I Am Noor

October Descent: Noor's Stranger

    I am Noor, and it is Sunday.
    Any moment now, the man who fathered me will burst in (he never knocks) and usher me out to Our Lady of Immaculate Grace for Confession. These ugly scribbles and this tattered sketchbook are all that I have to call my own, because he has confiscated my laptop, iPhone, and desktop computer-- in other words, all that I own which connects me to the outside world.
    I am Noor, and I am seventeen.
    The Church is like my mother, but I have been defiled by the kind of filth even jackals won't eat. How could I dare contaminate the Lord's house after what I've done?

    I have 5 minutes, he says. I am already dressed. This evening, Mum flies in from Indonesia.
    I'll tell her everything.
    I hate him. Hate hate hate hate hate.

    Evening. It is still Sunday. The date & month: October-something. Raining.
    I am Noor, the only girl in a family of seven brothers, and I am the first to have been accepted into Compton’s Community College under the Young Achiever Scholarship.
     I am Noor, and my name means “light”, but that is a cruel joke. My life has been dashed into a darkness so thick that it hurts to breathe at night.
    “Noor” has been synonymous with ‘bright’, ‘intelligent’, and ‘promise’. But when they find out-- and they will-- I will be transformed into garbage. My achievements will mean nothing. Mum would not dare look upon me, much less the Immaculate Mary, whom I love more than my own heart.

   *Later* The door! More tomorrow.

MONDAY-
Oct. 7th. The man who fathered me (I won't call him ‘Dad’) dropped me off in front of Edgemont High an hour ago. His ancient blue Durango screeched to a halt, and he reached across me to push open the door. Stony silence. Not so much as a word of ‘Careful now!’ or good-byes. So I grabbed my pack, slid out, and trudged on, knowing he wouldn't leave til he saw me go in.
     Satisfied, he pulled away. I walked the length of the building, ghosting my way through trendily-dressed, chattering ninnies, and exited through the double-doors in the back.
    Threw up immediately afterward in the principal’s parking lot.
    I have fled to the small vale that sits behind Edgemont so I can write. I found it last year while out on a lonely walk. It has a few wispy willows and a tiny creek. Sometimes, there are tadpoles. Most importantly, he doesn't know where it is.
    It's mine.
    I am Noor, and I belong to myself.
   Me.

Oct. 8th, Tues-
    Throwing up. It hurts. That's all I've done today. I meant to write of my Confession, but right now I can barely stand.
    I stink of vomit. I've been so ill that Mum has begged him to let me stay home. He relented. First reasonable thing he's permitted in I don't know how long.

9th-
Nausea

11th, Fri.
    Haven't been to school. Since I have no friends, no one will miss me. But at least today, I can sit up, and Mum brought me a piece of toast earlier. I ate it. It stayed down. It's 8 AM.
    So today, I will write, telling what I can of my station in life. If anything, it'll help me practice my English. It's nearly perfect, they say, but there are still tiny things I forget.
    I am Noor. I am proud of that sentence. At least, I have been. Those were the first words I learned to write in English. They made Mum so proud. Now, my name feels like dreck in my mouth.
   Mum wants to bond with me.
    I need her. Thank Allah & Merciful Mary the week-end is nigh/ near/neer  near. As you can see, Sketchbook, I still need a pocket dictionary.

    Noon.
    What to write? I am Noor, and I did a horrible thing. In the evenings, my breathing becomes labored. It feels as though vile tar fills the tiny air-sacs in my lungs (alveli? Alveole), and eventually it is as if I am drowning.
    I sleep with my rosary and a picture of the Immaculate Mother prominently on my nightstand. I also keep a small dish of Holy Water there, and a Women's Devotional Catholic Bible on my bookshelf. Haven't read it lately, but it's there. All these things used to be comforting (Mum is a devout Muslim, like most Indonesians, but I was baptized into the Catholic faith by my American father at five. 5? I think five).
    Now, they mean nothing. They are empty things. Vacant. Their sanctity fled the night after the thing-- the awful thing I did. I had a moment of weakness and sinned. Now, I am paying the price for my disgusting foray into the forbidden.
    That first night after it happened, I crawled into bed feeling slimy and frigid. A bang shattered my sleep around four AM and when I sat up, I saw that the Holy Mother's frame had been knocked onto its face. In my muddled state, I set it right and tried to go to sleep again. But once I toed the thread separating wakefulness and dreams, a series of four loud bangs jolted me upright.
    Mary's photograph was on the floor. When I picked it up, I saw the glass had shattered.
    The second night, my sleep was interrupted again. It was 4 AM. There had been no noise, but there was a suffocating air of foulness I can't even begin to describe-- so, shakily, I tapped my table lamp.
    The Holy Water had spilled. This time, the dish was cracked into two neat pieces. That was the night I realized something sinister was chipping away at my sanity.
    The third night I slept all the way through and woke optimistically, thinking maybe I'd just been stressed or overworked. That sunny hopefulness imploded when I reached for my rosary. My fingers brushed the pale pink beads, and they clattered to the floor. The thread had been snapped. When I felt for the thread and grasped it, I found it coated in something viscous and rotten, like opaque mucous. It smelled like a demon's bile. So I fled to the bathroom to wash.
    After three showers, and in spite of lotions, perfumes, and soothing oils, I reeked of a skunk’s anal glands. The stench was so overpowering that I was petrified of going downstairs. What would I say to my parents about how I smelled?!
    But I could not avoid the inevitable. When I did venture down, neither Mum nor he looked up from breakfast.
    “Ah, my daughter, my beautiful gift from Allah!” murmured Mum. Her eyes did not leave the pages of the open Quran before her. “What have you done differently this morning? You smell like a rose!”
    Disbelief churned my stomach bile like buttermilk. That day I began vomiting. The stench, which no one else can detect, mocks me. It has never left. How much longer can I tolerate this? I would rather be consumed with leeches than have to suffer from this stink.
    Filth. Mud. Graves. Ghouls.