Tainted Reverie

By Ami E. Bowen

The girl sat, legs bent at the knees and pulled up to her chin, in a dim corner of the stifling room, pale hair hanging in lank limp strands on either side of her face, like a gossamer curtain to hide behind. Two huge blue eyes peered out from the slit of her hair and stared blankly at nothing.



Her hands were wrapped about each other around her legs tightly, her fingers trembling slightly with the effort.



The smell of rot and death circled her. She closed her eyes and prayed to die.



She opened her eyes, hours, days, later. And cringed at a glare of sunlight beaming in through a cracked and blood-smeared window overhead. The shaft bouncing from one ghastly horror to another and slicing razor-sharp through her mind, severing any shadowed hope that all of it had just been some terrible misunderstanding, a kind of walking nightmare.



But she saw the dreadful truth in clear day light. Nothing could be denied.



Nothing.



She began to weep, huge gasping sobs flowed out of her small form, shaking her like the hands of an angry parent, tears spilling down her cheeks, to her knees, to the floor like colorless droplets of helplessness. She felt the confusion and self-pity rise up and threaten to choke her.



No!



The thought glanced off her mind like lightning in still air, loud and alarming, almost an audible scream. She pulled herself up in bed and starting breathing heavily. Sheets clutched in her small fists, sweat dripping from her brow, soaking her pajamas, and making them stick to her skin. She threw the sheets to one side, untangled her legs from the thin blue blanket and swung her slender legs over the side of the bed.



Her bare feet recoiled at the touch of the cold wood floor and she covered her mouth with her hands, glancing about, afraid of waking the others.



The beds were so damned near each other.



The room was hot.



Too hot.



She stood up and padded silently towards the window in the back of the room, her feet making soft thump-thump sounds in the still room.



She reached the windows, gazing out at the moon, a half-disk of white light in a star-filled black sky, and lifted her hands to the latch across the middle.



The sounds of breathing and buzz-like snores enveloped her from all sides. Someone whimpered, bed coils squeaked and the whimper became and soft moan and then nothing.



She waited, hands poised over the latch, breath held. She sighed when the dreamer did not awaken. She turned the latch, a cracking sound issued, she covered it with her hands, hoping to muffle it, and swung the window wide.



A blast of warm air struck like a slap across the face, she staggered and nearly fell. The portable fan in the corner whispered and whirred and looked pitiful on the small T.V. tray by the closet, as if it knew it\'s job was lax and should be replaced by a better air conditioning system. Many times she had wanted to knock the thing to the floor and stomp on it, destroying it. It really served no purpose beyond circulating the stale, humid air about the room and making nearly everyone ill with everyone else\'s myriad colds and illnesses.



She turned from the windows and looked about the room of beds, cots really, gray and dingy. A sea of lumpy blankets and sheets, powdered blue and beige, stared back at her. She watched them all, snoring, sleeping, and dreaming.



She watched them and wondered.



Yes she wondered.



The room was so hot.



Too hot.



It was always so hot.



Her nose had begun to bleed, again, but she didn\'t care. She let the blood drip and stain and clot and do all that nosebleed was meant to do, indifferent, uncaring. She watched the purple and green splotches in front of her eyes grow and circle and spin and flicker. Finally they disappeared as more sun issue through.



She had spent the night crouched in the corner, the fan was on the floor near her feet, fallen, yet not broken. It\'s plastic gray blades continued to turn, facing the ceiling and spun flakes of dusk about within a vapid current.



A small, scattering sound by her feet. She looked and watched with vague interest as the rat sniffed her big toe, placed its small eerily human-like claws on her ankle and rose onto it\'s hind legs, long whiskers twitching, trying to determine if she were food or enemy. Apparently neither, the black and white rodent scattered off, ducked beneath a bed and was out of sight. She envied that rat.



