Citrine Tunbark District 1 FINISHED

All you need to know about me is that I’m the fleeting wisp of yellow that flickers out of sight around a corner like a match being snuffed out. I’m the rustle of your curtains if you dared to leave the windows open at night, the fleeting footfalls that follow the realization that your wallet has gone missing from your pocket. I’m a peek, a glimpse- way too quick for you to really get a hold of, so you’d better commit that moment, that one second when you get a look at the fine gold hairs on the back of my head to memory before I’m gone. It’s the best look you’re ever likely to get.

And then you’ll wonder if you’ve ever seen me at all, or if you just imagined it.

My mom used to call me her little fallen star, a miracle, a gift to her from the sky. I always thought that this was just something nice that moms say but now I think about it- knowing her- she probably called me that because she found me unattended in a stroller somewhere while a woman stopped quickly inside to pick up a carton of cigarettes, a jug of milk, vegetables, anything and ran off with me. Which, you know is fine because she’s still my mom and everything but yeah, it would explain why I don’t remember all that much about being a kid and why there are no baby pictures or anything, not a single one even when I was going through all her most precious stuff (read: all her oldest junk) I couldn't find anything. Also, you do have to bear in mind that my mom was what you’d call a bonafide, A grade, professional crazy person.

Saying that, there are some things that we do share- or are starting to share, though that is getting into the nature versus nurture, hereditary gene argument that I don’t know that much about. Lookswise, me and my mom are worlds apart. Mom always rocked this ethereal, waify fairy look with these huge dinner plate eyes and almost translucent skin like you could see every vein and blood vessel underneath, so pale that she was ,like, fuzzy around the edges like a cloud or something, never quite human, never quite on earth all the way. She was a red head too- while I’m a blonde, right down to the tips of my blonde eyelashes- it was a fresh, pale sort of orange like peaches and cream, streaked with a lot of grey in a lot of places, curling wildly around her head and way down to the small of her back so that she could sit on it. Her hair was fanned out real pretty when I found her in the tub, floating in the water like it was lighter than air, the crimson water darkening it crimson too. Real pretty.

If we were a math problem, we just wouldn’t add up- my mom, tall and willowy while I am little and pointed, her wide pale brown eyes, my suspicious looking dull blue ones. Anyone who knows my mom and me can see where I get my cradle robber ( literally) theory from. Her nose was long and straight, her cheekbones hollowed out, sharp enough to cut through glass with this androgynous beauty kind of deal while my face is heart shaped and babyish with a pert kind of nose like a little button, alright but nothing to write home about. My mom looked like she belonged to the air (so does Bean), I just look like I belong to the dirt. Stuck on the ground, watching them up there above me.

Some fallen star, huh?

So I look like a girl but don’t go thinking I’m some flower, a little buttercup, not always. I’m made of eyes for watching, narrowing and darting around my head like catfish in a barrel of cod- I suppose you’d call it paranoia, feet for running and- and this is important- teeth for biting if I have to. I suppose I’m as skinny as you would expect too, it’s not like I live in a palace or a condo and eat steak and swan for breakfast- this life makes for the best diet plan ever, I guess. I see these mannequins in the city with synthetic hair extenstions and painted finger nails fretting about their carb intake and I wanna tell them to try sleeping under a bridge like a troll, finding their food in dumpsters and robbing houses to get by, good for the figure but maybe not for the skin, maybe not for the mind so much either. I don’t tell them that though, just dive into their bags and come out with a fistful of change.

Over the years, going through the bags and change purses of dumb plastics has left me with a strange magpie collection of makeup; thick gloopy lipgloss that shimmers when it catches the light like a slug trail across my mouth, heavy color eye powder that gets churned up if I blink too much. I found some red lipstick like the shade my mom used to wear and thought Bean might like it. I was like a kid coloring outside of the lines, maybe it was ill thought out and maybe I threw the stupid lipstick at some guys bedroom window so hard it shattered after he didn't notice. Not that it matters. I could be pretty if I wanted to be, not that it matters.

I guess I'm just too good at slipping out of sight- so many years of practice, I'm too good at hiding. One day though, he's gonna notice. .

