No, Britt This Is The Start

You'd always known you loved writing. You used to write about the way your mother would scowl at your crooked hat every September you went back to boarding school. You used to write about the way your father spoke in Latin when he addressed you in the mornings. You used to write about the way in family photos, your brother and sister would be sat neatly together on a bench or something, smiling so perfectly you'd think they were being paid in chocolate and you'd always be looking away or bitting your lip or crying.

It was the same at boarding school. You didn't really like serious photos. But when it came to taking photos with your friends in the boarding house, you loved it. You'd stick your tongue out, pout, go cross-eyed and on the rare occasion, actually be looking towards the lens.

Your drama teacher used to tell you it was such a shame you were no good in pictures because you actually had a great smile. You didn't mind her telling you that though, since she was your favourite teacher and performance was your favourite lesson. For a while, you got to be someone else and that person could smile all they wanted. And as big and bright as they wanted too.

When you eventually finished school, aged eighteen, you didn't want to go to college because you wanted to spend a year working out what it was you wanted to do. Your parents hadn't taken too kindly to this but after you got a job, they sort of backed off. They still reminded you every dinner time that if you want to get anywhere in life you have to go to university but like with everything, you just tried to shake it off.

You'd got your job sort of accidentally. You'd been walking through the summer meadows around the back of your house, lazily sipping a banana milkshake through a strawberry lace, (you'd had a whole packet in your pocket), when you'd noticed a small cardboard box under the twirling roots of an oak tree. Thinking back to it now, it all sounds so picturesque and lovely but in reality it had started to pour with rain and you really hated thunder and lightening.

But this box had seemed so out of place dumped in the middle of this beautiful green meadow - like placing an inner city block of flats in the middle of Ohio's most prized village. So you'd gone over to remove it, since it was littering your meadow, and soon you'd realised, like the Snow White that you were, that it contained four tiny gold and white puppies barely a day old. Your first thought had been that they were abandoned there by an owner who didn't want them but then you'd wondered maybe if they'd been stolen or misplaced. You never found out and you probably never will but you picked that box up like it contained the crown jewels and you carried it so carefully back through the village. It had totally been an accident that you'd bumped into Meredith Smith on your way through as she had just been picking up her lunch from the grocery store. Looking back, it was quite a miracle really that you'd seen her because had you taken those puppies back home, god knows what would have happened to them since your parents would have done nothing but scoff at them and tell you to drown them in the lake. But Mrs Smith had gasped just the same way you had and had hurried you into her small and very ancient book shop on the other side of town.

You'd been soaking from trying to keep the puppies dry and when you'd entered her shop, she'd taken you straight to the fire round the back, removed your coat, handed you an old dry and fraying wooly jumper and placed the puppies one by one into a bed of old scarves and blankets in front of the fire. You had no idea what had happened to their mother but judging from the way the puppies' golden coats had been tainted with white, like strokes of the prettiest paint, you were pretty sure they hadn't been the pedigrees this area of the state was well known for breeding.

Mrs Smith and you had spent hours trying to get them warm. She hadn't bothered to phone the vet. It had been a Sunday and from the way she had them wrapped in a cocoon and rubbed their backs rather roughly, you'd felt a bit like maybe she'd done this before. It was about seven in the evening when you finally got them stirring. You had heated them some out-of-date milk formula Mrs Smith so conveniently had still stored in her cupboards from her daughter's pregnancy, in her cottage next door, and since neither of you had any idea whether they could drink it or not, you risked it since they were on death's door anyway. And since that moment, you don't think you have ever felt so significant in all your life.

Mrs Smith kept those puppies in the back room of her cottage book shop for the following weeks after that. Soon, you'd got them opening their eyes and running around playing tag with each other and eventually, you noticed how they all had different personalities. There had been the lightest puppy, Muppet, nicknamed after the way she constantly bashed into everything. Little Judy had been named after tipping over Mrs Smith's punch at her annual summer party and Todd had just been a really odd dog, always sitting in the middle of the room and staring for ages into space. He was a dreamer much like you and Mrs Smith, always making you laugh.

