffe boy to the fourth member of the party, a gluttonous slob of a beast who had to put down a bowl of chips and wipe his fingers on his shirt to do anything dexterous.

  I watched them for a few moments longer, amused and disgusted with the whole thing. My drink was empty and I was thirsty, but I hesitated to get up and make another. To do so would mean passing by the maligned zoo of freaks and coming within an arm's reach. I really didn't want to be any nearer to them than I was.

  Steve ruined it all by asking me to bring him some chips. I guess I hesitated on the couch a little too long. "What the hell, woman? Get up and get me some damn chips!" He glared at me forcefully as if trying to resurrect the look he had when he beat me a few weeks prior. The alcoholic haze in his eyes didn't let him.

  "Fine." I sighed and stood up. Maybe I could sneak around them without being groped.

  The giraffe boy was the first to lift up my nightgown. He tried to be as sly as possible, but in his drunken state, sly meant practically scratching my thigh and tearing the fabric as I pulled away. The other boys laughed and I noticed Steve was among them. Somehow I felt they had designs to make me a play thing that night, and I wasn't going to have it.

  "In your dreams," was all I could say. I passed the table without further incident, dropped a bag of chips in Steve's lap and returned to the couch. Any further interruption of my study of anatomy and how best to cut the boys would not be appreciated.

  The rest of the night I overhead crude jokes—about how Steve wasn't going to get lucky and how each of the boys, in turn, would be lucky with me. Steve refusal to defend these statements bothered me, not for his nonchalance but for his goading.

  I felt like a piece of meat.

  I can say now, with certainty, that the poker nights fueled my anger more than anything else. The four of them were repulsive and even when they weren't there, I found myself ruminating over their deaths. Steve was always at the forefront of my mind, stretched out on the table with duct tape and drowning in the blood that would eventually pour from his mouth when I cut out his tongue. I settled into a routine of nightly flipping through my anatomy book then tracing cut lines on Steve's body with my finger as we lay in bed naked.

  Despite Steve's faults—and there were many—he did grow on me through the years. From adolescent bickering to young adult sex, there was a connection between us that I couldn't deny. But it was tense and not altogether normal, like the connection you make between the blade in your hand and the chicken breast on the counter: you want to cut, to feel the meat slip away under your direction. You can't help but notice the veins if they appear, the grain of the muscle, the slimy feel on your skin as you shape the breast into something tasty.

  So I started to think along these lines, the lines that put Steve on the same cutting board as an expensive roast or a rib eye steak, primed for cutting and shaping and seasoning and cooking up into a tasty meal. Of course, every time my finger traced a Y-pattern on his chest like a pathologist might do to a nameless cadaver, I returned to the tongue. How would that cut, how pliable would it be under a knife, how tasty would it be if I sautéed it in garlic and rosemary and butter?

  Like all men, Steve was oblivious to thoughts he didn't have and even if he asked me what I was thinking at any given time, he would be oblivious to its meaning. I'd come to realize by my twentieth birthday that men are led by their tongues and led poorly. Taste and word choice are hilariously wrong, and although they try to use their brains for good, they lack a clear picture of the whole. They can only see parts.

  The other three boys were just like Steve in maturity—or the lack thereof—and in intellect. The giraffe boy and the hyena were potheads and often came over with a bag of weed to share amongst them. The third boy was quieter, but that didn't mean he wasn't also led by his tongue and incapable of doing good in the world. He was shaped like an exercise ball, round in the head with no neck to be sure of. His shoulders tapered out to his midsection where a heap of fat had congregated and forced him to waddle when he walked in the door. I really don't know if he was able to see his penis if he didn't stare in a mirror, and I made a mental note to show it to him after I cut it off, right before he died.

  I often shot glances at them after reading a particular section of my book, and looked for whatever it was I felt like cutting in the folds of the boys. There were the obvious appendages—the penis, a finger or toe here, the tongue. Then there was the ear and what would happen if I pushed a barbeque skewer through the canal only an inch and a quarter versus three or four inches. I could puncture the eardrum and
maybe lodge the needle of the skewer into the cochlea. If I used a knitting needle, however, I wondered if I could hook the snail-like feature and pull it out to examine. How neat would it be to show the hyena what his interior ear looked like if he couldn't hear himself scream?

