Whore

She places her hands on the oak cabinet. Feeble fingertips press gently into the damp wood. She begins to tap, one finger at a time, then two, then one by one. A slow drumming song: I’m still here, I’m still here, I am, still here.

Her spine arches over the furniture, like a bent frame holding together a tent of translucent skin. Her flesh, marked by a patchwork of bruises, shares the appearance of a failed oil painting, the work of some intolerable artist, known for outbursts of splashing and spraying over a neglected canvas. Outside a dog howls and sirens scream. Her eyelids slide open; she peers into a dusty mirror. A woman, ghostly and gaunt, peers back. The woman is barely alive, a phantom, a silvery shadow of something else, of someone else, of someone who wouldn’t have let it happen – tonight had gone too far. The thud of his fist against her cheekbone had concussed her mind, jolting it out of the musty room into a smoke-filled living room where acrylic fingernails clicked and a television yelled. She had been sent backwards, back to the old days that never really seem that old.

Her brother in the sink. She washed his chubby back. He sung a choo-choo song he had composed a few hours earlier in the shoe shop. She tickled him with a sponge, carefully between his toes, his elbows, his little knees. Then – she turned around, for a moment, for one moment, I promise! To get the towel, it was to get the towel. She turned back to him. Her face – stung by paralysis. His face – smothered in happiness as his shoe, his brand new shoe, drifted in the water, swimming around his naked body. She couldn’t say anything, her throat was stuffed with iron fear. Mother. Mother. She tried to fish out the shoe, but it was too late. Her brother stopped singing, the train had reached its station. Mother. Mother.

Mother’s shadow loomed over her.

It happened fast, like the flash of a camera, one moment you’re here, the next moment you’re not. The wet shoe thumped against her skull. The choo-choo song began again, a little slower, a little more hesitant. He didn’t understand, he thought it was a game. Curled in a ball her eyes met the black and white tiles. She listened to the crackle of her bones, receiving blow after blow, pain surged through her body, around every joint, around every bang, where the rubber hit her flesh, and then the pain soared upwards, up her throat, to her head. Her mind wavered loosely like a flag in dull winds, drifting in and out of consciousness at times reaching in-between states of nothingness and in that nothingness she saw all white. Across the white she imagined a glowing field and a beautiful black horse, like the one from the book she was reading in English. With every thud, she envisioned his bold black legs leaping forward through the air, one after the other, weightless and strong. With every scream she heard his deep echoing grunt as he galloped further and further, thud, thud, thud, whore, slut, brat, thud, thud, further and further over a sea of shimmering grass.

There is a movement across the room. He places money on the nightstand. It would be less than agreed on, it always was. He gets up, he buckles his jeans, mumbles a “bye” that she doesn’t hear and shuts the door. There is a sickening smell: beer, cigarettes and sweaty genitals bubbling in an un-kept room. Every piece of furniture, save for the oak cabinet, lies turned on its side. The room is an abandoned battlefield; corpses sprawled across the carpet, the nightstand, the chair, the coffee table, the curtains and the bed sheet – there’s blood on the bed sheet.

She takes the sheet and dabs the corner against her split bottom lip. A dog howls, the same dog as before but a deeper howl, lonely and unreturned. She sinks into the carpet with her back against the wall, legs crossed like a schoolgirl. Thud. Thud. She bangs her head and two angry tears force their way out of her eyes. She closes them, tightly, pushing past everything that hurts, her eyelids ache as she tightens her squint and then, the horse reappears, coated by streaks of sunlight. Its black body radiates a silvery gleam like a velvet coat of armour. She is mesmerized by the soothing rhythm of his movement, he picks up speed, his thick black mane shudders in the wind. The horse gallops on and on and on, until it has reached out of sight leaping over to another field of imagination. No longer hers. She opens her eyes.

Using the wall she pulls her body up and walks over to the window. It takes her some time to open it; the window lets out a rusty, reluctant squeak but eventually gives in, letting the midnight breeze blow through the indoor fog. Her fingers curl around the ledge, she leans her head out into the sky as far as she can. She observes a thick black smoke rising from a neighbouring chimney, stretching and striding along jagged rooftops. With the cool night air caressing her forehead, she reassures herself that she is still here.