\"Momma! Momma how could you? How could you?\" she thought. The thought was more a plea than a question, or even an accusation. She dipped her fork into the lumpy mush and tried to swallow the dreadful bite, not even certain what was in it. She stared at her bowl, refusing to look around. She didn\'t need to, she knew what was around her.



She sat at the end of a long picnic table, covered with a blue plastic cover and candles burned in a long row down the center of the table.



The sound of eating, whispering, laughing, choking, slapping. She took another bite.



Benches moaned in complaint and there was a whistle, loud and sharp and insistent. She scraped the bottom of the bowl, unfazed and unhurried, lapping up the last of the spongy substance. <

Something hit her from behind and her head smacked the table, hitting the rim of the bowl and causing it to skitter to the other end of the table, fall onto the floor and spin on it\'s bottom for a moment. Spattered with running breakfast, she watched the bowl spin slowly to a stop.



\"Why?\" she thought.



She turned around, legs under the table and looked up at the woman in front of her.



Her eyes grew large at the expression of irritated anger covering the large dark-haired woman\'s pudgy face, tears began to well. For a moment she thought her mother had come back for her.



She almost cried out \"Momma\"! Until she saw the huge hand, fat and repulsive, covered with flesh and brown age spots, rising above her.



A flash of silver, and she realized later it had been the woman\'s cheap watch reflecting off the candle light.



She was on the floor, her was head spinning and the side of her face hot and numb. She stared up. A booted foot kicked her in the rump, not hard but enough to cause her further humiliation and pain. She began to wail. She couldn\'t help it. She always lost it too soon, always. As if her mind and her body were of two different worlds, unable to intercept and work with each other. The one always betraying the other.



She was made to sit in the corner for the rest of the morning. A punishment for her slow and lazy ways.



\"Momma\" she sobbed to herself, wanting to rip out that woman\'s throat so bad it made her hands tremble and her body shake. \"why did you leave me here? Why?\"



She heard voices and wondered if the police had finally come. They had not come that night, in fact, no one had came. She wondered how negligent those who were paid to protect people could really be, if given half the chance.



She wished the rat would come back. She was awfully lonely. Soon enough though she would hear heavy and hurried footsteps in the hall, voices shouting, frightened, amazed, and afflicted.



She closed her eyes and decided to feign sleep. It would be better if they found her that way, she could claim shock and not have to answer as many questions.



Her best friend was Kelly VanRichson. She was tall, dark girl with eyes too small for head and a mouth always smiling. She was a joker and clown and knew how to make the best of a bad situation. She loved Kelly more than anything. She shadowed the slightly older girl\'s days with



her shy presence, a small waifish creature nearly hidden behind the girl\'s blooming skirts and petticoats.



Everyone teased Kelly about her \'shade\'. Kelly would laugh and pat



her on the top of her head, telling her she was just fine. Kelly was the only girl she\'d ever talked to. The only girl who\'d ever listened.



How she\'d grieved so when Kelly went away one night and never came back. She\'s been adopted, they said with mock-glad smiles of goodwill pasted across their features.



\"Be happy for her....be happy for her...\". She had cried herself into a torpor of numbness for days afterwards.



Later, as she was finishing up a chore with consisted of scrubbing the toilets down with cleanser, she saw that someone had left the door to the basement open a crack.



Curious, she put down her sponge and, still on her hands and knees, crawled over to the door. She shoved it open with the palm of her hand and an abhorrent scent wafted up the stairs through the darkness, assaulting her.



She tilted her head, covered her mouth and nose with her hand and pulled herself to her feet. She had never smelled anything so awful. She wondered about it.



In spite of a sudden surge of fear, she felt along the side of the wall for the light switch, groping through masses of cobweb and dead insects, she finally found it.



The small switch felt hot under her sweaty hand and she flicked it upwards. Light flooded the basement, blinding her. She stood and waited for her eyes to get used to the glare.