  I smiled at my desires. Never once did it occur to me my desires would become my obsession and I would be going above and beyond what Grandma and the dust eels asked of me.

  They just wanted me to cut out the tongue.

  I wanted to cut out so much more.

  3

  After the first month of random poker nights, I'd become numb to the idea. Steve hadn't cared that I initially complained, nor had he sought to lessen the burden of cleaning up by helping out around the house when the night was over and the morning sun shone through the kitchen window onto a mess of cups and chips and beer and bottles of liquor half-empty. It was always my responsibility, much like it had been when it was just Mama's mess. Steve's messes, however, were so much worse.

  "Boys are coming over," Steve said from the front door as he walked in from work. "Clean up, will you?"

  I didn't argue, but I guess my face did display a certain distaste for the idea.

  "You got a problem?" he asked me. "This place is a pig sty. Clean it up."

  "I could use a little help," I said.

  The first time Steve hit me, I was already on the floor. This time, however, I had been walking past him on my way to the kitchen. I stumbled backward when his fist landed against my cheek. I tripped over the coffee table and crashed sideways into the couch. Something sharp lanced my shoulder.

  I looked back at him, more surprised than angry. I think my thoughts at that moment in my life must have revolved around why I asked for help, not that I'd been hit. "I'm sorry," I muttered through the pain in my cheek.

  "Now look what you made me do," Steve said. It was a matter-of-fact statement, not an apology of any sort. "And you're bleeding on the damn couch."

  I grabbed my shoulder and saw the red stain on the cushion, like a flower painted in the fabric.

  "Clean it up," he said again. There was another threat of violence in his voice. He stomped over to the couch. Reflexively, I shielded my face. Rather than hit me, though, he grabbed the back of my hair and pulled me to my knees. "Clean that up, too." He angled my head around and pushed my face in the wet cushion. "I don't need my friends seeing what a loser of a woman I have."

  You might think I had the common sense to walk away from the situation, much like I walked away from other situations in the past where there was a certain threat of violence. But I found myself frozen, glued in place like a china doll that'd just been lobbed across the room and shattered. It wasn't that I didn't want to leave, I think. I couldn't leave. This was my house, where I'd grown up. This was home.

  I did as I was told. I bandaged my shoulder, cleaned the kitchen, washed the blood out of the couch the best I could with a cold washcloth and finally draped Grandma's afghan over it. Steve remained in the bedroom most of the time, likely napping or mentally preparing himself for another fun-filled night of friends.

  I fumed, of course. Who wouldn't? In that fuming, I thought of more things I could do to Steve and his friends, more ways I could hurt them. I'm pretty sure that hatred fueled me; I could have easily been on empty and simply put a knife to my wrists that night. The thought certainly crossed my mind.

  "Are you done?" Steve asked from the hallway. He looked groggy.

  I didn't say anything. I was done, and he knew it. The trailer had never been this clean since Grandma was alive. I'd even laid a bowl of chips on the table, although I had wished they were poisoned.

  I pushed past Steve and went to my room—my old room. I hadn't done much with it since Mama died and Steve moved in with me. The bed was made, done up with an old quilt Grandma had made for me when I was a baby. The Barbie nightlight still shone in the corner. My dresser still had clothes I hadn't fit into since I was six or seven.

  Flopping on the bed in an exhausted and angry huff, I closed my eyes and shut out the world.

  When I opened them again, the sun had set and the noise of raucous laughter echoed through the trailer. The boys were over and they were already drunk. I didn't know how long I'd been asleep, but I hoped it was long enough that the party would be wrapping up soon and I wouldn't have to deal with anyone. My cheek still ached and a quick glance in the mirror over my dresser confirmed that I did, indeed, wear my shame that night.

  "You want to fuck her, don't you?" I heard Steve say through a drunken slur.

  "She's all used up," another boy said. I thought it might be the hyena, but I couldn't be sure.

  The exchange continued for several minutes. Something about a whore, a piece of trash that deserves a big piece of meat. I didn't think it was me until I heard Steve say: "She's in her old room. You want me to get her?"

