fawn abbott {district four}

We were happy once. It seems a fairy tale now, with my back pressed against the door and the ear-shattering thud that bounces off of hollow walls. The world has crumbled. Fairy wings have melted into storm clouds and washed off the smile that had been so painstakingly painted in bright red to her cheeks. I suppose it was bound to happen. The world was teetering on the edge of catastrophe ever since I was born and my mother smiled and held me to her chest. When she kissed my forehead and called me Fawn, it was the beginning of the end. There was something that I could not see, some kind of childish ignorance that forced the spiders and maggots from the corners of my vision. It led me to believe that we were happy.

Maybe we weren't so happy once, now that I think about it.

He's drunk tonight. I can smell the bitter liquid, feel it seep onto the backs of my legs as the bottle has tipped, sunken into the carpet as is bubbles out of a broken glass neck. "Violet!" he screams, on the verge of hysterics as he forces himself against the door with far too much force to be held much longer by my weight pressed against it. I want to tell him that I am not her, I am not mom. Mom left us and there's nothing we can do to fix it. I want him to stop but I've tried it all before. It's hopeless, worthless. It's childish to fight what will happen tonight because it's happened a thousand times before.

I scramble out from in front of the door, pain of the wood pressing itself into my sides too much to bear. I've never been good with pain. He softens when he sees me, eyes unable to focus no matter how hard I can see him trying. "Violet I've missed you." And he takes me into his arms, fingers running themselves through hair knotted with pointless salt water. "You've let this grow out haven't you?" and the sweetness fades, fists tearing at my hair and pulling my face back to look up at him. "I don't remember giving you permission to do that."

I don't blame my mom for leaving. Not now that I see what she lived with. A madman, controlling and driven half mad with grief. (But there is nothing half-mad about the way that he forces my hair back, tying it into a tight bun as clown's smile makes its way onto his lips. There is nothing half mad about what he made her do. What he makes me do.) It wasn't hard for my mom to leave a child that she never wanted to have. But her features that I bear are a curse. He never looks at my body, has never seen me undressed. I suppose that would ruin the illusion. It's my face that he likes, the one that is so strikingly similar to hers and so different than his that people doubt our kinship.

My eyes are squeezed shut but the unmistakable sound of fabric sliding down skin and the feeling of a hand upon back of my head are enough to make me feel sick.

--

It's only when he's drunk that he goes mad. It's only when he's drunk that he forgets he has a son and that he convinces himself his wife has returned. Returned to be used. But I don't think he cares when he's not. He won't look at me, call me anything other than Violet's boy as I sneak with baited breath through a house that does not feel like my own. He wants me to be like him, I think. Always inquiring whether I have found a girlfriend and demanding I bring her home. He'd show me how to use her, he says, but he never meets my eyes.

Maybe he doesn't even remember my name.

They are his attempts at bonding with a son that turned out flawed. Perhaps he wanted a carbon copy of himself, large and broad. He is the perfect man, according to none other than himself (despite the prominent beer gut poking through each of his too tight shirts.) He wanted someone strong, something more than the fragile thing that is always too small and too feminine.

But the next day he's yelling at me for wearing basketball shorts because I look too much like a man.

When he isn't drunk he cares too much.

It's not only when the poison is prominent through his veins that my father turns into a madman, no matter what I tell myself.

But I'm good at that. At making everything okay. Most nights my father is drunk but it's okay. Most days I must find my own source of food, I must fear his wrath because who knows what he wants me to be from one day to the next but it's okay. We were happy once, even if we weren't. So it's all okay.

I've done a good job at raising myself, nonetheless. Perhaps it was all to spite him, the grades that I returned with A's all down the parchment. The ones that I hung on the refrigerator door because there was no one else to do it for me. I cannot run away, cannot take the world for my own like mother once did. I'm scared of a world without a warm bed, scared of what would happen without the various bits of nutrients scattered around the cabinets filled with empty bottles.

In the end, I have raised myself to be a coward.

But the company I keep is nothing like my father. I'm far too aware of the rings one is forced to jump through to achieve the status I have at highschool. A meaningless status. Popular is merely the title of a bunch of pathetic things trying all to hard not to fall apart in front of one another. And sometimes we fall apart together.

I'm no better than my father. I've indulged in the bitter liquid that he so often enjoys, indulged in the pills that friends who are nothing like friends pass me. They make me go numb, a numbness that I have come to enjoy more than anything. My father's hands to not hurt so bad when I return numbed and quiet. I do not fight as hard. He likes it better that way. But cowards never put up much of a fight anyway. Not against someone so much stronger.

If I ran away, I'm sure he'd kill me. Sure he'd kill someone else or use them like he uses me and like he used mom. And so I sate the beast best I can.

Someone has to.

There is much one can learn about themselves when watching other people. I'd call it a hobby of mine, to wrap myself in a jacket three sizes to large and to sit on the beach or upon a park bench. I've never felt envious of the families I've seen, the ones with moms and dads that look so happy I cannot help but to smile too. With the way their hands are so tightly entwined as they watch their child trip over nothing but the sand their feet sink into.

It makes me more happy, than anything. Happy that such a thing exists, that not all people are as terrible as they seem. I've made up stories for them all in my head. That boy, smoking on the beach and a towel around his waist, he aspires to be an author. He writes tales that always end with the guy kissing the girl and their happy endings are so sweet that his readers often suffer heart attacks. There are no pain in his stories, nothing to be sad about. They are good tales, tales of adventure and of friendship.

That guy, smoking on the beach with a towel around his waist, he's a good guy.

And that couple that sits on the beach, heads tilted so slightly to the side that their skulls meet, they've been together for three years. He's planning on proposing soon, bought the biggest and most beautiful ring that he could find because he loves her. She is his sun and his moon, she is his stars in the sky. His everything. And one day, they'll be happily married and they'll have three kids who are all as happy as they.

I liked these stories, these endings so much better than what I have actually seen. Because the guy smoking on the beach with a towel around his waist has seen four girls the four days that I have sat and watched him, told each one of them that he loved them and that he would run away with them one day. That they are his one and his only.

And that couple on the beach, they are only together because he knocked her up. They fight all the time, I've even seen him push her to the ground with no regard to the life currently sat inside of her. One day they will be married, but the ring he gave her is plastic and too small to fit on anything but her pinky finger.

As hard as I try to find them, fairy tale endings simply don't exist. Not here.

But I still look for them everywhere I go.

pressed against the pane
could see the veins
and there was poison out