whittle me down
(for the 2005 freeverse challenge. k was a kick ass beta and though i'm posting this late i actually wrote it on time. thanks to mosca for the beautiful quote and the awesome challenge. i loved it.)
"Whittle yourself to transparency. Cross the bridge look back. It is already turning to smoke. Soon it will not be there."
as it burns, sparks
in the wisps of your hair, and don't
In her dream, she sees herself on the other side of a bridge. She waves, trying to catch her twin's eye. Her other self looks sad, looks lost. She wants to comfort her, tell her it will all be okay.
She goes to cross the bridge, but stops. "Do not cross," she hears. Helen looks around. She is alone with her other self. There is no sign of the voice. She runs across the bridge and as she does, she can hear the wooden planks falling away.
She runs faster.
The other side is dark, and she calls out. "Hello?" But there is no answer. She is alone.
Alone in the darkness. She sits down, knees to chest, looking at the side she just left, and begins to cry.
There is always paint in her hair. Colored flecks that escape, finding refuge in her curls. She wonders what would happen if she washed her hair with turpentine. The paint clings underneath her fingernails no matter how hard she scrubs. Oils and acrylics, sometimes she likes to work in pastels, smudging the colors together with her fingertips.
This week they are drawing in pencil and ink, sketches of the body. Helen draws joints, elbows and knees intertwined. She draws a hand, and the lifeline is deliberately short.
It happens, and she thinks she doesn't remember. Doesn't want to remember. But he is there, omniscient, watching her. He found her in her bed, her roommate gone. He whispered in her ear and though she knew she screamed, she could not hear a sound.
Maybe his hand was across her mouth, maybe she didn't struggle. She doesn't remember; she remembers. His hands on her body. Her joints. Her hands pinned above her head.
He tore her nightgown apart and she clutched at open air. She was exposed, she was naked, she was human and so was he, only not. She tried to look him in the eye, but he slapped her across the face and told her not to look, to fantasize, because this is what she wanted, wasn't it?
Helen's twin bed begins to suffocate her. It was too small and they were too big. His hands were rough against her nipples. He bit one and she gasped. "Liked that, didn't you?" and she squeezed her eyes shut tighter. She knew what was coming, but she begged and pleaded until yes, his hand on her mouth, pressing hard.
She couldn't breathe.
He adjusted and then he was in her and she screamed into his hand, the sharp pain, the tightness, the tearing. He grunted. "You're so nice and tight, just the way I like it. Your first time?" She didn't move. He grabbed her hair and yanked back. "Answer me."
She nodded, eyes closed, anything to keep him happy, anything to make it stop. He laughed harshly. "They say you never forget your first."
Helen tried to think of a landscape, but all she saw was broken glass, and burning bridges.
He is gone as quickly as he came, and Helen, dried eyed, pulls her sheet above her head. She doesn't move. She can't move. She is frozen, torn, broken.
She falls into an uneasy sleep.
This time the bridge is burning, and she is in the darkness. She sees herself, waiting for her. Helen walks onto the burning bridge. "Do not cross," she hears, the same deep voice. Her other self calls out to her. Helen simply stands, sparks in her hair, and waits for the bridge to fall.
She goes to the hospital in overalls and a sweatshirt. They murmur behind the curtain and apologize for what they have to do. They comb her pubic hair, put her heels in metal stirrups. She answers the questions the police ask, though she knows there is little to go on. She doesn't really care. All she wants is a shower, hot and steamy.
They tell her she can leave, they tell her they will do their best to find him, they tell her they are so sorry.
She knows she has a file now. One Helen Brodie, nineteen, rape victim. She wonders if it mentions she was an art student.
Helen returns to the empty dorm room and sheds her clothes. She puts the shower on the highest possible setting and climbs in. She begins to scratch violently at her skin. She starts with her arms, and then her belly, angry red streaks left behind, her thighs and calves. She pulls at her hair, scratches her neck, her breasts, trying to get him off her.
She collapses in defeat, legs akimbo, and lets the water beat down on her back. She doesn't cry. She doesn't remember how.
She stays in bed for a week. She cannot move. She cannot face the morning, the afternoon, the night. She draws the curtains and tries to erase time.
Her books sit unread on her desk. She moves unsteadily from bed to bathroom to sink. She is afraid of throwing up. She drinks water, eats nothing, thinks about getting drunk. But it is too much effort to find alcohol in her uneasy state.
