Nine Years Old

First-person story of a nine year old girl and a night with her parents.

You're on that brown sofa that sits against the wall of the living room, facing me. I sit on a stool in the middle of the room, looking down at my hands, wondering what to say, what to do. You look at me with the saddest eyes that my nine years have ever seen, and ask me why.

 

But I have questions for you in return, waiting: Why did you do it? Why would you want to scare your child? What in the world is the point of it? But there, of course, is no way I can ask these...I'll never get any answers that I need to move on, though you will get all the answers you need to torment me even more. I just sit, gazing down at the floor, and try my hardest to zone out...

 

You look at me, and demand to know again: Why? What I did now, I'm not sure; you're upset, though, so I try to answer correctly.

 

"I didn't mean to?" Wrong answer. "Get up and go to your room until you're smart enough to figure it out, then get your a*s back out here!"

 

I'm sitting on my bed, curled up tight in the corner sobbing. There's horse pictures on the wall beside me...I look up at their grace, their beauty, and wonder if I could ever feel so free.  Slowly, I start calming down a bit. All of a sudden I hear screaming and something falling...He's home...It starts again.

 

I'm sitting on the stool in the middle again; she's on the brown sofa; he in the blue recliner that so many good stories were told in before bed so long ago.  This time, it's two against one... I'm sure to lose, yet I don't just give in. I'm too young to realize that this only made it harder.

 

You demand that I tell him what I did this time. I look up slowly, and say as soft as I can that I don't know. You ask how I don't know, you say that I never know, you say it's pointless to try...and ask me again. I repeat that I don't know what I've done wrong.

 

You inform me that I'm an ugly, nasty little brat who doesn't deserve how "it" is being treated, and that from now on, I'd better behave, or you'll give me to the state to deal with. At the time, I have no idea what this means; I'll learn soon enough, and wish that it would happen. But all in good time...

 

I'm sent to my room again. He hasn't moved from the recliner, hasn't looked me in the eye, hasn't dared to breathe a word. Of course, this makes sense. I'm the only one rebellious enough to contradict her when she's like this. We know it'll pass soon enough...but I hate it, and I try to defend myself. Again, I'll learn soon enough that this is a mistake.

 

Walking to my room, I look on the little table just inside the guest bedroom door; the way the house is, I easily saw without looking: a tiny peice of glass on the table. I quietly go in, grab it, and then go to my room, curling up on the bed again, underneath the covers this time. I press it to my wrist...And finally feel a sense of freedom, of control, in my screwed-up world. This will come to be my first experience with cutting, though I don't know at the time that anyone else does it.

 

I'm laying on my bed, curled up in a ball...Blood dripped down my wrist...And I'm okay now. No matter what she does, breaking my skin breaks her control, and puts my life in my hands. And I'll never forget this.

Reviews

[Trigorin]

You have a good concept, I suppose, but your writing style is a little bland and monotone - I would have much better liked to have seen something a little more disjointed and nonsensical, which would have better reflected the nature of the narrator as a nine-year-old. As it stands it's like a very boring, dependent adult were telling the story.
The ending, too, is very disappointing. The whole boring trope of the depressed narrator going off and cutting themselves is so overplayed and done to death at this point that it has absolutely zero validity left if you're intending for the reader to take it seriously, which it seems you are in this piece. I would have liked to have seen the narrator transcended that expected end and gone on to triumph at the end through ingenuity or wit or something, but instead we're left with a dependent, apathetic narrator who is unable to even put in the perfunctory effort to solve her own problems.
Your writing is not technically bad - there are no grammar or spelling errors, for example - but really, you can do much better than this.

[Cookie]

After all the kind reviews I've read here on writing I would not consider good, I was wondering if there ever were critical reviews such as this. I appreciate your honesty very much--thank you!

I wrote this when I was 12; it's a memory from my childhood, which is the explanation for the crappy ending--because it IS a memory, I didn't want to change the events when I was writing it as such. I was planning to write this into a story, though, so I'm glad to know it's kind of cliche, and boring - I'll work on that in an edit.

Thank you again!

[Trigorin]

I'm glad to know there are people here who can accept criticism gracefully - keep writing.

[Marie]

I wouldn't have been quite as blunt as Trigorin, but I agree what he says about this story. There is an excuse, if you wrote if when you were only twelve--but there's no excuse for posting it on here now that you're 18 and should be doing better writing.

[Cookie]

The reason I posted it, though it's not the best, is because I'm horrible at actually going back with my writing and editing. I'm trying to get an idea of what's good and what's not from my past writing to help me in what I write now.

Thank you for reviewing. :)

[Kenilo Kent]

You have a flair for descriptions... Keep it up.

[Naomi Bloom]

Wow very dark. It sounds like this is a true story. So much is left to the imagination. I wish I knew what the mom was mad about. That sounds vey intimidating; to sit in the middle of the living room on a stool and be interrogated. It reminds me that people can simply bring a child into the world on a whim (whether they want to be alive or not) and get away with controlling them and exploiting them if they want. I liked the hopefulness of the horse posters on the wall. The ending is nicely done.

[Cookie]

A good portion of my writing is fictionalized memories, and some of them are less fictionalised than others. That is to say, I never knew what she was mad about, either.

Thank you. :)

[Naomi Bloom]

Cool. :)

[SPH1995]

i like it,its powerful and shows stauas aswell as the inocence of the little girl :)