Lily's Rescue

A young woman raised in isolation learns what it means to fall in love.

She couldn’t describe for you the feeling of a caress by the morning breeze if you asked her.

She might want to, but she’d be unable. She doesn’t know what “outside” is. She hasn’t seen the purity of the sunrise since she was three years old, maybe earlier then that. It’s not clear.

She’s not deprived. She’s content. She’s comfortable in her home, surrounded by live oaks, loblolly pines, willows and maples. Her blinds are thick, her curtains thicker, and the shutters on her windows remain closed. She is almost drowned in darkness throughout the day, and when she wants light, she lights a candle stick.

She finds content in books. Though she’s not blind, she learned to read Braille from a girl who once shared her room. They would read together in the dark, and sometimes their hands would touch as they both stroked the pages at the same time. It was the most real human contact she’d had in her lifetime.

She couldn’t tell you what the breeze felt like, or how blue the sky was, or how the morning dew on grass blades felt on her toes and how it smelled. Not only because she hasn’t experienced these things, but because she can’t speak. Her vocal cords are small and thin, undeveloped. She’s never had much reason to speak. This is not to say that she can’t communicate. She can write beautiful stories, of a morose nature, and though they lack the imagery we are used to, they are sonorous with emotion, and full of feeling.

Her name is Lily. That’ s the name her father gave her. She doesn’t know her father’s name, but she does know his voice. She has been in that place for seventeen years, alone for fifteen of those. She feeds and clothes herself. Every morning on the third Wednesday of the month,  her fridge is filled with enough food to sustain her for well into three months. Every year, she is asked to wait in her living room while clothes are taken out of her closet and replaced with larger or smaller clothes, depending on how her size has changed. She can’t appreciate the colors, because most of them are colorless. Blacks, browns, and grays that disguise her in the dark.

Her father cares for her. He truly does. He told her that he would take care of her until the day that she dies. He told her that no one else would do that for her. He told her that the world could not, and would not except her for what she is. He knows this because she is different, and the world doesn’t like different. So she trusts him to keep her safe and well.

It was Sunday morning, or Monday, or Tuesday for that matter. She tries to distinguish the days the way they do in the books she reads, but she doesn’t have a calendar. She tries to count the days starting from her birthday, but that pasted seven months ago and she’s lost count. She woke up to hear swearing outside her window.

She knows swearing. The girl used to do that. Brandy. Brandy was two years younger then she was. She lived with her for two years, until her father took her away, just like he brought her. She remembered that Brandy would cry, because she missed home. She said that father wouldn’t let her leave, that he made her come there. Brandy was blind, and she said that when she tried to see him with her hands, he bit them through a mask that felt like socks. Lily didn’t believe Brandy. It was probably the hateful world that did that to her, the world probably didn’t like her because her eyes didn’t work.

The voice wasn’t as soft and gentle as Brandy’s voice though. It was loud and harsh. It wasn’t her father’s voice either. Food had just come not long ago, and clothes came on her birthday, so she couldn’t imagine who could be there. She quietly walked to the living room anyway, and waited with a new book. The cover was soft, but grainy, and felt nice when she caressed it. It smelled new too. She liked that smell.

She got halfway into the book before she noticed that no noise was made outside the living room door, and that no one had come in. She closed the book and set it aside, and went into the kitchen for a glass of water.

She took her seat at the table, and sipped.

Then, she heard the familiar sound of the handle of the door being turned, and the door being pushed open.

She rushed towards the living room to avoid being scolded. In her haste, she spilled her glass of water, and though she couldn’t see where the puddle was, water dripped from the table into her lap, and when she stood, water soaked the soles of her bare feet.

She searched for a towel to clean the mess, and found none. Feeling around in a drawer, she came upon some cloths, probably her napkins. She took them and brought them to the table.

Stooped down at the chair where she had been sitting, she felt a presence. She was going to be admonished. She debated leaving the mess and finding refuge in the living room, or soaking it up so that no one would slip and fall and blame her for their injuries.

