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By Jasmine Ledesma
I’m in the backseat of my stepdad’s bullet grey truck. My hair is a nest for wasps and toothpicks, curling away from me. I’m holding a vanilla ice cream cone in one hand, mindlessly scratching at the seat with the other. The interior of the truck smells of crushed salt and that sickly tang new cars come with. When we first bought the truck from the dealership, I spent the ride swallowing gags. The drippy ice cream wanes with every lick I take. I’m sat below the right window, the night sky outside a wound stapled shut. The electric trees of our purgatorial suburbia flash by with cartoonish energy.
To my right are my little brothers, thirteen and twelve, who are devouring their ice cream at a much more rapid rate than me. My mother is sitting in the passenger seat, her golden hoop earrings dancing as we drive. Next to her, his fingers snaked around the steering wheel, is my stepdad. A lowly pop song breathes through the air like vapor. Or sickness. There is a weak, plastic shiny conversation happening between our parents, but I can’t make anything out. My ears strain for any foreshadow of violence, a slow twang of the air or a dip in cadence.
I am seventeen. I always forget to paint my nails and sometimes I make collages in my pajamas. My room is plastered with various, sticky polaroid photos and poems. I’m still not sure who Keanu Reeves is, just that everybody loves him. I only really like collecting candy wrappers and watching hours of cooking shows. The chef’s obvious sweat gleam above monstrous blue fires that burn hulking chunks of meat like a crescent moon. It calms me down well enough.
As I take another lick of my ice cream, the vanilla greased across my tongue like blood, I briefly meet eyes with my stepdad. His eyes look like beloved dog toys, fat and yellowed. They would probably squeak if I squeezed them. He looks away, focusing his gaze back on the road.
Four months ago, he beat our mom in front of us.
It was a couple of weeks into the start of September. I was worried about math homework and popping a pimple that had formed solely to sabotage me. That afternoon, I stayed home to thrash around my bedroom to gurgled rock music while my family went to visit my aunt. This was our typical Sunday routine, splicing ourselves into various rooms and lawns until the night came to bring us together. Then, we had separate dreams. It wasn’t a beautiful life to begin with. But it was painless.
However, this Sunday did not play by the rules of the Sundays before it. An hour after my family left, I was already deep into a chorus of some Nirvana song when they came back. Usually, I had at least four hours to myself. I stood by the head of the stairs as they trickled in through the front door as if there was lead on their feet. There was a sense of urgency to my parents, a kind of heated aura surrounding them. My brothers quietly walked behind them.
We had been dealing with their explosive, frightening fights for at least five years but in the last year, the tension grew large like a whip in the air. I often had daydreams of running out into the dark, cold street during the next fight. I used to try to predict them. There was a night my stepdad had someone else’s blood on his shirt, and a night where my mother came home bruised telling us she wanted to kill herself over and over like prayer. There was always the inference of violence threaded between them.
That night, violence came from around the corner, hands sprawled out like fireworks. My dog, a small yip yap yorkie, barked while my little brother begged. My hands tried to shake imaginary fire off them. Their bedroom door was wide open, an open exhibition. My stepdad’s shadow elongated over and over. He was a horrible mountain.
I ran to the bathroom and looked for something to defend myself with in case he could somehow break the lock off the door. I felt choked by the air. I laid on the grimy carpet, listening out. My house was an orchestration of what we knew was going to happen all along, every window we could have possibly escaped from slammed shut at once. It felt prehistoric.
Then, the front door slammed. There was a fat pause. I came out from the bathroom to see my brothers holding my mom, crying. Her eye like a bloated clamshell, her lip busted. My stepdad had run out of the house when he decided he was finished. We stayed still for a few moments, the weight of everything we tried to keep in the air falling around us. It was one of the only moments we really saw each other.
When you experience trauma, you lose the skin you were born with. It burns right off, sheds onto the carpet. There isn’t a nerve that can’t be touched, a germ nobody can’t see. Then, another skin grows. But this one is different. It’s sleek, and sometimes, it even shines, gloats.
Some call it bravado or resilience. Really, it’s comradery between yourselves. The girl you were before the trauma and the bitch you became as a result.
After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, his napkin creased grasshopper wife Jackie Kennedy wore and bore the blood-stained pink Chanel suit for the world to see. Her legs, splattered with America’s tragedy, held her up. That moment was hers. Nobody else in the entire world could do that. Even the cameras stuttered.
The truck jerks.
I nearly crush my ice cream cone as we settle. A car nearly came into our lane at the last second. My stepdad clucks his tongue and waves his hand at the car in frustration. Aside from that, his body has been monolithic. I try to meet his eyes again as the light turns green and we begin to move again. He doesn’t notice so I go back to looking out of the window at the parched sidewalks. My fantasies surge.
Across the span of the last few months, the pain has grown into a hairless tumor and I into its terrific mother. I don’t worry about math class or looking pathetic anymore. Once, I sat in my school’s hallway for an hour with blood stained into the bottom of my shirt.
The world feels like a blizzard. I know every flinch by name. I live in the blood museum.
Every night, I pray for my stepdad to hit me like I know he wants to, like I know we both deserve. I imagine him knocking a tooth out from my needy gums and wearing it around my neck. Or he could give me a geographical styled bruise so everybody can ask what happened and I can tell them.
I dream in soundless fragments where there used to be floral movies. He dies on good nights and is there in the morning on bad ones. Sometimes, I cut myself, so I have somewhere to go. I imagine screaming at him for days and days. Tears like gel in my eyes, begging him to crush my face like garbage.
Just toss me out of the ring so I can leave!
Most of the time, I don’t even want revenge. I just want to walk around like that. Undeniable.
There were many, many miniature acts of violence before the big one. He hit me with a belt because I drank orange juice in the afternoon last year. He almost drove us into a ditch. He threw a beer bottle at my mom’s car. He ripped my keyboard and mouse from my computer. He called me stupid and crazy and ugly. He told me he’d rip my legs off. He made me sit at the table for two hours while he insisted I was lying until I thought maybe I was. He ushered my illness. He grounded me for a year. He smashed my mom into a mirror. He made me into an alien on my own planet. He went to the car while I was in the restroom. He taught me how to ride a bike.
I could have been a person if it wasn’t for him, one of those that doesn’t think about anything else but what is in front of them, who isn’t bothered by much. But my amygdala has forgotten how to sit still. My life has yet another slit. I’m a dog bone go fetch palm bleed mouth sore teenager when I could have been nice.
Often, I think of Sylvia Plath as a teenager, plucking strawberries into a bread brown basket. Hunched over like a gargoyle. Her sweat running down her back like a braid. How simple she must have felt, then. Before the concentric circles and possessed men. Before the broken playground of New York ruined her. Before her sap began to blacken. Before the baby’s milk curdled. Before the tricyclic antidepressant slept on her tongue, the thought appeared in her head quite calmly: perhaps I will write a poem tonight.
For all of my loss, I can recognize what there is to gain. As I sit in the truck, the radio leaking, I can feel my second skin nearly glowing. There is no way I am going to survive and proceed to slack off. I’ve grown a sense of vigilance, even if it’s hyper. I know what is waiting in the corners, why the dark smells. I’m alive at every moment. My freckles feel everything.
We park in the driveway and as I pour out of the backseat, I hear the usual train pumping through the starved, tar black night.
I recognize the grease heave. It sounds like me.
Jasmine Ledesma lives in New York but comes from Texas. Her work has appeared in places such as Glitter Mob, The Southampton Review and Crab Fat Magazine among others. You can find more about her work here.