Night, and the crows that gather outside my door offer little comfort
Night, and the one who is is somehow less than the one who isn’t
Night, and the silhouettes of the trees harbor the moon from my eyes
Night, and then the dawn comes
"They only want you for your body."
The sentence had been written in lipstick on the mirror. Midnight Rose was the color; the stick was standing on the counter, upright, capped. The rest of the counter was spotlessly clean and bare, polished white faux marble gleaming in the mild light of the bathroom.
The letters were jagged, inconsistently alternating between block and script. The penmanship was feminine, but not the flowery feminine of high school girls with fuzzy sweaters, and not the immaculate feminine of the elementary school teacher. Instead, it was a more intense feminine, as if it had been written with the stick clenched in a fist, like a dagger, not held daintily between the thumb and forefinger, like chalk.
Amber stared at the words on the mirror, tracing the letters with her eyes, over and over. She wondered how she’d come to be here, in this bathroom, staring at these words.
She wondered who’d written the words.
Running her fingers through her hair, she wondered if she’d ever have her sanity back again.
"Julie! Come in to dinner!"
Julie, seven years old, stopped mid-hop, her right foot on the three, her left foot raised behind her. She wobbled, a stork in a dress, and looked in the direction of her mother’s voice.
She turned to look at Sarah and Lisa, and sighed. Dinner was probably something yucky. Mom was on a health-food kick, and came up with the strangest concoctions of eggplant, zucchini, soy, and unidentifiable vegetables. She only got meat when Dad snuck her out to Mickey Dee’s, and he didn’t do that very often.
Only when he was home.
She looked back down at the sidewalk, resolutely hopping onto the four, and then up the rest of the numbers, and back again to one.
"Julie! Come in now!"
She pocketed her prized hopscotch stone, waved to her friends, and dashed off home.
Amber leaned her back against the wall of the bathroom, entranced by the words on the mirror. Her eyes flickered back and forth. Her cheeks were flush, and her eyes were red and puffy from crying.
There was a knock on the door. "Amber, honey, are you all right in there?" It was a man’s voice, deep and husky, and she would have know it was Richard’s if she’d been paying enough attention to it. It could only have been Richard’s, after all. But the voice seemed foreign and distant, like someone she’d never met before.
"I’m fine," she said, straining her voice.
"I heard noises," Richard-not-Richard said.
"I’m fine," she said again, then balled her hands up against her ears so she couldn’t hear his voice anymore, but by that time, the other voices had drowned him out anyway, and those voices didn’t go away no matter how hard she covered her ears.
"Relax, Julie. Why are you so tense today?"
"I… I’m not sure I want to talk about it."
"That’s why you’re here, to talk."
Silence.
"Last time we were talking about your father."
Silence.
"Do you want to continue where we left off, Julie?"
"What’s the point? Talking won’t change what he did."
Amber crouched down, opened the cabinet under the bathroom sink, and took a razor blade out of a small box of blades. She took the protective cardboard sleeve off of the blade, held the blade up to the light, and admired the glint of the light on the sharp edge.
She held the blade up and slowly, gently licked the sharp edge, feeling the mild sting of the skin of her tongue sliding along it.
She looked in the mirror, saw the letters again, and laughed aloud, then again, then again.
She set the blade down on the edge of the counter, looked deeply into her reflected eyes, and said, "Oh, precious Amber, sometimes you can be so very overdramatic."
She picked up the lipstick, uncapped it, rolled it across her lips, smacked her lips together, considered it for a moment, capped the lipstick, and set it down next to the razor blade.
"Daddy! Daddy!" Julie ran down the steps of the porch. It had been two weeks since he’d been home, but he’d promised not to miss her fifth birthday, and here he was, just as he promised.
He got out of the car and crouched down, like a catcher awaiting a pitch, his knees spread wide, a smile on his face. "How’s my little girl?"
"Daddy, Mommy said you might not come!" Julie pressed up against him as he wrapped his arms around her.
He sighed distantly, and squeezed her tight. "I know, Mommy worries. But I’m here."
"Just like you promised!"
He smiled and nodded. "Just like I promised."
"Are you sure you’re all right?" Richard looked at Amber as she sat down at the dinner table.
"Yes, hon, I’m fine." Amber smiled consolingly. "Never better."
He eyed her suspiciously, but resigned to let it drop, and stabbed at his potatoes again. "If you’re sure."
She leaned over and stroked his arm. "I’m sure."
Night. The stars call my name, but I can’t reach them.
Night. The demons each have a different face. Does it matter which mine wears?
