Ultraviolence

ELEVEN+

© Amber Kalkes 2014

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*Sexual Content. 

ELEVEN+

Levi’s jaw drops as he hears her first confession. Ten? She had killed her first person at ten? That’s insane! This little beautiful girl has been killing people since she was ten? He can’t believe it. He wants, no, he needs to hear more.

“…I didn’t want to. It was a game; a game I didn’t want to play but I didn’t have any choice. I didn’t have many choices after they died.”

“Your parents?” Levi asks.

Rose nods, “Yeah. They died when I was six, I don’t remember much about them, just a few things. Mom had brown eyes like me and she smelled like lavender. Dad had green eyes and loved to sing me to sleep. Other than that though I can’t remember much else.

That was when I was put in my first foster home. She was a nice older lady with a gray beehive hair-do and loved to dance to Dean Martian songs. Her name was Mrs. Johnson. She was like a grandmother to me but she died of a heart attack when I was eight. I found her after I came home from school dead in the hallway.”

Levi can’t stop himself as his hand goes out to touch her but she pulls back from his touch. Shaking her head she closes her eyes tightly before taking another deep breath and going on with the story. He wants to comfort her but he knows she won’t let him near her until she’s done. When he knows everything.

“That was when I was moved to a new foster home. At first the couple seemed nice. The woman’s name was Beth. She was blonde and kind chunky but she had pretty blue eyes and a sweet soft voice. I liked her instantly when she gave me a white teddy bear with a pink ribbon.”

Levi watches Rose smile a little at the memory before her face becomes dark and her expression pinched. Her eyes are trained over his head at the small brown box TV’s black screen.

“Then…He came home. He was nice at first. He worked at a garage in town while Beth was a secretary so they often didn’t see each other until evenings. He looked right at me and smiled his slimy smile. I didn’t like him, he made me uncomfortable but I liked Beth so I tried to be nice, tried to just do what he wanted me to do.

It all happened so fast after he had decided I was going to stay with them, be their new daughter. He pulled me out of school when I hit eight. He said he wanted to teach me himself, about life. All he did was either lock me in my room to learn obedience or beat me for the simplest slight. Then he decided I needed to learn the family way.

He called it the ‘Playroom’. It was in the attic and was empty except for a red tall tool cabinet and a chair in the middle of the room. I was first brought there when I was around nine when I told him to go fuck himself. He dragged me up there by my hair and tied me by my hands so I suspended in the air. He took out some cable ties and began whipping me with them. This became ritual that once every week he would drag me up there and whip me.

I didn’t understand why he was doing it then one day Beth came up to get me. He had left me in the ‘Playroom’ to rot after a ‘lesson’ and Beth picked me up and began carrying me down to my room. I cried into her shoulder and asked her why and she told me it was a lesson he was trying to teach me, ‘Pain is weakness and weakness is death’. He was trying to teach me to shut off pain. And after that day I did. I didn’t feel pain anymore, just a hallow acceptance as he whipped me.”