And then there had been Peter. Peter had been your favourite. Peter had liked to pretend he could fly. And because of that, you'd instantly singled him out. He was a fox red colour and he had this gorgeous white blaze going from his left ear all the way down his chest. He was the best. And even after Muppet had been taken home by Mrs Smith's daughter and Judy had gone to live at the local Irish pub and Todd had ended up curled in the armchair of an old man in town, Peter remained right by that fire and he hadn't left since.

You'd spent every waking moment you had with that dog as he grew up, teaching him all the tricks you could think of and walking him through the meadow. It hadn't taken Mrs Smith long before she'd offered you a job. She had used the excuse, "my knees aren't what they used to be", and thrown you right behind that cashier without even so much as a "you're hired."

So as far as a job went, you'd felt like you had hit the jackpot. You spent all day reading books, pitching story-lines to possible buyers, listening to all of Mrs Smith's many tales and sitting next to Peter.

(Mrs Smith referred to him as your dog and you loved that more than anything.)

But after all the fun you had during the day, laughing along side Mrs Smith, Peter and the regular customers, you always come home to nothing. And not nothing as in, no house, no parents, no room, no space, no family etc. Nothing, as in every single evening you walked back into that house you were engulfed in an overwhelming stench of rotting, stale emptiness. No one in your house would ever ask how your day had been. No one would wait up for you, or have dinner cooked for you waiting on the side counter. No one. You learnt how to be independent from a very young age.

Yet you were certain that from an outsiders point of view, that house was nothing short of perfect.

As a teenager, coming home from boarding school wasn't always the same level of excitement as it was for your friends. You'd often be five minutes away from the house, the journey home with your mother deathly silent, and you'd have to remind yourself what everything looked like. You told yourself to open that front door like you were an outsider since that's exactly what you felt like. You said you'd breathe in that warm and homely scent of home cooked togetherness oozing straight from the family kitchen so deeply, your lungs would go numb from doubt and when you saw your father for the first time you would think of him as the strong and respected figure the rest of the world saw him as and you would smile at him like he controlled all the stars and the universe. Like he could do anything for you and make you feel a tiny bit like you were special. Because you were simply in his presence.

But it never worked.

You'd be back in your room and under your duvet before your father even recognised the Range Rover back on the driveway.

You would lie in your bed for days after you came home. And back then, it didn't seem so wrong and so... well, abnormal. It just seemed like you. Fitting, somehow. And you'd lie there spending hours and hours just thinking. You remember once reading a quote from Winona Ryder that she was the world's biggest procrastinator saying something along the lines of, "if it exists, I've fucking thought about it." And that was you, too. You would think about all the times you'd tried to ask for your sister's help with makeup and hair and how she'd always reply with, "isn't that what you learn at boarding school?" You'd think of how your brother once tried to teach you darts and he never bothered again since you were so much better at it than he was.

And you would think mostly about elephants. And how there was this girl at school who adored elephants but who looked so terrified all of the time you thought that maybe she was actually scared of them.

(That girl was just like you.)

You nicknamed that girl Nana since she was always a part of the novel, but could never go on the adventure.

Nana helped you forget how terrible things felt at home. Her presence was so loud yet she was always so quiet. She was fascinating, yet easily forgettable. Always moving, yet standing so still. Popular, yet totally friendless.

You never really talked to Nana. (You can't much remember her name.) But she was just like you. And you'd always find yourself thinking about her and her elephant slippers regardless of what you had been thinking about before.

You'd wonder if she went home to a house like yours or whether her house was much different.

You still wondered about Nana, even as you were reading stories to Peter by the fire. You still wondered about her when you walked home in the dark and you always wondered about her when you were pulling the knots out of your mangled shoulder length blonde hair in front of your mangled and stained mirror.

And you wondered about Nana because one hundred and fifty miles away, she was sat in a horribly dry hospital bed, with a drip line attached to her hand and a wire attached to her chest, being force fed through a tube because she couldn't bare to open her mouth for anything.

Again and again and again, Nana was just like you.

Just. Like. You.

And as you stared that into your mirror that lonely August night, all you could see in yourself was Nana's reflection.

Bones, blades, and blossoms and blossoms of bright black blood.