The weather had absolutely nothing to do with it – though it had been a terribly dismal day, dark and sticky with humidity – because very few people ventured to the 7-11 on 1st and 3rd in the first place. The establishment was in the seediest part of Bridgeton, which was in the seediest part of Maryland, and in those days, if nice folk from the richer areas of town were seen hanging around 1st avenue or 3rd street at night, they wouldn’t leave with smiles in the morning. It was the meanest part of an already callous town.
The damp air around the till seemed to cling to my hair, just brushed, my uniform, just washed, and my dignity, which was basically nonexistent. It was the unwavering dismay I felt, and the fact that I had been contemplating suicide for the last 48 hours, that caused me to call Paul in from the back – he was the general manager at the time. A real weirdo if you ask me, with fat fingers and acne and a high forehead that stretched across his face like a prairie sky, full of stars.
“Yes, Belinda, I’ll be with you in a minute,” he screeched from the office. Paul was always screeching from his office. He entered the cash area with his usual sigh and shuffled his clumsy feet. When he looked at me, he grimaced. “What can I do for you?”
“It’s Daisy.”
“Right, Daisy, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” he clasped his hands together, making a loud smacking sound that echoed in the empty store.
“Thanks. I quit.”
“What? But you can’t quit, Belinda! You can’t! You are our best employee!” Paul was screeching again. This time he grabbed my hands in his. I immediately pulled them away, unconsciously wiping them on my uniform.
“Paul, I have to. We both know it.” It was true. We both did know – I had been working at 7-11 for six years, since I graduated high school. I had bigger dreams than cleaning out the Slurpee machine and doling out sour soothers to the kids of single moms.
“It was that boyfriend of yours who put you up to this, wasn’t it? You know better than to hang around a guy like him. Ever since you’ve been hanging around that ass –”
“Paul, stop, okay? It’s not Damon. It’s me. And please, call me Daisy.”
“Well, Daisy, you can’t quit. You just can’t. It’s busy season. It’s almost July.”
“It’s fucking dead in here all the time. Seriously.”
“I don’t appreciate cursing. Especially from someone like you, Belinda.”
He paused – a little blonde girl, must’ve been only 5 or 6, walked into the store – our first customer in nearly two hours.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I retorted loudly. Paul gave me his classic Paul look – not in front of the customers– and strolled neatly back to the office, slamming the door behind him. The little girl put a bag of Fritos on the counter and some change. I gave them to her for free, and watched her walk out of the store into twilight.
It was dark when I opened my own bag of Fritos from behind the counter and finished them all, wiping their glorious orange cheese dust on my red uniform top. I then took it off, folded it neatly and left it on the counter. I signed out on the standardized 7-11 employee sign in, sign out sheet, 3 hours early. I left the store, wearing nothing but a leopard print bra and cargo shorts. I was smiling for the first time in 48 hours and didn’t stop until I heard a car honk on 1st avenue, just behind me. I turned, registered who it was, and then broke into a full sprint.
“What the fuck Belinda!” Damon yelled from his window when he caught up to me. He was driving the same car he used to pick me up for our first date two years prior – a 2009 red Hyundai Elantra he later called his “babemobile”.
“It’s Daisy now,” I yelled back. I kept running. I felt like a baby bird, suddenly pushed from its nest. I felt like a flower being trampled.
“No it fucking isn’t.” Cars were honking behind the Elantra. An old lady in a red Toyota looked at me in my bra, disgusted, as she changed lanes around Damon.
“What do you want from me? I am going home.” I turned forward, running harder, as Damon followed effortlessly behind.
“What the fuck are you doing? You look like a tramp,” he yelled.
“What do you care?”
“Get in the car.”
“No,” I screeched, just like Paul. I ran harder, but Damon tailed me, shouting obscenities from his car. When I stopped to catch my breath halfway down 3rd street, thirty seconds from home, he double-parked the Elantra and left it idling. He got out.
“Belinda, come on,” Damon put one of his hands on mine, the other on my hair, which he smoothed. For the second time that day, I was disgusted by the thought of human touch.
“Fuck. You. Damon,” I breathed. Struggling was futile.
“I didn’t hurt you last week, did I?” He smiled, pulling me in.
“Only a few broken teeth,” I lifted my head and spat at him. The saliva dribbled down my chin.
“Now, now. Remember our deal.” He clasped me tighter. If we were anywhere else, we would have looked like lovers, sharing kisses on a moonlit night.
“I’m not fucking pressing charges. Just let me get home. Please.”
