Chapter 1
The young girl’s body rests on the ground. Slowly breathing. In and out, has come to be her new motto. Her way of life. Just breath, she thinks.
Her father, a large man sitting at the kitchen table and a few feet adjacent from her, takes a long swig from his Absolut, wiping his meaty hand across his mouth, he smiles, an awful, wicked, horrid smile, right before he brings out the switchblade he had been hiding in his pants pocket.
The young girl doesn’t move. Her father is like a bear; the best way to outwit him is to play dead. The girl is sixteen years old and has been dead most of her life.
Her father wipes the switchblade across his grimy work shirt, a striped blue mechanics shirt with the name Howard stitched on his breast pocket.
She doesn’t move, instead slowing her breathing to a stop. She hopes she can suffocate herself before she has to feel her father use the blade.
“Girl!” That’s all she has ever been to Howard. Never his daughter, never by her name, Jane.
Jane doesn’t move. Her father’s heavy footsteps echo in her ear until her his voice rings through it instead, “I know your awake, girl. You think big ole’ Howie here is stupid, don’t ya?”
She refuses to wrinkle her nose at the breath reeking from the old man’s mouth. Alcohol -ridden. An inch or so above her belly button.
Howard lifts up Jane’s shirt, just an Jane can’t help it. She stiffens at the touch. Her father had never touched her like this; it was always slaps and punches.
Howard lays the blade against the girl’s skin. Flipping it in on each side, “Girl, why don’t you leave?”
Jane doesn’t say anything; she knows its only one of Howard’s very few tricks.
Howard gently turns the blade upright, gliding it in slices down the poor girl’s stomach. “That’s right,” he sings, “because know one wants you. You ugly,” and with each insult he digs the blade deeper throughout each line, “poor, ungrateful, bitch.”
Jane tenses, but before she can feel the final lines the old man makes, the girl passes out.
YOU ARE READING
My Name is Bitch
عاطفيةJane lived in a broken home, a broken family and walked to school every day with either her heart broken or her ribs. Sometimes both.
