Emilie Wilson, Fresh To Order
Knife, Death threat, Scratches/Cuts
Waking up in my bed the next morning and having no recollection of how I ended up there was highly unnerving. What was worlds more frightening than alcohol amnesia was facing my insane mother. With a headache capable of killing me if I let it.
So there I was, laying on my bed dreading to sit up and after that, dreading to take even one step down the stairs. My bare feet hit the wooden floor. My steps were as silent as a pirouette.
Dreading to hear her open her mouth to scold me,
I missed ballet.
Dreading to feel my eardrums burst with her shrill screaming.
Ow! The burn of a hangnail being peeled. I was biting at my fingers. My fingers weren’t what I should have had in my mouth; it was supposed to be my toothbrush. That’s the whole reason I walked to the bathroom isn’t it? To brush my teeth, to clean up. I reached for my toothbrush in the white nine-inch cup I’ve had for 8 years, 2 months and 21 days. A small dollop of white toothpaste lay on the bristles of my toothbrush like they have no worries. Like they have all the time in the world to feel okay. The ice cold bristles covered in toothpaste touched the upper left of the inside of my mouth, sending a slight shiver through my hand, to my forearm to my shoulder.
For just a moment I was able to focus on the sensation of the brittles softly scratching my teeth. I was able to feel the minty burn of the toothpaste on my gums. I was able to squeeze the rubber on the handle. I was on another plane. One that was headed to somewhere colder, somewhere where the people were cheery, smiley, happy.
“Clementine! Are you up!?”
An eerie sound from down the 14 step staircase I haven’t seen or stepped on in 17 hours. My head told me to respond to her. ‘Yes mother, I’m up!’ My heart told me to respond to her as well but.. differently. In retrospect, responding to her differently seemed like a horrible idea. So…
“I’m up, mother!”
I shouted lower than normal, half hoping she wouldn’t hear me and just go on with her morning. My hope quickly faded when I heard her maddening voice again.
“Come down!”
My brain was hurting. The amount of energy being taken from me to do something so simple was astounding. It shouldn’t have been this hard. I just had to walk. Walk downstairs and have a conversation. It couldn’t be all that bad. For all I knew she could have been having a wonderful morning.
‘I know it will be okay’, I told myself. ‘I know all will be okay.’
One step, two inches down. Two steps, four inches down. I just had to take 12 more steps and I would be okay. Three, four, five. A couple more steps
“Clementine?”
My mother walked towards the staircase and laid eyes on me. She stopped in her tracks to scold me.
“Come down when I tell you to.” She snarled.
My lips tightened in a peculiar way. Like pulling that last bit of thread to close the stitch. At that point I was done coaching myself. I would have to just talk… Just talk. All is well, Clementine.
Tea was made on the kitchen counter while mother was drinking her own cup of tea. She preferred green. I never understood why. I always thought it tasted funny, like grass on a hard candy. I preferred English breakfast tea. It tasted like my father saying those four words I hadn’t heard in four years.
‘I love you, Minnie.’
When tea makes a waterfall and spills down my throat, I can taste his voice, his tone, his pitch. I savor the taste knowing I’ll never hear it again, only feel it. My mother knows that my first choice for tea is English breakfast. Yet when I ran my hands across the kitchen counter from the left bottom corner to the right bottom corner, when I peeked into my cup that regularly houses my tea, my cup with purple petunias printed on the rim, it was saffron. A yellow-green tinted cup of saffron tea with those stupid fucking red stigmas that were not fully strained out. I didn’t know how long I could do this anymore. Receiving something I loved in a way that I hated. In a way that just… made me angry. My lips curled into a grimace.
“Mother?” I spoke slowly.
“Problem, my dear?” She asked half heartedly. She said it in a peculiar way. She said it like she wanted to make me saffron just to make me angry.
“I don’t.. like saffron.” Her eyebrows furrowed.
“What? So you’re just going to throw it out? I made that for you with love, Lemon drop.”
In an instant, without thinking I slammed my hands against the kitchen island making my tea tremble in fear of spilling. My body moved without running it by my common sense.
“I don’t know why you keep making me saffron tea! You know I don’t like saffron tea! I don’t know if you’re trying to make me angry or what but this is stupid-”
“Clementine Amanda Hall! What has gotten into you!?” That banshee-like scream, it hurt my ears, it echoed in my head but the last thing I was going to do was put my spear down.