  My heart pounded in my chest and I took in a sharp breath. If I had been groggily listening to the first part of the exchange, I was awake now. The days of inappropriate teasing and pulling up my nightgown, patting my butt and ogling my boobs had just ended. They may have been drunk, but I heard conviction in their voices.

  I also realized Steve wasn't going to stop them.

  A quick flash of memory hit me. I was in the desert, scratched up and crying. A man stood over me as he stuffed his penis back in his pants. My thighs ached. My stomach felt like it had been hit with a baseball bat. Tears stung my eyes as I looked up at him, at the man Mama brought home, at the man who took a piece of me away.

  "That's what good girls like you get," I heard Alfie say through my fear-induced hallucination.

  No matter how hard I prayed it would never happen to me again, no matter what I did to protect myself from people like him, no matter how many nights I dreamed of what I would do if ever put in that situation . . . it was about to happen again.

  I pushed up from my bed and unlatched the window.

  Not this time, damn it.

  4

  I didn't sleep at all that night. I had run through the desert in my nightgown and climbed inside the Bus. I hid in the back where Michael had been, where Dusty had been, where all the bricks to Grandma's castle had been laid out and prepared for the eels. I wasn't afraid of them, though. I wasn't even mortified at the idea that an unknown number of storms had come to this spot and swept out an unknown number of messes.

  Didn't they all deserve it?

  The night seemed to last forever. I was cold in my nightgown and curled myself into a fetal position on the floor of the Bus. I couldn't sleep but I could dream. I prayed for Grandma, for Mama, for anyone to come and talk to me. I didn't want them to tell me it would be okay or that castles in the sky took patience to build. I wanted them to tell me what to do next and when to do it. The mess I was in with Steve was too large, too dangerous. It needed a divine broom to clean up and the longer I waited or let it get worse, the more ferocious the storm would have to be.

  Guidance. That's all I wanted.

  I heard Mama in the darkness of the Bus. She whispered something about how she wasn't strong enough. It was a memory, one from the day she was killed. I had hoped for more. I hadn't seen Grandma in a while and there had been no storms of note since the night the windows shattered in the trailer. It was as if I had been abandoned, left without a broom in the mess I had created.

  A wave of sadness flushed over me, replacing the fear that had driven me to the Bus. I was alone, more so than ever before, and I felt God had turned His back on me. The castle I was supposed to build could not have been any more distant from possibility.

  I cried until the sun crested the mountains in the distance. I cried until it had crawled patiently into the sky and hung over the Bus, baking the desert floor and the inside of the Bus. I cried until the sweat on my body stopped beading up and I felt thirsty, hungry, anxious.

  I left the Bus when the sun was still high and crossed the desert floor in my slippers. In the distance, I saw a billow of cl
ouds, white against the sun-bleached horizon. It wasn't big enough to carry the eels, to carry God's broom and sweep clean my mess, and this saddened me. As I walked, I began to see the whole. My brain just couldn't see the parts any more.

  Grandma and Mama had been talking to me. If I was to clean up the mess, I had to do it on my own.

  I stepped up on the porch of the trailer, relieved the boys had gone home. Steve would be at work and I could shower and clean up their mess before he got home. Maybe I would even make him a nice dinner before I cut out his heart with some cutting shears.

  It was not to be so simple.

  The boys were laid out on the floor of the trailer. They must have stayed up all night, indulging in anything they could find. Pot roaches littered an ashtray on the coffee table, liquor bottles were turned over empty, beer cans were tossed in the corner of the kitchen as if they had made only the weakest attempt at getting them in the trash can.

  Steve was awake. He sat on the couch and stared at me. His hands rested on his thighs, the index finger of his right hand tapping away a pattern of impatience and anger. His eyes were bloodshot, black irises floating in pools of red. His lips were pursed so tightly, I thought he might break a blood vessel.

  "Where were you?" he asked. His tone was not calm, not menacing, not anything remotely . . . human.

  I swallowed, still in shock at finding the boys in the trailer and Steve on the couch. They were supposed to be gone.

  "I missed you," he said in that same inhuman voice. There was no flicker in the eyes, though. No sign of the devil. They were simply red and piercing.