The upstairs smelled like pennies.
I spent the afternoon lounging in a pool of death in the upstairs bathtub. I would cut carefully and heal. Sporadically and heal. The tub would be left red with blood from a source long dead and I felt nothing for the hours I would waste this way. The bathtub offered a memory to cut to without the presence of the boy I once shared it with. People stopped bothering me during these sessions. I remember calling "GO AWAY" until my voice was hoarse and unfamiliar to my family and Tate. Lately I'd spent my days in quiet living slowly.
It had been many years and I had lost track when the outside world had paid less visits to my home. Standing in front of the mirror I still saw a girl, not the woman that I felt I had been for a long time. I wanted to see a crack, a dent, a hint of something. I wanted a badge of wisdom and time spent. The smoothness before me felt a lie.
I toweled off and lit a cigarette, smoke disappearing into the steam from the hot water draining. I opened the door to our room…I mean my room. It smelled of him and the scuffs that had built up on the windowsill over the years confirmed his presence. He was a ghost among ghosts these days living unseen. I hadn't seen him in so long, just a ruffled sheet, a quickly erased letter on the chalk board, or a scuffed windowsill.
Maybe someday I'll be lonely enough to call out to him, but for now I lingered in quiet toleration as many of the murder house's guests did.
Our altercations in the first year after I confronted him had set a tone that left him afraid of another face to face heartbreak. The last of them was in the basement.
"I love you violet. I love you! Tell me how to fix this. PLEASE?" He wept into my sweater, tugging with white knuckles on the bottom of it as he sunk to his knees.
"You love me?" I asked coldly.
"of cour-" He began to choke out.
"You're an ugly hearted monster Tate! You don't know how to love." I yelled as I tried to yank sweater out of his hands.
"No, no please" He cried into me, his usual handsome face was ugly, twisted and red from crying. I felt that they had become real, but the monster I saw in him couldn't have left. The monster he was, that he is, couldn't win this time.
"You're nothing but darkness. You deserve to rot here" I called and I struck his wet face with all that my small hand had.
"NO! Wait. Please Violet! Don't-" He pleaded into my sweater muffled and choking.
"GO AWAY!" I screamed. He disappeared as my command echoed through the basement. I was left then with a catch in my throat and a wet sweater.
I cried then like a child. I cried until I felt nothing more in me and I climbed those stairs upward for the last time, disappearing before he continued his banishment where I stood.
That memory wasn't my proudest moment. He had been trying to prove himself to me so constantly and so soon that I came at him with the kind of rage that I had feared to find in him.
I took another puff from my cigarette watching the street from the scuffed sill. It didn't matter now. Our love had become so distant; it was very possible that it had never existed at all.
We were expecting new guests soon and I wanted to scope them out as I usually did. With new people I came to expect a little life to come back for a month or two until they would surely run away. They always ran away in horror of the things that lurked in the home. There had been a unspoken law in the house after the death of the Harmon family. No more Murder. Not out of kindness, the turning of a new leaf, or some respect for life. The house despite its size was becoming crowded. While the majority of the angry, sad, and lost residents had confined themselves to the basement it was agreed that another permanent guest would be unwanted by all.
I watched as my parents stood in the lawn as a moving truck halted in the driveway. An old gray woman and her sickly husband seemed to be the new residents. The older woman smiled up her new place and helped her husband get inside. She had a kind face and soft eyes the kind I would imagine a loving grandmother to have. The man seemed lost, moving slowly with a walker. Movers followed behind them with heavy ornate furniture asking the kind faced woman where she wanted her things placed. From the sounds downstairs they didn't seem very careful.
