POISON TREE, yellowjackets

i. filth teaches filth

i. filth teaches filth
may 1996

ALEX BLUEBIRD IS her fathers daughter. This is what she thinks as she presses a damp wash cloth to her throbbing knuckles. Staring back at her in the mirror is a poorly put together vampire costume on a girl who clearly doesn't care about much. Over head, the florescent light flickers with the need for a new bulb.

In another world, one far better than this one, she is eleven again. Her lips are stained bright red from the strawberries fresh from the grocery store and her mother hasn't died yet so all of the windows are open to let the fresh spring air in. Her knees are still knobby and her bangs are crooked from a bad at home haircut. Casey is three and he is still struggling with learning the alphabet.

Nothing bad has happened, its a much simpler time before everything went wrong.

This is her world though. She's come to accept how things have panned out for her thus far.

It's late, the only sound vibrating through the house comes from the living room. The TV is blaring some old black and white film her father put on before he passed out, a pack of cigarettes on his chest and a half dozen empty beer bottles scattered on the coffee table.

She had spent most of her day being the doting older sister she had always been, perhaps the one she had been born to be. Wearing cheap, plastic store bought fangs that dug unforgivingly into her gums and an equally crappy cape. All while spending hours ushering her younger brother around town so he could have the perfect birthday.

Hell, she had even taken him to that diner on the nicer side of town that charged an arm and a leg for a stack of chocolate chip pancakes with some whipped cream on top. The old ladies drinking their morning coffee at the booth adjacent to theirs had sent them awful looks, no doubt questioning why they were dressed for Halloween in the middle of May. But she had made a promise to make up for him missing trick-or-treating last year, and he requested they dress up for his birthday.

What Casey wanted, Casey got. It was the least she could do to make up for the hardships that consumed their lives left and right.

For as long as she could remember, they had lived in the shabbier part of Wiskayok. None of her friends ventured out this way, not even Natalie who lived in the trailer park not far from where Alex resided. She didn't want to think about her though.

Outside, the houses foundation was crumbling to a point that it was probably considered unsafe and the grass was so dead it hadn't grown much in the last few years. Next door an abandoned home had started to cave in on itself and more often than not the homeless junkies sought it out for shelter when the weather was bad.

Across the street the neighbors Rottweiler (Bruce, nearly as old as Casey but still alive and well) paced back and forth like a predator along their chain link fence, snarling and snapping his strong jaws at everyone that it saw. A warning. A threat.

Her home was a piece of shit. Her dad was a piece of shit. She was pretty dead set on her life turning out to be a piece of shit too.

But that didn't mean Casey's had to be.

By the end of the night the two had torn through a good portion of his pretend Halloween candy in quiet giggles, hidden away in his room while their father drank himself to sleep on the couch. When the ten year old boy finally crashed from his sugar high, she pulled his own fake fangs from his mouth and tucked him under the thin blanket decorated with multicolored dinosaurs.

She spent almost an hour debating whether she should attend the party at Lottie's or not. It had only just began and her costume was easy to remove. When she trudged to the kitchen to get a glass of water, she found the faucet empty. Not a singular drop of water escaping the metal pipes.