Finding my Wings

~3~

        There really is a normal life that exists. I remember when I had one. Except in this story the girl’s normal life was ripped away the moment that semi smashed the front end of her parents little white camri on their way home from picking up groceries. They were only two minutes away.

        And I remember sitting at the kitchen table hours into the night wandering where they were. It wasn’t until I got that phone call that I knew they weren’t going to be pulling into that driveway anytime soon.

        The funeral wasn’t the worst part of the next few weeks but it was definitely the hardest. My mom and dad had eloped a year after they started college in a brand new city. From the story my mother told me, their parents were furious. They had known each other since elementary but their lifestyles had always been in opposite sides of the spectrum. So come the day of the funeral. It was only me and the sad preacher sitting in that room with two coffins of the mangled corpses of my normal life.

        “Since you have no other family registered with you and your parents’ names we’ve had to pull some strings. Your uncle will be coming to pick you up next Sunday at noon. ‘Pack lightly’ he informed us to tell you.” The court judge ordered. I wanted to smack that pitiful expression right of his aged face.

        My uncle was an older man, older then my dad had been. From what he told me he was my dad’s brother and they had never gotten along when they were still talking. He had a malicious look in his furrowed brow. I shuddered the first few times I caught him staring at me with hungry eyes. I had to leave behind my house, my school, my excuses for friends that had not even texted their condolences.

        It was only a week into living in his shabby house that I was caught snooping in his office. I hadn’t found much but the furious expression he had made me immediately wish I’d heard the front door open upon his arrivial home that night.

        “I work for my living here and now I have you mooching off me and hard earned expenses! Your body will become your compensation for putting me out like this!” His hands left bruises where he had gripped them when he pulled me into the next bedroom and lifted off for a moment to slam and lock the door.

        “Be a good girl now and do just what I say. Or you’ll be sorry you ever lived you little shit!”

I still remember how I screamed. How the pain of something foreign entering my body for the first time made my lower spine and legs feel like they were being melted in hot lava that burned and scorched. Then came the tearing, the crying, the dull thud of his fists against my skin, and the creaking of the bedpost. They would become the nightly norm of sounds that filled my ears. This was no longer my own body. It had become something battered and disjointed in its movements. When I looked in the mirror, I felt sick and threw up on multiple occasions. I looked like the corpses I saw that day in the caskets. Except when I laid down my head at night, it wasn’t the silky cushion lining of the rectangular box that lulled me to sleep.

        It was the horrible nightmarish things coming to life in my own reality that would make me black out in sheer exhaustion into nothingness until the cracks of dawn woke me into the world I truly lived in.

        It would suffice to say I’d given up on any sense of peace and normality in this reality that was mine to live in.       

   

        But what was this feeling? This soft, plush fabric under my body wasn’t the hard, stabbing mattress at Uncle’s I would normally wake up on.

        Maybe I was in heaven. Yeah, that would explain it. My hand moved slowly over the fabric, savoring the feeling of it under my fingertips. My lips pulled at the ends, but quickly diminished when the pain in my wrist became hard to ignore.

        You don’t experience pain in heaven right?

        Alarm shot through me and my eyes flew open. Elegant drapery was suspended above my head. One sweep around the rest of the room left me with the sense I’d mistakenly been identified as an heiress been swept away to this room that was dripping in luxury and comfort.

        “Well seems like your awake sleeping beauty. I was getting worried.”