“I’m fucking done!”
The only thing I could shoot out of my mouth before seeing a bread knife.
An audible breath escaped my loosened lips. Her breathing was heavy, terrifying. Then she proceeded to repeat herself.
“I’ll kill you, Clementine..”
It wasn’t loud, it wasn’t painful. It was a whisper of mania. All of my common sense surrounding my mother was chucked harshly out the window. All so I could say what would inevitably be the words that harmed me the most.
“Do it.”
I couldn’t hear what she was saying anymore. I could only hear the banging and the screaming. Banging and screaming. Was it my own? Was it hers? I didn’t know anymore. All I knew all I heard was banging and screaming, each one more ear piercing than the last, each one more maddening than the last. It was torture until… nothing. It stopped. The banging had stopped. Was I screaming? No I wasn’t. That stopped too. Everything had stopped.
‘Get out’
What?
‘Get out, Clementine’
I jumped to my feet in what seemed like half a second. My eyes darted in every corner of my room trying desperately to find an exit. My closet, my vanity, my window. Of course my window. That was the only real option. Away from mother and towards Jonah’s place. Sadly, mother did know about my habit to sneak out my window so as retaliation, she removed the actual window which was insanely counter productive. Still, I still saw it as a window because what else were holes in the walls for?
I heard another bang on my door, one loud enough to break it clean in half. The only thing I could hope for in that moment was the slim chance of my mother being too weak to break the door. ‘Don’t turn around’
I tried to look back.
‘You have to turn around’
My eyes refused to follow my head.
‘She’s in my room’
When my eyes finally landed on my door, she wasn’t there. It was just my dresser pushed up against the door on the verge of toppling over from the blow.
I didn’t put that there. I would have remembered. I would be tired. I didn’t move my dresser.
Not wasting any more time than I already had, my head was the last thing to leave the sad hole in my wall only big enough for me. I tried to remember what I did the last time I was on the roof. I sat on the second- no, the third to last tile with my legs dangling. I felt around the bottom of the roof to find where I held onto to support myself. The pads of my fingers hit the small bump that nested in the divots of my fingerprint. I placed my left hand right beside my right, gripping onto the rim until I was afraid it would burst. All of my weight shifted to my arms.
With the sudden change in my body, a cry left my mouth. Whether it was a cry for help or a cry of rage was beyond me. I just wanted to cry. I made sure to point my feet just 2 centimeters below a violet flower in the third bush.
When I let go, it felt like legging go of my current fears. It felt like I was letting myself board that plane to the cheery, smiley and happy place. Though I obtained a few scratches on my exposed legs, it was a walk in the park compared to being literally stabbed. From the violet bush, I ran. I ran past my house past the next three houses. I ran until I could see that one familiar house in the distance.
‘Take a left.’
Three houses away, two, one and a ditch away. I could feel my lungs struggle to take a full breath in let alone a full breath out. Normally I was fantastic at running a distance but nothing about that morning was normal. My eyes got pulled back into my head, back into focus once the feeling of a smooth stone hit the sole of my right foot.
I wasn’t at my house. I was home. Not where I survived but where I lived. My fingers traced the upside down V shaped roof in the air. It was nothing like the roof I jumped off of moments ago. That house was nothing like my own.
The one thing that I could think, the one thing I could mutter under my breath for no one to hear was,
‘I’m safe’
Before I could pull the door open, a little black nose slipped through the crack in an attempt to push it open. In my shaken state, I quickly pulled my hand away. Then I saw a row of smiling teeth, connected to a mouth smiling ear to ear, the ears being floppy and brown. I held the door slightly open once I registered that it was Brandy. Without hesitation I started letting the tears spill out of my eyes.
I kneeled down to the ground to wrap my arms around the sack of brown fluff that I so desperately needed. She licked my face lovingly wiping my tears away. Despite her efforts, my cheeks were still covered in my tears.
“Brandy..”
I cried tears of joy and sadness and anger and fear and all of it. I was so happy, and I could never stress this enough, to be safe again.
I stood back up with more effort than normal. With tears in my eyes, scratches on my legs and a hand on her dog I managed to blurt out.
“Hi.”