If she had close friends, they would wonder where she was. Helen always kept to herself, painting slowly, carefully. Avoiding. Sometimes they would do one-hour paintings, and she hated those, hated the quick mistakes she didn't have time to correct. Improvisation on canvas, and Helen always liked to know her lines.
She doesn't go to class. She misses Perception and Depth, The Horse in Chinese, Mongolian and Japanese art, Color, literature. She picks up a pencil to sketch something, but stares at the blank page for hours. She sleeps.
Sometimes that's all she thinks she can do.
Her roommate comes back and asks why the police have left a message on the machine. Helen simply walks away. She wears overalls and sweatshirts and scrapes at her skin in the shower.
She sits in the back of her classes, contemplates dropping out. Everything she draws is ordinary. Her professors have stopped trying to draw her out. The same sweatshirts, the same overalls, she is comfortable in them, she feels safe.
(She never feels safe.)
She paints. She paints only in oils and she begins to paint herself in a long red dress. She is disproportionally long. The red is dark, the color of stained blood. There are stains on her sheets. She takes them and hides them under her bed. She must find new sheets. She buys them in red, almost burgundy. They clash with her bedspread. Helen keeps on painting, makes her hair black, makes everything stark in contrast to the red.
She doesn't sleep while she paints. It is as if she is possessed, like the red shoes in the fairy tale, she will paint this red dress to her death. She might welcome death, she isn't sure. And so she paints, because it's all she knows how to do.
Her professors applaud her courage (they don't know; no one knows), stepping away from landscapes. "It's rare to reap such rewards outside one's comfort zone so early on."
They encourage her to continue the series. She merely walks away.
She paints in her room, her easel facing the window so she can keep watch. She paints herself through shards of glass. She avoids student events, gatherings, large crowds, though she is terrified of being alone. Her room locks automatically now and Helen wears the key on a string around her neck.
Her roommate has stopped asking her what is wrong, if everything is okay, and now just leaves and enters the room as if Helen were not there. Sometimes she might as well not be, curled up in the fetal position on her bed, eyes closed tightly.
She walks to class quickly, and then back to her room. Her overalls are paint-spattered, wearing thin at the knees. They paint outside one day and Helen works on a tree, treating each leaf with deft precision and grace. Her professors can't help but admit she is talented – still, she is no artist. Helen knows this, checking occasionally behind her, but she has ceased trying. She merely paints now, colors swirling, defining, colors in her colorless world.
She finishes her second painting, her face in different shades, a violent red scattered throughout. Then she is done, and she hides the paintings in the back of her closet.
Helen fades. She wonders where she is disappearing to.
After the two paintings, she sleeps. She forgets. The days bleed. She can no longer sketch a horse, full of movement. Helen is stagnant, tired, lost. Helen shrinks from the world around her.
She drops out of school, leaves her paints and everything but her two red paintings behind, becomes a waitress at a nearby diner. She leaves her landscapes of places she has never been. She leaves herself behind.
Her apartment is tiny, stained carpet and mold in the shower. She scrubs at the grout and it almost becomes livable. Sometimes she works double shifts, just to pass the time. She saves her money, but she doesn't know what for.
Her routine is simple. Wake up, make coffee. Shower, scrub at her skin. Get dressed. Go to the diner. Eat lunch. Collect tips. Head home and idly watch tv, nothing registering. Sleep. Rinse, repeat.
The police stop by the diner often, and she gets to know their names. She doesn't hold it against them, the fact they never found her rapist (even now it's hard for her to use the word). She smiles, and after a couple of months, she begins to brush her hair more carefully and waves goodbye when the regulars leave.
"Here's your coffee, Officer."
"Girardi. It's Officer Girardi. Or, you know, you could just call me Will. Since I know your name," he peers at her nametag, "Helen, it only seems fair that we're both on a first name basis."
Helen blushes. She finds him cute and feels guilty. It has been a year and three months since the incident.
She still feels traces of him on her skin. She still scratches herself in the shower. But she smiles now, and she calls this man Will, and somehow things seem to be feeling a bit like life again.
He asks her out for coffee, and then immediately apologizes. "You serve coffee all day, what was I thinking?" He smacks his hand on his forehead.
Helen smiles. "Coffee would be nice."
It would be her first time out in months, her first time really talking with someone.
He asks how she ended up at the diner, and Helen smiles, her habit when uncomfortable or embarrassed, and says, "Twist of fate," and he grabs her hands and says, "Lucky for me."
