The Trashpile Princess [Short Story: Part 1 of 2]

The heart is not a cute, warm red shape, my teacher told me, but a flaccid lumped network of nerves the color of a sickly salmon paint chip.

In 8th grade biology we dissected open sheep hearts and tried to label all the parts, and I wondered if anyone else had to resist the impulse to place the dead tissue on the back of their tongues.

My lab partner, a small ladygirlchild with turpentine skin, leaned into me and whispered.
“wonder what it’s like.”
“What?”
“we did this to a human, instead of a sheep, you know,” she said in her nearly breathless voice, “If we cut up a person. A cadaver. Is that what they call it?”

I didn’t tell her I thought it would be exactly the same.

Across the table Katie – with her homemade lip piercing and cold held together with pins, her baby doll floret curls and fluorescent rubber wristbands – looked up at me with a scalpel dancing between her knuckles, and grinned.
When I was smaller the rooms of my house choked me, and my eyes and tongue were molded into wallpaper trying to hide from chandeliers and Mommyfights, because when she broke the furniture the hallways grew dirty fingers. When I found Dad in my bedroom crying I closed and locked the door, and then told him to stay and hide with me forever.
I didn’t understand why he couldn’t stay.

With the walls breaking around our 1995 prison I pulled on the hem of my dress, too bumbly, I said, too bumbly and he told me the story of the labyrinth built by Daedalus, where he kept the terrible half bull, half human Minotaur. Nobody could escape the labyrinth’s multi-layered shadowskin walls, until that is, Theseus went into the labyrinth, killed the Minotaur, and used a ball of thread to find his way out.

And downstairs Mommy opened up the cabinets and broke glass on the linoleum. Dad held me and we both cried, but I was the one who tried to say, “It’s okay.”
He didn’t stay.

When he left I dreamed that I was screaming, moving from one end of my static-colored room to the other, trying to peel open the walls and let the fireflies in that stuck in frozen light to the window when it became dark. But the more I screamed, the more I moved, the slower I became, my feet clotting against the floor, my hands growing sausage-heavy. My eyes inflated themselves until they were ready to pop and float away from my head, and my throat constricted until I could do nothing but breathe a pitiful heh-heh-heh while my vocal chords pinched the air right out of my hemoglobin, right out of my spider stick cells. I couldn’t take the walls apart. The thin Victorian flower wallpaper grew wings and chordata and sat straight down on my ribcage.

Later I wrapped my baby brother and I in the blanket that showed all the landmarks of Texas, and we hid in our plastic playhouse because I still believed there were sanctuaries even living with monsters. He sat on the carpet in silence, and his head became too heavy for his dark nucleotide eyes.

“It's okay,” I said, biting my lip and shaking, “It’s okay.”
I held him close underneath our blanket and cried and he never asked me what was wrong.
I tried to forget Mom called me a stupid bitch and choked me on the sofa until my face turned red.
But you now how that goes.

And I still dreamed of gray rooms that locked me in their embrace, back when I was left in a crib in the dark right up next to the cowboy wallpaper, and I got spanked for crawling out into the hallway during sleepytime. I could never find the words to tell her that the shadows cast onto the wall by lamplight were amorphous, arterial monsters waiting for the right moment to squeeze my brain right out of my ears. Even when I grew old enough to jump out of bed and turn up the lights as bright as they’d go, the shadows remained. The monsters remained. They waited for me when I went to school with my eyes cut into red puffs and the tear streaks visible on my face. I tried to hide but they still saw and never asked me what was wrong.

When Katie met me somehow she knew I was wrong from the beginning, perhaps even from the womb, dark spirits injecting themselves into prenatal wounds. Before school started she sat outside near the flagpole in steel-toed boots and trash-bag colored clothes like a switchblade doll, beautiful yet confined in her prison of metallic fiber. I imagined she only lived inside my head, nestled between archaic strands, cocoons of dead spiders.

And she terrified me.

At lunch I did not eat but sat on the floor between the cheerleader’s trophy case and the vending machine, tugging on the hem of my skirt and reading Stoker or Proust so that maybe my head would float over the top of the cafeteria noise. When she approached me I saw only her knee-highs and the top seam of her legs.

“You're pretty, you know,” Katie said. I bit my lip. I kept my thumb pressed against the book’s spine.
“I mean, really pretty, especially when you’re afraid to look at me.”

At home in the shower, I arched my back and pressed my throat against the showerhead and pretended to drown. Later I lay in bed in an oversized t-shirt with my knees pressed to my ribcage and my wet hair splayed out on the pillow. Mom came in to tell me she loved me before turning off the lights. I didn’t speak. I closed my eyes, breathing through my mouth, and thought of the red bands her knee-highs must create on the inside of her legs. It made my lips dry.

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