Night. My sleep is troubled, my eyes are open, the shadows oppress my lungs.
Night. When will the dawn come?
That night, Richard and Amber made love, as usual.
When the relationship had been young, their lovemaking had been desperate, taken in stolen moments. He had swept her off her feet in a way that she thought she couldn’t be, her jaded cynicism weighing heavy around her neck.
But Richard had lost interest after she was no longer some barely attainable, some butterfly that he was courting and trying to catch.
He had a lover on the side: she knew that much. Not because she knew who it was, or even suspected, but because he was male, and virile, and bored of sex with her.
All the same, she still fucked him, and faked a ferocity that she had grown so accustomed to faking, her orgasm washing over her in a flurry of simulated moans, groans, and muscle spasms that would have been like McDonald’s to a gourmet, but fooled Richard well enough.
They fooled her well enough, too, but she had given up caring long ago.
The man took a slow drag of the cigarette and tapped the ash into the ashtray. "You’re Amber?"
Julie nodded slowly. "Yes, sir."
"So, Amber," he enunciated the word deliberately, as if the number of Ambers he met in his business was entirely too disproportionate to the number of Ambers in the world. "Have you ever done this before?"
Julie shook her head. "No."
He sighed heavily and looked her up and down slowly. "You got nice tits."
She blushed and looked down.
"You got a license?"
She looked up. "License?"
He sighed again. "Cabaret license. You can’t just dance, you know."
"I… I didn’t know."
He clucked and shrugged. "No matter. Get your ass on the stage and show me what you can do."
She moved up and down, her hands pressed onto his chest, her breasts swaying, her thigh muscles tensing, her head thrown back so that she could close her eyes and imagine that she was somewhere else, anywhere else, even though there was nowhere else that she could think of being.
His cock slid in and out of her, as his faked moans stirred out of his throat. His cock was hard all right, but she knew that didn’t mean anything. Cocks were simple things: They grew hard at the proper stimulus, sometimes despite their owners’ wishes.
An erection didn’t mean interest, any more than the lube her cunt oozed meant interest.
All the same, it was a part of the act, the role they had to play, so Amber moaned and groaned and ground her hips into his.
Julie watched the candle on the cake, wavering. She reached a hand out, fascinated by the flame, and touched the flame.
Screams. Searing, searing pain. The big people, the ones who could communicate with those complex noises that she could only marvel at, moved around her quickly, and this made her scream more.
What had she done wrong? She only wanted to learn about the flame, and now it hurt so, and the big people seemed so upset with her.
But Mommy was kissing the hurt better, and so things would be all right, in time.
In time, everything would be all right.
In time, everything would be all right.
Amber opened her eyes and looked around. She’d been in the bathroom, playing with the razor blades, and now she was on top of Richard, his hardness buried deep inside of her.
She couldn’t remember the time in between, but she had long learned to ignore the times in between, the times she couldn’t remember. She was a sleep-walker, living half of her life in a hazy dream of memories and worry.
Richard looked up at her, suspiciously. "Amber, honey…?"
"Yes?"
"You… stopped."
She shook her head to clear it, opened her mouth to apologize, then just went back to pumping up and down.
It was dark, and quiet. Julie was curled up in bed, stifling her sobs, listening to her parents in the next room, their bedroom.
Daddy was drunk again. Business was sour, and he was home more, and he was drunk more.
For years she had wished that he didn’t have to be away so much. Now, she closed her eyes and prayed that he would go away for good.
Julie’s stifled sobs. Her mother’s pleas for mercy. Her father’s hand, coming down again and again.
And then, silence.
Amber stared out the bedroom window, into the night.
It seemed like the night lasted forever. Daylight was a flash of light, and the nighttime lingered.
In the darkness, there were monsters. Monsters that sucked your blood. Monsters that devoured your soul. Monsters that rent your limbs from your torso. Monsters that reached deep into your sex with both hands, found your very core, your very being, and ripped it from you.
Slowly, her eyes closed, and she slept fitfully, Richard’s snoring occasionally waking her up.
Night comes upon me, padding softly on the carpet of autumn leaves
Night remembers the memories I’ve locked tightly away
Night caresses, fondles, assuages, kisses, massages, teases, tempts, torments
Night, and in those darkest hours, there is no dawn
She awoke with a start. Richard was gone from the bed, and somebody was shouting from the bathroom.
"What the Hell is this?" the voice asked again, and she realized that it was Richard-not-Richard, the man she either did or didn’t live with, and she wasn’t quite sure which.