She laughs and looks away. He thinks she is desirable. He thinks she is attractive. He doesn't think she is broken, or fractured, or damaged. And she begins to think that maybe he sees her better than she sees herself, and spends that night staring at herself in the mirror, trying to find the cracks and creases she knows are there.
They date, and Helen finds herself laughing. He is funny, in a gentle sort of way, and she likes the way he comes up behind her and wraps his arms around her ribs. At first it panicked her, but she learned to breathe, and now she relaxes into his arms. She meets his friends, his partner, his family. She takes him home at Thanksgiving.
Helen reads poetry, Ferlihngetti, and repeats, "I am waiting for the rebirth of wonder," and she glances at Will, and prays to a God she doesn't believe in anymore. (Right?)
He fills in her white spaces. Will is confident and caring, and she hides behind Catholicism to keep him from touching. Funny how she uses her religion now, as a buffer, as a safety zone. Where was it when she needed to be safe?
They hold hands, and that is enough. Helen doesn't want anything more. He has a tendency to touch her face and ask what's wrong, but she just smiles and says nothing. He doesn't need to know, no one needs to know.
She dreams again of the bridge, caught fire, herself on the other side. She waits for the command, but this time the voice tells her to cross, urges her, whispers in her ear. Helen hesitates, sits down, cross-legged, and watches the bridge burn, watches herself on the other side, pacing.
She stops returning his phone calls. Her overalls appear again, sweatshirt over her head. She paints again, landscapes, because they are safe, because there are no people.
Will leaves insistent messages. He knocks on her door. She wishes she were invisible, and prays to God that this all goes away, that this was just a figment of her imagination. That she is not broken like glass, but whole like the sky, wide, open and appealing. If she is the sky, she hides behind dark clouds. If she is the sky, then the world is flat, for all Helen sees are endings.
He finds her after her shift, when she decides to return to work. Her hair is freshly washed, her apron ironed straight.
"Where have you been? Why don't you return my calls?" He reaches to touch her and she recoils in fear.
"Jesus, Helen, I'm not going to hurt you. It's me, Will. What happened?" He is frustrated, she can tell. And she yearns for him to wrap her in his strong arms and keep her safe, but she knows there's no such thing as safe. Will can't erase the past. Will can't take back what happened.
But maybe, just maybe, he can help her cross the bridge.
She smiles and says, "Nothing," and takes his hand. She pulls him into a hug and whispers, "I'm sorry."
"I was so worried," he said. "I didn't know what was wrong."
Helen looks him in the eyes and kisses him. "Nothing," she says, "Nothing at all," and it isn't quite a lie, she thinks, if you look at it the right way.
Three nights before they are to be married, Helen tells Will she was raped in art school. He is furious. His eyes blaze with something unknown to Helen. "What do you mean, you were raped?"
"A man crawled into my bed and raped me. It was a long time ago. It wasn't an end. You helped me see that."
Will is talking about "finding the bastard" at any cost, is raging, he is off balance. Helen reaches out and touches his hand. "It's over, Will. It happened. But we're together now. That's the important thing."
Later, she shows him her paintings. He is silent, taking it in.
"Why didn't you tell me?" He is quiet. It frightens her.
"I wanted it to disappear. I didn't want to be a victim in your eyes."
"Oh, Helen." He looks at her with wide, sad eyes. "Is this why-"
"I'm Catholic, Will." She falters. She stopped being Catholic that night. She looks away and laughs shortly. "As if Catholicism stopped me from doing anything."
He touches her face and kisses her forehead gently. He kisses her nose, her lips. She sighs into him.
"Is this okay?" he whispers, his hands tracing her outlines. Helen murmurs in response. He kisses her neck, her shoulders, her clavicle. She tries to stay still. She wants to give this to him, she wants to give herself to him.
They move to the bed. Helen wills herself not to shudder. This is Will, and he is tender and careful and he loves her. They are to be married in three days.
She is still as they make love, breaths heavy as he touches her in all the right places. He rolls off of her. "Are you okay?" Helen musters a smile. "Never been better," and she kisses him to convince herself that this is who she is now, that this is where she's supposed to be.
She dreams of a burning bridge, herself on the other side. "Cross," says the voice, and she puts one foot on the planks. The heat encroaches and she tries not to cough. "Cross," she hears and she begins to walk, sparks flying in her hair. She is not afraid.
She meets herself on the other side.
"Hello," says her other self. "I've been waiting for you."