The Bitch

Love number one called her a slut and chased her with a knife, but they were teenagers and laughed passionately. He hated her for her confidence and as soon she stood tall he’d spit virulent, vulgar insults and camouflaged in comedy, hit her. He hated that she could sing and told her not to pursue a career on stage but still she’d opened her legs and shared with him her first consensual time, but not her virginity, and then she forgot.

He loved to steal and so they snatched the trampoline from his family home and placed it in her forest. At night they would lie on it, eating M&M’s, smoking joints and taking pictures of the stars while a thin layer or dew would encase them, and as the camera caught what they couldn’t see they questioned their existence.

Where she lived, the nights were black and the stars were brilliant and on those nights full of madness he’d drive and play chicken in his 1980’s Buick, racing blind on her winding dirt road canopied by the forest and lit only by the peering moon.  She’d scream to stop but he liked to see her scared.

Blair drove her anywhere and did as she wished and soon became Daphne and her mother’s bitch; spending hours on all fours with a dog brush in hand to remove the hairs a vacuum couldn’t, lugging and spreading twenty kilo bags of sheep manure through the garden because the ladies rather wouldn’t, cleaning Daphne’s puke as she lay passed out beside the toilet in a codeine inflicted tonsillectomy delirium, washing her mother’s blood from the bathroom crime scene after her hysterectomy stitches burst, all to seduce her mother to be his.  

Regretfully, if you happened to have a dick, Daphne’s mother, Valerie was hard to win over, having never recovered from a string of failed men. An existentialist, atheist, misandrist, she ran an emasculated house, but with Blair’s unrelenting tenacity he massaged her cracked and calloused feet until she and her feet softened.

Blair lived in a big red brick house, beside another big red brick house with 3 brothers and 2 principals as parents. Daphne lived in a small wood apartment beside another small wood apartment with a mom and a dog and a cat. Blair’s Dad beat him. He like to laugh and call it wrestling. Daphne’s true first had been rape.  Blaire liked to laugh and call her a slut.

Daphne had opened her legs and shared with him a first, but not her virginity, and years later when he could no longer hide his his wounds she found she could no longer feign laughter or fight him for good posture.  As Daphne stood in the doorway of his bathroom watching as he scattered the toilet full of vomit and traces of bourbon, she glanced around his dorm room and counted the overflowing dirty mugs and bowls full of ash, butts and roaches. One balanced precariously on his headboard, one on the edge of his sink, two on the floor and one on the arm of his couch.  But she wouldn’t clean his puke as he lay passed out beside the toilet. She would remember instead, that he hadn’t taken her virginity.

“I think he beats her”