She choked back a scream when she saw it. Kelly VanRichson laid at the bottom the stairs, a crumpled mass of flesh, her dark skin gray and wan, naked and bruised. Kelly looked as if she were a rag doll, discarded by a selfish child. And oh, so dead. So completely, utterly dead.



She stood and stared and felt bolted to the floor by invisible hands, her heart gave a lurch and them seemed to cease.



One eye had been removed and the socket seemed an entrance into horror. She couldn\'t stop staring at that black hole.



Sometime later she was able to move and her heart began to beat again. She backed away from that ghastly



scene, aware of the wrongness of it all, and the shock turning from fear to anger.



\"How could they?\" She screamed to herself as she turned out the light, shut the door and walked back to the unfinished toilet \"Damn them, damn them! How could they!?\"



She began to scrub the floor around the toilet, hard, hard enough to feel the floor beneath the skimpy wash sponge.



She awoke sometime that night to an itch on her leg. She scratched at it and rolled over, going back to sleep. Her hand moved under the blanket as she continued to scratch the itch on the inside of her right thigh. She wondered what bug had bit her now. Spider most likely.



The next morning there was a huge rash across her thigh and around her leg towards her buttocks.



She went to the nurse and got some lotion. The rash went away in few days. But something else would take its place.



She had cut herself in class one day. It was only a paper cut across the fleshy part of her thumb but it had bled profusely. She enjoyed watching the ruby drops fall to stain the white notebook paper on the desk. It did not transpire to her that the blood was coming out much to fast and too thickly until her entire desk was covered with it and it began to drip down towards her lap.



The others pointed and gathered around, glad for some hiatus in their learning process.



The teacher slapped her across the face and handed her a paper towel from the dispenser over the sink. She wrapped the brown towel around her thumb and watched the blood blossom and clot through the material. The teacher excused her to go to the nurse.



The nurse gave her a bandage and some more lotion. She went to her cot and lay down, fabricating sickness. She fell asleep and dreamed of paper cuts.



She became obsessed with her own blood. She would spend hours with a small sewing needle, stolen from home etch, jabbing it into her fingers and watching the crimson rise to the surface of her flesh. She spent her free time locked in the bathroom, pricking her thumbs and fingers with the needle.



After a while she grew brave enough to try using a small knife or a blade of glass. She could not locate a knife and any silverware taken from the tables at mealtimes would be missed, each child searched. She resorted to breaking a glass bottle and taking one of the shards. She kept it wrapped in a scrap of cloth in her pocket.



She enjoyed the way it felt as it slid across her the palm of her hand, tingly and hot and itchy at once. The pain, there is always pain, came later like the after effect of a drug.



No one bothered her and she made certain to hide her scars well enough, injuring only the inside of her hands.



She began to wonder about the others. Would their blood be as pretty or as bright as her own. Would they fear the blossom or find it beautiful and be filled with awe?



Those thoughts stayed with her.



The voices were closer now, certainly they were.



She would be taken away and maybe locked up again. She didn\'t really



care, not now, not ever.



She sighed and stared down at the floor, ready to close her eyes the moment the door banged open.



\"Good god in heaven!\"



Good, they had come. Now it would end.



\"What in....what the hell....?\"



They must have seen it, seen it, seen it all. She knew her thoughts were rambling, but she didn\'t care, she was too happy to care.



\"Hal, come here, would ya?\" The voice was low and deep, a man\'s. She silently wondered about him too, wondered about his thoughts and motives, his life.



\"What do you think?\"



\"That something horrible happened, sir,\" answered Hal, a woman. Maybe Hal was short for Hailey? \"I\'ve never seen anything so...all those kids...my god!\"



\"Yeah,\" The man said, \"Are you okay, Hal? Not gonna be sick on me?\"



\"No...yeah, I\'m all right,\" She said, \"I can\'t believe....they\'re all...?\"



They walked toward the first bed,



She thought excitedly, I know it! They\'re pulling back the covers...back the covers! I know it!. She sat still, not moving, aware that she was hidden by the stillness and shadowy corner. One move would



betray her secret.



