I tilted my head upwards and looked to the sky, but it didn’t look like the sky. It was black and haunting with millions of unseen beings floating away in it. My eyelids kissed and the drop in temperature around me made my skin prick. It was the universe’s way of letting me know I was a small being, that my existence meant next to nothing. I was taken aback at how sudden it spoke to me. Tonight it wasted no time in letting me know that I was insignificant, that there were people and planets and space protruding for trillions of miles and I was nothing but a speck. An unwelcome speck in the scheme of life.
I could see her in my mind, the way her blonde hair used to fall around her face and the way she’d purse her lips when she was thinking of something utterly revolting. I saw how she’d turn her back to me when she noticed I was coming. I heard her carefree laugh that plagued my nightmares. Her giggle when I wasn’t around seemed to signify a dagger, a dagger always meant for me.
She was nothing more than a speck. Just like me, she didn’t matter.
I turned away from the darkness and walked with feet that didn’t seem to belong to my body. They stepped along the hazy stones one in front of the other but I never told them to move. Suddenly I saw the lights of the house in the distance. They seemed like an alien dwelling, but it in reality it was my home.
~~~
“Where were you?” James questioned me as if I was a prisoner rather than his awkward stepdaughter.
“Out.” Was all I said without making eye contact with him. I never made eye contact with him, for fear of his cold black rat’s eyes transforming mine to reciprocate the emptiness his held. James reached out his slender long spider fingers to grab my arm and drag me throughout the florescent-ly lit house to the kitchen table. As we rounded the beige walls of the house the, again, alien looking dinner table came into sight.
It was a nice table, mahogany and dark, with a center piece that would appear in a catalog. My mother sat on the end, gazing in my direction. I did not meet her eyes either. She was a stranger to me, and I to her.
I wiggled away from James’ grasp and slid into place beside Laurie. James took long strides as he awkwardly advanced to the opposite end of the table. He rested both his hands on either side of the arm rest of his chair before bending down, and finally sitting. It was a peculiar ritual he partook of every time he sat. It was simple and small, I know, but every time it caused my insides to twitch, and want to reach out and avenge him for it.
With James sitting, my mother gingerly picked up the knife as if we had a million years worth of time to live our lives. She moved with care and gently cut into the roast laying on the table before her. The pot was spotted with water marks and scratches from silverware. The meat inside that she had prepared was a light brown; it was most likely dry and bristle. Laurie and I were expected to swallow lumps of it with the defrosted, freezer burned corn and vegetables.
On my left elbow Laurie’s warm body bumped into mine. She was a head smaller than me, but she was only ten years old. I watched her perfectly proportioned arms reach across the table to dish up the food. She created mountains of the tasteless food that I watched her gulp down, knowing that later that night she’d run into my bathroom to throw it all up again. I speckled my plate with the greens from broccoli, browns from meat, and oranges from carrot salad, red tomatoes, and yellow corns. I rearranged my food, mixed it together, and separated it all again throughout the silent, dull dinner.
I was a vegetarian. My mother never bothered to retain that tidbit about me.
~~~
In the blackness I could make out the silhouette of the ceiling fan, spinning around and around. Very faintly I could feel the air that whirled towards me as I laid blinking alone in bed. My brunette hair fell around the pillow and I fingered it with my left hand. I remembered her hair. It always smelled like salon shampoo, like it had just been cut. It was the most beautiful hair I had seen and I envied it. We’d sit on the floor in a train, with me at the end and I’d brush her hair with the black brush that I kept in my top drawer of my dresser.