≈

First off, let me say that I’m not one hundred percent sure I even exist. Legally, it seems unlikely that I do. My mom was never one for paper work, it was all about messages on the back of cans, join up the dots in the stars and see if they are talking to us, paint on the walls, men with ropes and grey coats with her. We didn’t do normal stuff like other mom’s and daughters, and she didn’t do things like cook dinner, wash clothes or enrol me in school or anything like that. I highly doubt she did something so normal and responsible as get a birth certificate for me, I’ve certainly never seen one, and if there is one it probably has a whole different set of names on it owned by a whole different set of people.

But it’s not just the official side of stuff either; I mean how does anyone really know that they are anything but a figment? My mom wanted a child desperately, she was already quite old when I came along, a cherub with golden hair and blue eyes and there I was, springing fully formed from the sky, spat out by the stars who spoke to my mother. Who’s to say that she didn’t imagine me up one day and now she’s gone that I am the lingering traces of her psyche, an echo on the earth that dead people leave behind like headstones and pots of ashes?. I could be Bean's imaginary friend now, he's the only person I want to talk to most days so I wouldn't mind that so much; sleeping when he does, going where he went- I bet if Bean went away he wouldn't leave me on my own like my stupid Mom did. He'd take me with him, or I'd find a way to get there.

Everything my mom did had this dreamy quality to it, insubstantial as thick wafts of smoke that you try wrapping your hands around that even as a little kid it occurred to me that some things might not be real, that the reality my mom put me in might not have been the reality that other people lived in. There were snarls carried on the wind, we made lists of the things we owned because there were people who came in and took little things like buttons and cardigans, who moved things around just to confuse my mom. There were enemies everywhere, especially waiting in big crowds. Persistent delusions, dreams or reality, my Mom had a way of warping your perception.

There might be something in some of it. I hear the snarls too, and the glow of eyes that sometimes watch me when I’m alone. Sometimes I’m in a crowd and I swear that I can see faces turn to face me, I mean really face me and look straight into my head, past my eye balls past my skull and into my head. There are people out there, I am sure, that can read your thoughts like hearing whispers and if you think too loud they can pick you out especially. Sometimes I wonder if my thoughts about Bean are loud enough that he can hear them, making me blush and if he smiles, just a little, I'm sure he can. Mom could have been onto something, you know, she really could have done. I’m not afraid of them, though, I’m a flicker of light, too quick for the human eye, too quick for them to find me.

It’s a nicer thing to think about than the thought that she really did steal me from a stroller. I love my mom, and I’d rather die than live a normal boring life with two normal blonde boring people, but come on, if you are going to steal a kid at least commit. Don’t take her, teach her to love you and then just leave her. That’s way shittier than out and out stealing a baby, it isn’t fair not by a long way.

Sometimes I have to ask myself if it was my fault that mom left. The people knew her all said that it was too difficult for her to look after me as well as herself, and I think in her own way all her craziness got worse because she was trying to keep me safe, fretting about men with ropes in grey coats is way worse when there is a ten year old in the house. In the end she couldn’t cope and she just decided to leave me.

Not that you know, I need her . I was taking care of myself long before she died anyway and I can take care of myself no problem now she is gone, a) because I am awesome- cat burglar extraordinaire, quicker than a blink, no one knows me because I’m too fast for them to even register that I was there at all b) because people suck, and I’m better off without them. (One exception, of course) Really, it’s hard to find people who you can genuinely trust- you have instincts, but mostly my instincts tell me that a person is bad or untrustworthy. If I meet someone worth knowing though, something deep down just knows it.

I have this intuition, see. Some people do. And if you practise hard enough, that intuition might let you read minds just like they do. Only if you practise enough. I’m not quite there yet.

Take Bean, for example.From the minute I saw him, I knew that we'd be good together. It was like deja vu or something, the kind of thing where you think you might be able to see the smallest slip and glimpse of the future. I don't mean we'd do something dumb and boring like get married or get a house or anything. But we could look out for eachother, just us, the way me and my mom used to back at our house, when it was just us and the rest of the world didn't matter. .

≈

Mom was old when she had me, stole me, found me in a meteor crater whatever you want to say. By the time I came along her parents were long dead and Mom’s hair was already gray in places, she’d inherited a large house too, but if there was money then she wasn't really sure what to do with it. I’m sure it used to be pretty, painted white with blue shutters, a manicured law, and creeping wisteria blushing pink in the summer and neat new furniture in rooms that stretched five floors high and kissed the low flying clouds, but let me tell you my memories of this house are of a wreck.