She chose to clean it up first, and then run.

When she felt the floor and felt the table and was satisfied that she had gotten all the water that spilled, she stood and walked towards the living room. The presence grew stronger. She knew someone was there. It was just a matter of where, and who.

“Who’s there?” she called, her voice not even close to a whisper.

She heard the snap pf a lighter, like the one she used to light her candles. She followed the source of the light. She walked, remembering where the furniture would block her way, and seeing all of her things emerge from the shadows.

“Who are you?” she asked. Her voice was heavy with fear.

“Hey, what are you doing in the dark?” It was a man’s voice, like her father’s.
_______________________________

He wandered upon the house when his car broke down on the road. A stranger had told him to take a right at the fork in the road, and it led him here. Finding the house, he figured the owners would know how to handle lost passersby, and if not, might lend him a phone to call for directions.

He walked up to the  house. It was inconspicuous. He wouldn’t have known there was a house there if he hadn’t seen the rusted pick-up truck parked in front. He wandered through a maze of trees that seemed bent on devouring the home.

It was a nice house. The exterior walls were made of designer’s stone, the shutters that concealed the windows were all brown, and the driveway was slated.

He almost turned around and went back where he came from. It was a fork, if right was wrong, then left should be right. Unless left just got him further away from where he really needed to go.

When he bumped his foot against a tree root, tripping him and then landing him on top of a jutting rock and gashing his shin, he thought it was worth seeing if anyone was in the house. He didn’t want to continue his journey with an aching shin and bad directions.

He limped to the door, and planned to peek inside, but it was an impenetrable fortress. With all the windows closed, he couldn’t tell if anyone was home or not. Until he reached the front door. The door was cracked, and yet no light escaped it. If the house was abandoned, he would spend the night there, and attempt to find his way in the morning. He was almost positive no one lived there. He wandered in with his hand clutching his chin. He felt around for a light switch, and found none.

He felt around hoping to not run into any furniture, or wake a sleeping family. Then, he knew someone shared the space with him. He heard a gentle crash, a liquid splash, then soft whimpering.

He heard the softest of footsteps. Finding no light, he fished for his lighter, and switched it on.

He saw a girl. Actually, she looked more like a woman. She was slender, solemn, and beautiful. She had short black hair, and soft features, probably further softened by the dim lighting. Any more details than that were hidden in the shadows.

“What are you doing in the dark?” he asked her.

She wouldn’t answer. She stared at him with such incredulity, as if she had never seen another human person before. She squinted slightly in the light.

“I’m sorry.” he told her. “Were you headed to bed?”

Her mouth moved, taking the shape of words, but no audible sound came out. He caught her looking down at his bleeding knee. She came to him, and knelt down in front of him and studied it. Her eyes were so full of wonderment, as if  bleeding flesh was a mystery to her. She gave him a questioning look, so he explained, not sure if that was the correct response.

“I tripped and fell in front of your house.” he told her. “It’s not that bad, it’ll heal.”

“Sit.” she said, her voice a whisper. She  blew the flame out of his lighter, and began moving around the house. In the dark, he had to listen to know her location, until he suddenly felt a wet cloth on his knee. She cleaned the wound and wrapped it tight.

Then, as he discovered upon lighting his lighter once again, she took a seat on the living room couch with a book. When he introduced light into the room once again, she squinted her eyes and looked at him. She stood up, and went into a hallway.
_________________________

 Lily‘s father taught her very little. Everything she knew she learned from books. Like love. She knew love very well, most of her books were about love. She knew it, but didn’t understand it. She knew there was a feeling that came with it. It was a confusing feeling, it made women act weird,  behave differently, and appear silly. Although, she couldn’t grasp it. She didn’t know how it happened. She knew you couldn’t touch love, or eat it, or drink it. But she knew it was real.

She also knew it was for normal people. It was for people who didn’t have to hide from the world. It wasn’t for people who had to live in a dark house all alone.

