STANDARD DISCLAIMER APPLIED.
chronologicby: pixie paramount (10/28/2007, 12:56 PM)
The People Under the Stairs, Roach-centric (implied Mommy/Daddy, Roach/Alice, Daddy/Alice) & she's in that pretty white dress again
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i.
She's wearing that pretty, lily-white dress like the good little girl Mommy always wanted but never got until now.
In the walls, he watches as Mommy smacks her because of this-and-that and he listens to the girl crying in her room, curled in her bed as Mommy leaves ("Disobedient girls burn in hell!") with a loud slam of the door behind her.
He creeps to her through the open vents in the walls, hovers over her, singing missing-tongue lullabies to her until she sleeps. It hurts, sometimes, because she cries into her pillow as she tries to sleep. She still wishes to be free (real deep down) like he and the rest of the world outside their own is—how they used to be.
And he hopes that, one day, she can be.
He hopes that, one-day, he can be, too.
ii.
Roach tries to tell her of his big, grand dreams but he knows it is useless when all he can do is make salivated grunts and whines. (Sometimes, he misses having a tongue.)
So, instead, he keeps his dreams to himself. His dreams are always about him and her running into the big, bright, sinful world Mommy and Daddy despise. In his dreams, they keep on running and running and running until nobody can stop them—not even God.
Roach knows that he dreams of the impossible.
iii.
Alice is blooming like a weed as of late. The little baby-doll dresses feel tight around her chest and constricting around her thin, asparagus arms. Mommy has to make her new dresses now.
Roach remembers that he did, too, not long before. He sprouted like a sequoia, tall and proud, while she still played with dolls rather than stitched them to house the souls of those unlucky enough to wander in.
He watches Alice and she that she is becoming.
And he knows that he is not the only one who is noticing.
Mommy notices and her eyes have begun to bleed green when she is around Alice. As of late, every little thing sets Mommy off around Alice. (Roach hates the bruises and the tears and the blood and the fright, doe-like eyes the most—but not as much as he hates Mommy for doing that to her.)
Daddy, too, and it scares Roach when he notices the looks Daddy sometimes gives Alice when he doesn't think anyone is there (but Roach is always there, in the rafters, behind the walls). There is always something masked, unnamed, in the way Daddy looks at Alice.
It's a lot like how he looks at Mommy.
Roach hates that the most.
(It's why he escaped.)
iv.
At night, Roach climbs in through the air-ducts, between the secret cracks and loose paintings that only he knows are there, and climbs out from the walls and tiptoes quietly besides Alice's bed. HE watches her sleep at night, notes each intake of breath and—
Every bruise on her skin, every tear she has ever shed, everything.
Roach sometimes feels that he is no better than Mommy or Daddy. Sometimes, he feels worse.
v.
If he could, Roach would tell her every single day that he loves her.
(It's the only thing he resents about not having a tongue: being unable to speak the most important words you could ever tell someone.)
vi.
He enjoys riling Daddy to hell and back. He likes crawling around and screaming his high-pitches screams. He likes the thrill of it all; he enjoys it.
He doesn't like how Mommy treats Alice. He doesn't like how Alice fears. He doesn't like how Alice doesn't truly live—she can't even breathe without Mommy's say so—and he hates, most of all, how Mommy will hurt Alice.
(He hates the days where Alice is red-faced and teary; hates the bruises dotting her skin and the scorch-marks that twist and twirl all over her skin like tie-dye.)
He fears for the days that Mommy will want to cut out Alice's pretty little eyes, tongue, and ears. He fears for her. (He doesn't want her to ever be like the children in the basement, to be like him.
He wants her to be better than this—to find something more than this non-life.)
vii.
When Fool stumbles into their lives, Roach can see for the briefest moment that Alice has a chance at living now.
He hopes that Fool can give her everything he never could and everything he wishes she could have. He hopes that Fool could save them—her.
Roaches last few days are spent wanting nothing else but seeing Alice smile like she really is alive and not—
A ghost of what she was and not what she was made into by Mommy and Daddy.
viii.
(With his last breath, he vows that he'll save her.)
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Author's Note: …I blame my brother and his girlfriend who, after watching this movie, started to refer to one another as "Mommy" and "Daddy". It inspired me. "The People Under the Stairs" © Wes Craven, Paramount Studios. – pixie paramount (10/13/2007, 1:21 AM)