Who knows how long she’d been alone in that place letting it slip into disrepair; when I was a kid there was no furniture except two beds, a stove which was useless because there was no gas or electricity, a tub even though there was no running water either. I remember making a game of running in my socks and slipping on the oak floors of the vast empty rooms though there were some places, some rooms where it wasn’t safe to tread between broken floorboards and ceilings. Paint chipped like broken fingernails and wallpaper peeled like dead skin. Mom kept newspapers from twenty years ago piled high, some flapping and coming loose in the wind that rattled through windows missing panes of glass. It was always cold and Mom kept cats but didn’t feed them or put out litter trays so they pooped where they wanted and if a cat died, it was usually left where it fell to attract flies and invite the smell of festering decay into another room. Mostly, the house reminded me of something ill, or something that was dying.

I dunno, I guess I kind of liked it- it was the only life I knew any ways. We were like fairy princesses in a castle to me when I was a kid, our poverty was sort of romantic, something magical in our isolation and our madness.

I liked my Mom a lot, liked putting my fingers through her soft curls and the way she smiled at me. She had red lipstick that she would always wear and the same silk robe every day with nothing underneath- it smelled of rot and old chicken carcasses but I liked how it felt. We hardly ever went out if we could help it, and there never seemed to be any guests. She wore a wedding ring, I remember that; it was the only jewellery that ever sat on her skin and if there was mail it was addressed to Mrs Tunbark but it was always only ever just Mom and me.

Now don’t get me wrong, there were good days and bad days. I could paint on the walls if I got bored and Mom never got mad the way other people’s mothers do, sometimes she’d paint up the walls too with me and laugh. I’ve been back there a couple of times and some of my silly kids drawings of ponies and girls in triangular dresses are still there. There were other times though were she wrote on the walls by herself, cryptic messages, eyes thick with tears, picked at her scabs and smeared blood along her silk dressing gowns. Not much I could do for her those days, except hide in a different part of that big empty house which was easy enough-all those spaces and corners to slip into and stop existing for a while. The moments passed though, slipped away like the night giving way to the dawn and I forgot that it could get dark until it happened all over again.

Then came Daddy and nothing was good ever again.

I was nine, with long straggly hair that had been twisted into four or five uneven pig tails when mom was bored. For the most part I was a few steps up from a feral child, running around barefoot and barely even feeling the splinters from shattered frames and broken beams any more, dirt was thick behind my ears, around my neck since mom left me to it when it came to bedtimes and bath times.

Watching him pull up to the wrought iron gate twisted with dead ivy, which separated the house and us from the outside world, in a neat black car I felt a curl of trepidation that someone was violating our fortress of solitude which only intensified when I saw my mom’s face. Something in her had melted away as she looked out of the window, her eyes barely opened, impassive and dead. Wordlessly she stepped away from me and curled into a corner, growing very still and very silent. After that, she never spoke.

I wasn’t going to let him in, no way no how- my mom’s delusions had left me as wary of strangers as it is impossible to be but the familiar click of the lock on the vast, engraved wooden door downstairs alerted me that for some reason he had a key. Quietly, I slipped into the hall to press my face between the banisters of the stairs to get a good look at the man in the entrance hall bellow.

Daddy was a tall, whippet thin man with snow white hair in a smart grey suit holding a stack of papers in his arms. Even though his dress and looks were as conservative as could be he seemed gaudy and out of place in the dying house. As he turned up to look at me, his face filled first with confusion at the dirty nine year old girl and then with a joy that didn’t quite reach his pale grey eyes. He walked up the stairs and crouched to my level, pulling out a handful of rock hard brightly colored sugar candies. Like a quiet animal i leaned in close and weary before snatching the sweets and retreating, stuffing my face with sugar.

What’s your name, sweetheart?

Citrine Tunbark

Nice to meet you Citrine, do you know who I am?

I shake my head, more enamoured with licking salvia sticky syrup from my fingers than listening to this man.

Well Citrine, my name is Chervil but I guess that you can call me Daddy.