When the man came into her house though, she felt a feeling that she almost confused for nausea, until she went to seek refuge in a book.

Then, she thought she knew it. And when she did, she was overcome by fear.
__________________________

She agreed to let him spend the night. He was to leave early in the morning.

He felt like a stranger in a different country. This girl was so strange, but he didn’t understand what was different about her.

He then discovered it was the house. The house seemed deserted, and yet, it was the exact opposite. The house was almost bare, except for a bed, a couch, a table and a fridge.

And then there was the way she preferred to do everything in the dark. She read in the dark, tended to his wounds in the dark, navigated the space in the dark like a blind woman who knew where each obstacle was and how to get around it despite the fact that she couldn't see it.

There were also rows and rows of books. They lined the walls in the living room, and some of the kitchen. He lay restless on the couch, and decided to pick up a book to help him get to sleep. In the dim light his lighter provided, he found a black leather bound notebook. He found  a candle on the kitchen table and lit it. He brought the candle to the couch and placed it on the floor.

The handwriting was difficult to decipher. But if he paid close attention he could read the crooked and misspelled words.
    
When he had read from the front cover of the book to the last, he felt the urge to weep. The story seemed to have been a syringe through which torrents of emotions were injected into his bloodstream. He felt waves of passion, yet, not passion for a woman, but for something else. He felt enormous fear, deep empathy, and horrendous grief.

He put the book down and picked up another. He almost felt like each book would deplete his strength, and yet he felt addicted to the words in them.

This book was an autobiography. From the words, he could tell it was the story of the girl who lived in the house. It told about her contempt for the outside world, and yet her longing to be apart of it. It told of her father, who took care of her, in good ways, and in ways she seemed to not know were wrong. There were parts were she referred to herself as different, unlike those in society. The features that she described as “unwanted” her sleek black hair, her smooth caramel colored skin, her thin yet curved body, were not unwanted at all. These were all features that made her very attractive, but what her father had told her were alien to society.

The more he read, the more full of rage he’d become. This man who she’d revered, who she adored and called father had brainwashed this woman from a very young age. This naïve girl with no knowledge of the world outside her shut shutters was led to believe she was a pariah, an outcast and a leper. She thought this man loved her, when all he did was hurt her.

He did not know this girl, but the stories made him feel as if he had known her for all his life, and that his job was to protect her.

He thought of taking her from the house, but was afraid the light would hurt her or frighten her. She had been in the dark for so long that she almost lived her life as if she was blind. She didn’t even go out at night. She squinted in the light, the light filters in her eyes may be so unused that they were unusable. Her pupils may never contract again in the blinding sunlight.

Once he finished the seventh book full of her words, and burned through a third candle stick, he heard stirring from her bedroom. He heard a door open, and her footsteps move through the kitchen. She walked from the door to the kitchen into the small pool of light the candle created.

He stood to stand close enough to her to be sure she understood what he said, and most importantly, that he could hear her if she spoke to him.

“We have to leave here.” he told her.

He face was stricken with fear. A soft whimpering was emitted from deep in her throat. She looked down, rather then look at him. “No.” she said softly, her voice shook with the beginnings of a cry.

“There’s no reason to be scared. Your father has been lying to you. You are perfect, no one out there would hate you. You have to leave so that you’re father can’t hurt you anymore.”

“I can’t leave him, who will take care of me?” she asked. Had his ears not been less then five inches from her lips, he may have never heard the question.

“He’s a bad man…”

The girl began to scream. It was a soft scream, but a painful one. It was full of terror. His intentions weren’t to scare her.

She put her hands over her ears and fell to the ground.
_________________________

It was too much. There was a stranger in her home, and there hadn’t been one since Brandy left. She thought that maybe she might “love” the stranger, but now she suddenly hated him. He was gonna feed her to the lions. He was gonna take her away from all she’s ever known so that strangers could tease and torment her. So that they could hurt her.

And he said bad things about her father. Her father was good man. He took care of her. He wouldn’t take her out there where bad things happened to people like her.

