Her childhood...

She is a baby, lying hungry in a makeshift crib.  It’s been a long while since anyone came to feed her.  She cries until she’s worn out, then sleeps until her hunger wakes her and she cries again.  At one point, she discovers her thumb.  Her thumb is always there, always reliable.  Into her mouth it goes.  Eventually, someone comes and gives her a bottle of milk to suck, or sometimes apple juice.  She doesn’t know the difference.    Bottles come, bottles run dry, but her thumb is always handy.


Years later, she shuts her eyes tight and tries to sleep on a cot in the corner of the living room, while her parents argue in the bedroom.  Sometimes after these fights her father storms out of the house slamming doors.  Sometimes her mother cries loudly after he goes.   She wishes she could go to sleep and shut it all out.  Her mother’s voice is harsh and high, and her father’s voice booms, but it is just noise.  She doesn’t have a clue what it all means, but it frightens her, like an impending storm.  The air is unbreathable, so thick it is with anger.  When she can breathe again, her stomach hurts.  So in her head, she constructs a house with fifty rooms, and begins to place furniture inside each room.  She practices keeping all fifty rooms in her memory at once, and begins to construct a new wing on the imaginary house.  She falls asleep, and doesn’t hear the door crash shut.


She goes to school where her teachers admire her cleverness but worry why she is always alone.  At home when her parents began a new argument, She retreats to her small personal space.  She begins by cleaning the entire room including the ledges on the window sills.  She uses a toothbrush for the tiny crevices that accumulate dust and silt.   Frustrated,  she tries to clear out the last bits of grey fuzz, but there’s always a little left over.   She lines up her shoes in the closet and spaces the hangers evenly.  She takes the books on the shelf and arranges them by height and as far as possible by color within height, and then sits down on the bed, exhausted, wondering if somehow the right  arrangement would be alphabetical by author or perhaps in categories related to the subjects.  She makes the bed, and then makes it again, rearranging the bedspread so it hangs evenly on all sides.  Now that all this work is done, she feels a kind of peace.  


Today, her mother told her that they’re going to move again.  The family has money problems and the rent is too expensive in this house.  She doesn’t say anything; nobody asks her opinion.  She goes to her room,  takes out her paint by numbers kit and begins to meticulously fill in the tiny spaces with the correct shade of paint. She likes the little jars of paints, and the pretty names,  titanium white, cobalt teal, carbon black.  She can spend hours with her delicate brushes to transform the clean white paper to a lakeside village.  Moving to a new apartment, she thinks, doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter at all.  The only things that matters is this, this perfection which she controls.


Outside, in identical rectangular drops, the evenly spaced rain begins to fall.