break

no sense of reality (but no escape from it either)

she looks sallow, colorless. her lips are an ashen gray.

 

there's a heartbreaking droop to her eyelids. she looks like a sleepwalker, stumbling against people that aren't there. her sleeves swallow matchstick arms.

 

there are stains across her thighs that look like spreading mold. in a few days they'll be mustard yellow and then they'll vanish. lower on her legs is a muddy brown patch no amount of water can wash off, and there's an area on her upper arm streaked with more brown lines. no one cares enough to look at them. if anyone has, no one has asked about them. they don't look like cutting scars a person can be sympathetic about. they look like stains, filth.

 

even if she washed or brushed her hair this morning, you can't tell by the time she ends up at school, soaked in sweat at 7:20 on the dot because she overslept again, whole body sore from a five-mile bike ride. her mom wouldn't think of driving her. waste of gas.

 

at the lunch table she sits with people she knows but doesn't speak to them. she puts her head down (unkempt, hacked-short hair fanning over her eyes) and tries to dream. a nickel short for a reduced lunch - mom doesn't have enough for even this. scour the change jar, let me sleep. she would scream when the bell rings to go back to class if she cared that much.

 

it's not that she never smiles, it's that when she does they're always caused by memories or things she wishes had happened but didn't.

 

eyelashes brush her under-eye skin like butterfly wings.

 

she speaks to herself, biking against the wind (no matter which way she goes. how is that possible?), sometimes singing. our world has been shaken, we wander our homelands forsaken. blue lips, blue veins. it was not your fault but mine.

 

she reads about 14-year-old girls who screw their foster fathers instead of analyzing essays about the differences between men and women. it's supposed to be humorous but she's stopped laughing at anything that isn't an inside joke long ago.

 

she narrates life as it goes on around her. she is a dark dead pocket in the heart of a diamond. she sucks her necklace charms into her mouth, on her tongue like carmel candy, tastes metal. like blood, only colder.

 

she whistles instrumental music to fill the pocket she causes. descend, umbral ultimatum, sunslammer. she wonders how these songs got their names.

 

she wishes she had more to show for skipping breakfast and lunch every day. her ribs don't stick out. the scale number won't drop.

 

she learns suicide tips from her school library. take sleeping pills one at a time, slow, or you'll just throw them up. a bubble of air in your bone marrow. white oleanders and athritis medication.

 

she wishes she has more to say, wishes she had more important things to say. she just keeps driving on, on into the fog to who knows where.

Reviews

[Kloud_Nine]

A very sad piece, like the opening to somthing Scott Heimish. Your description is crisp and of course, Im a sucker for awesome metaphors - there are lots here. Good stuff.

It can be tough writing in the 3rd person present-tense narritive, but it all just flows like poetry when you finally get it right. That's what you have here, poetry. Some real Ellen Hopkins stuff, kudos!