“Alright,” he said, and he released me. He turned around and took a step toward the car. I leaned over onto a nearby tree, relieved, prepared to vomit. It was then he swiftly turned back toward me and slammed my head against the tree’s sturdy trunk. I was still conscious when he ripped off my pants and thrust his hand in my underwear.
“Do you like that, tramp?” he whispered, feeling me. I couldn’t even tell what he was doing with his hands, I was so focused on the throbbing of my skull. I tried to tell him to fuck off, but my mouth was full of blood.
It seemed like a thousand lifetimes had passed – him, leading me roughly to the Elantra, ripping off what little clothing I had, entering me, his heat like a branding iron, his hands, claws, slamming my head on the inside car handle with each thrust, the sudden relief from the sting before it repeated, relentlessly – before I heard them. Sirens.
Damon cussed loudly and slammed my head one last time on the handle, ripping out a chunk of my hair. He pulled out – all I could see was blood. On my aching belly, on the heat of his body, on his hands. I felt it drip in the dark place between my legs as he left me in the back seat of the car. I felt like a small glass bird, shattered, a flower, devoid of petals. I felt like the shards of glass, like the stem. The sirens grew louder. I drifted.
When I awoke, Paul and two cops were in the hospital room with me. I checked my watch, which had somehow survived the ordeal. It was 9:37 AM. I was alive. I wasn’t sure if this was a good thing.
“Good God, she’s awake, she’s awake!” screeched Paul to one of the cops. A nurse came by and gave me water. When I drank it, it tasted like blood.
“You okay to talk, sweetheart? My name’s John.” The cop held out his hand, which I shook, feebly. I briefly closed my eyes and heard Paul being asked to leave the room. I opened them: the other cop pulled up a chair and took out a small tape recorder. The nurse drew the curtain around us, a sanctuary. I took stock of my surroundings, though my eyes ached from the light in the room. There was a cannula in my nose, and some unknown clear fluid going into the vein in my left arm.
“First thing’s first – before you turn that thing on, Dave –” he motioned to the tape recorder, “what were you doing out on 3rd street late at night in nothing but a bra?”
I shook my head limply, noticing the dull ache of a million bruises on the inside of my skin. I felt sick – a familiar sort of queasiness that started in the bottoms of my feet and spread warmly throughout my broken body.
“Sweetheart, don’t you know better?” he cooed in a sing-song, baby voice. He leaned in to me, his face closer to mine than one would expect a stranger’s to be. “I saw what happened to you. I saw everything. It wasn’t right. Right Dave?”
Dave the Cop nodded, a ponderous, revolted look on his face as he relived the moment of my horror. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“This wasn’t the first time, right honey?” I shook my head. He leaned in so close I could smell his aftershave, which made the feeling thicken, like bread rising. “To be perfectly honest, you don’t have much of a case here, with your clothing choices and all. Especially since this has happened before.” I heard the click of Dave’s tape recorder turning on.The sickness spread to my insides and simmered there, untouchable. “Do you understand what I am saying, sweetheart?”
“I am going to boil over,” I whispered. The nausea grew into a thick knot inside of my stomach. I panted.
“What?” asked John the Cop. He looked at Dave the Cop, who shrugged helplessly.
“Can you repeat that again, honey? Louder, so the recorder can hear you.”
“I am a pot and I am going to boil over.”
“Excuse me young lady?” he said. By then it was too late.
I vomited up the Fritos and the blood, the glass shards and the petals, all over my gown, all over the hospital bed. It was then I floated up, above myself, and watched them surround me, trying to revive me. It was there, in the space between the living and dying breath, I saw all of the events leading up to the incident: the first time I took a ride in the Hyundai, the first time I denied him. I watched my first shift at the store, the last. I watched them all in wonder and anticipation, as if this was the first time I had ever seen my life, as if this was the only life I would ever see, as if it was the last.
It all washed over me, a river, an endless trove of stories and pictures and sounds I had never heard or seen or imagined. The faces of women I did not know blurred together – the nurse, the little blonde girl at the store, and others I could not name. Somehow, in that moment, they were important. And then, they were gone.
It was then, in the moment before I woke up, I saw me: a glass bird, resting on the edge of a windowsill. I watched it being picked up, a weight in a man’s hand.
I watched it fall.
- Beverley Katherine
** The beginning of this story is an emulation of a story by T. Coraghessan Boyle called “Tooth and Claw” as this was an assignment for a creative writing class.