She sat up in the bed. "What, honey?" Her memories wandered back into her mind slowly, and she searched the pieces to figure out what he could be upset about.
He came into the bedroom, anger in his eyes. "You’ve been writing on the mirror again."
She shook her head, panicked. "No, that wasn’t…" She could see the words clearly now. She was going to say that it was her, the other Amber, the one who did things like that, only she wasn’t quite sure which Amber was which now, and maybe it had been her after all, and at any rate, Richard-not-Richard wouldn’t understand any of that anyway, and he’d…
… he’d put her in a place that she didn’t want to be.
The man in the navy suit looked her over slowly.
Julie had gotten used to their prying eyes. They were all so different, and all so similar. Old, young, black, white… they had wives at home, or they were single… this was a bachelor party, or a graduation party, or maybe just a guy’s night out. Sometimes they even brought their wives and girlfriends with them, and then the women would either stare with the lust of half-formed bisexual fantasies, or with a condemning jealousy that their beaus would rather watch her dancing naked, then stay at home and fuck them.
He leaned forward and held up a dollar bill, folded neatly in half and held tightly in his hand.
She strut-danced over to him, crouched close to him, and gyrated her sex in his face, close enough that she was sure that he could smell its muskiness.
Richard slid the bill into the g-string and patted her inner thigh playfully.
It was then that he knew that he would have her. A small part of her knew it too, and that was the part that didn’t care anymore.
"I’m sorry, honey," she said, her voice taking a pleading edge. "I don’t know what comes over me. I’ll clean it up."
"Damn straight you’ll clean it up," he said, looming in the bedroom doorway, visible to her only as a silhouette. "And no more of that self-pity. God gave you a gorgeous body, quit whining about it."
"Yes, honey."
Richard-not-Richard slapped Amber-or-Amber harshly across the face, just for good measure. "Now get to it."
The third project in ninth grade art was to make a collage.
Julie carefully tore pictures out of various magazines, mostly Cosmopolitan and National Geographic, and made a montage of animals and women, pieces of images that were once whole images, pasted into a new image, somehow a whole.
Julie couldn’t look at it with the same confidence as she had looked at the original photographs. She was Victor Frankenstein, and this was her Monster.
She could abandon it, and it would learn a dozen languages, and read philosophy and higher mathematics, and try to contribute to the civilized world only to be shunned by people who refused to understand, who refused to hear all of the voices running through its head, who reeled in fear at the look of its body.
Julie pasted a caption onto the top of the collage, a phrase she had cut from Cosmopolitan: "The New You!"
She patiently waited for the glue to dry, and then tore the collage into shreds and took an F on the assignment, on her way to dropping the class.
Amber took the sponge and wiped it across the mirror, scrubbing hard, smearing the lipstick.
Setting down the sponge, she looked into the mirror, and smiled. "Amber, my dear, you get yourself into such difficulties, and it’s up to me to bail you out."
She picked up the blade that rested on the counter, and smiled wider.
A shape in the doorway: Daddy.
"Happy birthday, Julie."
She was thirteen.
"Are you excited, honey?"
Halfway through eighth grade. That was when the worst part started. The fragmenting had already begun, the crazing beneath the glaze of the ceramic. But her birthday had been the beginning of the end and the end of the beginning, and this was all she remembered:
"It’s time you learned what it’s like to be a woman."
The blade liberates, the blade imprisons.
The best part of it was watching the blood flow. It was so very pretty, flowing like that from the open wounds, the gashes.
Richard screamed about the sheets, of course. He would have. He hated the mess. He hated any sort of mess, but particularly the sort of mess that stained.
The mirror was forgivable. It could be washed off. Amber would have to be punished for making the mess, of course, but that was standard procedure.
Amber was bad: Amber was punished.
But this was an entirely different sort of mess. Blood was everywhere… on the sheets, on the pillows, on the carpet. It was soaked into the mattress. It was drying and caking on the dresser.
So Richard screamed about it, of course. This was completely unforgivable.
Those were his last words, in fact, before the shock from the loss of blood overcame his nervous system: "Dammit, Amber, why did you have to make such a mess?"
She’d smiled wryly in response. "My name is Julie," she said, "and I have a mind."
And then she laughed until she cried.
Night, the kingdom of Moon, the queen of illusions and lies
Night, the fiefdom of Stars, a thousand sparkling jewels of hope
Night, the respite of Sun, who sleeps only to be awakened
And the dawn may be gentle or cruel
October 15 (4pm) to October 20 (2am), 1998
For my twin moons, Selena and Selena (née Emily)