He stood there in her home and tried to change everything.

She had the barrette Brandy left her. She remembered from her books that you were supposed to give people you loved a token of your affection. She was going to give him the barrette because it was  a special present from a special friend. Now she just wanted him gone, but didn’t know how to make him leave.

Through her screams, she could hear the door open again. She stood, and ran to take a seat on the couch. Her fear still consumed her, but she’d rather deal with it from the safety of her couch, then out there. If father was here, she wanted to be where he expected her to be.

“Lily?” her father called.

She could feel his footsteps approaching, though he always tried to walk so quiet that she couldn’t hear them. She blew the flame out of the candlestick.

“Lily.” he said when he was in the living room. “I need you to do something for me. Come here.”

She walked carefully to him, trying her best not to run into the man, letting her father know he was there.

“I want you to wait for me in your bedroom.”
___________________

He could only think the worst. He knew this feeling. It was a rush of adrenaline. He knew what that man wanted with the poor, innocent girl.

Before he knew what he was doing, he snapped the lighter on. Looking quickly around the room, he found the man standing with a look of shock. He was an elderly man, his hair had already begun to gray. Though his daughter’s skin was caramel colored, his was milky white. The skin on his face was pale and wrinkled. Lily’s father’s jaw dropped.

He let go of the flame to pick up the small end table that held the candle stick. Giving the man no time to react, he lifted the table in the dark and dropped it over the man’s head. He heard a grunt, and the man fell to the ground.

Lily’s voice followed. Whimpering, soft sobbing. He lit his lighter again to see her walking backwards, until the wall stopped her motion.

He took her hand. She wouldn’t let him have it.  

“We’re leaving now.” he told her. “We have to go.”

She shook her head.

He took her by force. He wrapped both hands around one of her slender arms, and when she pulled away, he picked her up and cradled him in his own arms. He walked out of the door with her.
____________________

She’d only heard the sound once before. It was when her father took Brandy away. He took her out into the backyard, where he had the car parked.  The she heard the sound. It was a loud “pop!”, but it was really quick. It was so loud that she had to cover ears, but by the time she lifted them, the sound was gone. Then, he started his car and drove away.

This time, she heard it, and she didn’t try to lift her arms. This time, the sound made the man who carried her run. She heard it again, and this time, it made him fall.
This was bad. Because he had been holding her.

She threw her hands up praying for something to hold on to, but when he fell, she fell too, and they were both sent falling down the steps in front of the house. She dropped the special barrette Brandy left her.

It seemed as if she’d been falling forever.

When she reached the bottom, she couldn’t move. She didn’t know where the man fell. Her sides ached, her head throbbed, and her legs stung with pain. She couldn’t lift herself up on them, because when she tried, they didn’t respond.

She touched the part of her head that rested on a jutting rock. There was a liquid coming from it, that felt sticky like what came out of the stranger’s knee.

She closed her eyes, because she was suddenly very tired.

The darkness that she lived in suddenly became infinite.
__________________
He failed Lily. He could see her broken body from where he lay on the bottom step.

He was bleeding. The first time that man shot his gun, he missed. The second time it landed in the small of his back.

As the world faded away, he apologized to Lily, the girl who had been robbed of life, from the time she was little. The poor girl who was never allowed to know how beautiful, how talented, and how normal she really was.
____________________

The movers arrived at the house shortly past dawn. They only brought one small truck. They were told to pack what was labeled for auction, and toss what wasn’t.

Inside the house, the only movable furniture were  tables, a couch, a bed in one room, and a fridge and a stove in the kitchen. There were rows of shelves all over the house. There was one row of shelving where all the books had been removed, and dust piles with the imprints of books left there.

“So” said Henry, the owner of the moving company. “I hear there’s a story behind this one.”