Patting my head awkwardly, he sought out my Mom’s room and I followed but he shut the door after him so I couldn’t get in. There were voices, well, his voice- Mom never said anything, getting louder and louder, angrier and angrier for the longest time before I got bought and sought out one of the cats to play with. It was dark by the time Daddy left the room, fiddling with his tie and looking exasperated, leaving his papers behind him. He found me with my arms around an angry flea bitten ginger creature and once again knelt down.

Would you like to come with me for now, Citrine?

I shook my head fiercely; I didn’t understand that when grownups meant stuff like that they meant come with me now, Citrine. An order, not a question at all.

Daddy curled his hands around my waist and I started shrieking. Maybe he did genuinely want to help me after seeing the place I was living, maybe he pitied me, but I was a loyal creature above everything, twisting and struggling against his grip. It couldn’t have been easy; he was old and skinny and I was throwing my full strength into escaping but somehow he managed to get me into the car.

There were two other people and a driver. A pretty woman with pink lipstick and curled blonde hair and another man in a grey suit. There were words that I didn’t understand like power of attorney, diminished responsibility and beneficiary. It sailed straight over my head then but I have pieced it together in the years since.

Daddy was my Mom’s husband, estranged for a long time and he’d come back wanting her house and money if he could only get Mom put away somewhere. I think he must have known I wasn’t his daughter but maybe pretending I was would have helped him get the house somehow. So they took me away from my castle and put me in a concrete tower.

It must have been like bringing home a violent damaged cat. I couldn’t read or write or hold a fork properly, I smelt bad and didn’t flush the toilet. Daddy must have wondered what the hell he’d gotten himself into. I’m glad of that. Mom had always ranted about the men in grey coats coming for us, their whispers, them watching us and she’d been right the whole time. Or maybe they were just more hallucinations made real, the same way I was.

The pretty blonde woman was his lover, I think, she was there often enough and she was nice enough to me, tried in her own patient way to civilise me- but she wasn’t my mommy. I told her so, bit and scratched her and even made her cry. I feel a little bad about that.

Mom went into an institution for a little while, I think, not as long as daddy wanted but long enough to enrol me in a school and for Daddy to get the house. He was going to decorate it and I turned ten years old. For the first time in my life there was a birthday cake and the blonde woman put me in a pretty dress- the cake alone was almost enough to push me to mutiny against Mom but I somehow managed to stay firm.

I had dolls, and clean sheets and pillows and when Mom got out of the institution the first place she came was to me. In the dead of night, we busted out together and headed straight for the old house. Daddy had changed the locks so Mom had to give me a leg up. Inside, he hadn’t done much to repair it- the traces of builders, their cups of tea, a few tools was present but our home was, for the most part, just the same as it had ever been.

Wordlessly, Mom touched my newly brushed hair, my pretty dress and tears pricked her eyes. Without saying anything she made her feelings of betrayal utterly clear to me, but soon she was as kind and soft as she had ever been and I fell asleep in her arms

I found her in the tub the next morning. She’d slit her wrists and died while I was sleeping. I still see her like that all the time when I shut my eyes, unmovable in the tub filled with blood. I don’t think she’d been released officially from the institution at all, but had wanted to see me for one last time. And since she’d made her feelings about me living with Daddy and since, in my eyes it was his fault she’d gone I took off that morning and tried to get where he couldn’t find me.

Thats when I became a blur of yellow and I’ve been that way ever since.

Daddy got the closest to putting me in a cage, but others almost got there too. Men in suits, men with sticks trying to reach out to grab sticky paws and me always running and hiding. That was when he came and saved me. I'd never been saved before- I suppose Daddy thought he was saving me but he just made things worse, and as much as I love my mom she couldn't save anyone least of all herself.

It wasn't long ago, not when you think about it- the time it takes to blink, a heartbeat, the pause in a sentence where someone is supposed to breathe. A full stop. But it felt like being born all over again- I stopped being my Mom's and I started being his. They were chasing me, I forget who, it never matters who they are- just that they are trying to get at me. He knows the streets like I knew my mom's house, like I know the twisting veins in the back of my hands and he helped me. Introduced himself as 'Bean' afterwards and it didn't take much more than a heartbeat to know that we were going to belong to each other. Nothing corny, don't laugh, but sometimes you just know.

But I suppose I've always been too quick, so now I'm waiting for Bean to catch up. He'll get there.

Not that you need to know.

All you need to know about me is that I’m the fleeting wisp of yellow just around a corner.