She thought of Kelly and wondered how they could have done it to her. How they could have been so cruel and heartless. She wondered how her mother could have been so inhuman.



The woman screamed and ran out of the room.



\"Yes, good! Run you bitch. You like them all. All of them. They only hurt and keep on hurting and never say they\'re sorry, never sorry never, never, never!\"



Her hands were fists now, laying at her sides, fingernails digging painfully into cut-scared palms. Anger, a sickness in her gut, churning, welling up in her throat, nearly gag her her.



The window let in air and gave her the strength to turn around. She took the glass shard from her pocket and advanced towards the first bed. She peered at the angelic-looking face beneath her. She kissed the slightly parted lips, lifted her head and held her hand over the child\'s mouth.



With a swiftness born of determination and stifled rage, she slide the shard hard across the child\'s throat and watched her eyes pop open.



She held her hand over her mouth to stifle her gurgled cries.



\"Shh!\" She whispered, \"Close your eyes. You\'re having a nightmare. Go back to sleep. Don\'t wake the others.\"



She removed her hand and the blood-covered piece of glass, which was nearly larger than her hand, and pulled the blanket up over the child\'s head.



She saw how nice the blood was, so bright, so red.



Beautiful.



She smiled and turned to the next bed. Her damned curiosity not sated.



\"Oh my god...\"



She felt warm breath on her shoulder and knew the man was kneeling before her.



She waited.



He tapped her and she stirred. \"I found a live one!\" He yelled, \"Hal! Hurry! Get a blanket anart art the car! We\'ve gotta get her outta here!\"



She opened her eyes and looked up into his face. Hatred glared from within those blue orbs.



He recoiled and reached out to pat her shoulder in a reassuring gesture, mistaking her expression for fear.



\"It\'s gonna be all right, kid.\" He said, \"I promise.\"



\"I know...\" She whispered, her tongue felt thick and lifeless in her mouth, \"I know.\"



She began to cry again. Damn it! Sobbing like an idiot on the floor, her head between her legs and her clothing covered with gore. She wailed loudly, she couldn\'t stop.

He reached out to embrace her. Maybe to comfort her, maybe to comfort himself.



\"What a mess,\" she thought, as her fingers wrapped around the sticky-slick fragment of ill-used glass. \"I\'ve got to get out of here.\"



She brought her hand from behind her back and plunged the shard into the man\'s throat, slightly amused at the tip of glass which protruded from his neck toward her.



He stared in surprise at her, his hands rising to feel the point of glass exiting his throat, bejeweled with blood.



She watched him die and noticed that hisod tod too, had been lovely.



The woman came back in and screamed.



\"I want to go home,\" she thought. \"I want out of here. Why did put put me here? Oh God Why?\" She sobbed and screamed.



The woman ran to her, lifted her up and hugged her close.



The woman\'s perfume was horrid, strong and so familiar.



She wrapped her thin arms around the woman\'s neck and whispered \"Momma.\"



And was answered. \"I love you darling,\" She said, \"I hope you weren\'t too miserable here.\"



\"No,\" She said. \"I made the best of it. Can we go home now?\"



\"Certainly, I\'m feeling better now. The doctor said you can come home to stay now.\"



\"I\'ve missed you, Momma.\"



Her mother checked her out of the hospital by signing the right amount of forms and talking to a few people. She watched it all dispassionately, happy to be leaving this stifling place.



She looked at the fan in the corner and wished she could knock it over.ONT>ONT>



A dark skinned girl seated against the wall to her right smiled and waved. She raised her hand to wave and the smooth, unblemished flesh of her palm met the air.



Her mother came back and took her hand, leading her out.



Her fantasies lingered in the back of her mind, shut away, now there was no longer any use for them.



She still wondered about the blood, though. She still wondered.



Someday she would come back and knock that damn fan to the ground.



~End~