“Yeah, you don’t know? Old guy who owned this house, never stayed in it. Never put it up for sale, nothing. Kept coming around to do repairs or to bring things. Someone said they saw him bring in a box full of girl’s clothes up here.” Gary explained. He carried a clipboard, to make sure everything they were supposed to pick up was there, and nothing had been looted before they got there.

“Really?”

“Guy’s dead now. Shot himself in the cab of his pick up truck.”

“Anyone know why?” Henry lifted a table and put it on a hand truck.

“They got an idea. He had all these books in the bed of the truck. He lit them ablaze and then shot himself. The police salvaged two or three of them. They were stories written by a little girl, mostly stories about living alone in that house, in the dark. The stories kinda hinted to him raping her and get this “taking care of her”. Yeah, he took care of her all right. They found the girl and some man laid out on the front steps. He’d been shot, and she bled internally after falling down the steps. They think that’s why he shot himself.”

“That’s crazy.”

“What’s crazier, the girl is the child of a black woman. The guy is a white man.You can bet he was scared shitless about anyone finding out about her. The little girl had a younger half sister, the black woman‘s daughter by a black man, he kept her for awhile. Her mother promised him she would rat him out to his wife if he didn't take charge of both her girls. They say he killed his younger one, but they couldn’t pin it on him. Now they know he killed her because he couldn’t support both of them and still keep his wife dumb to what was going on.”

“How’d you hear about all this?”

“Around the rumor mill. My mother in law heard it from the guy who did some work for the old f**k, never let ihm inside. Sad though. Some guy down the way says he blanked for a minute and forgot the direction of the highway. Says he led the poor fellow who got shot down here. He’s feeling kind of guilty.”

“Can’t trust the woods around here.” Henry said, picking up a barrette and throwing it into a large trashcan.

Author's Note

I want you to take away your own translation, although I did my best to make the plot cohesive. Enjoy! Review please!

Reviews

[Larry Dyson]

most excellent in execution and in thought in the storyline.. It is so much like fiction that I am drawn to it ..or maybe it is the real story in your mind's eye as you see it that makes it real .. I loved it and I will read more of your stories.. SIr Larry /Sunshine

[[untitled]]

I'm trying to think of the author this piece most reminds me of, Bradbury or someone similar. Dark, suffocating, barely revealing. I remember reading shorts like this in college, and marveling at the sense of doom so palpable throughout them, just as I felt here. Great job.

In the end, and just like those shorts, it's not the extraordinariness of the circumstances facing the protagonist that affects the reader, but the trivial, almost banal level of ordinary evil suffused in the entire picture, the explanation for everything, that gets him. It's a difficult thing to pull off, but you did it quite well.

I'm not generally one to read such fiction--my tastes are in another direction, as you may well have guessed by now, but I really enjoyed this.

Best to you today--

:--)

[S-W-E-E-T-S]

I really like this! The emotion is palpable, I felt so bad for Lily the entire time, I agree that she needed more time to expreince love, but I suppose that's the real tragedy o fit all. Keep writing!

[Erin Was Here.]

Oh my gosh. This is such a beautiful story. Your character development was deep and I appreciated Lily more because of that. Your wording was amazing, too. I think your first line of this story should be in the book of famous first lines. Do they even have a book of famous first lines? Well, they should. Anyways, I loved this story so much.

[EmpressPoetess]

this is really good. although I would have liked for Lily and the man to have had more time, to share a little more affection. H e fell in love with Lily because of her writing, which revealed what was in her heart and soul, but Lily didn't get a chance to know the stranger. That's my only regret with this, otherwise it's really good! I read the whole thing, and believe me, if it wasn't interesting I would not have!

[M. View]

This was a amazing read I love it to death I read it 4 times befor I did a review. I can't put it in words on how this story touched me.

[Bella]

This was incredible. You are truly an amazing writer. I'm going to read more of your writing ASAP.

[Michael X]

what a turning saga, the depth and clarity set this awsome story to a level that has the capibility
to remain with the reader for a long time to come,honestly loved, sad, tragic, heartbreaking
you added the perfect touches to create another place and time. brilliant job.