Nowhere Near Normal by Traci Foust

Author:Traci Foust
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2011-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

part two

Everyone asked me, “How’re you doing?”

And I said, “Well, I’m at the high end of low.”

—MARILYN MANSON, INTERVIEW, SPIN

10

whore

We never actually cleaned but rather just turned on the

vacuum so it sounded like we were cleaning as we picked the

pubic hairs off the sheets and out of the tub …

—MAGGIE ESTEP, “SCAB MAIDS ON SPEED”

God didn’t stop my dreams about fire. Just like he didn’t stop me from crying and making a big thing in front of everyone on the first day I left my mother’s house. The night before I put my suitcase and typewriter into the back of my dad’s truck, I dreamed about my mother in flames. Jesus was in the dream too. He was on the cross in his underwear and wore a crown of metal spikes like the kind you use to stop a beast from entering a pretty garden. Blood ran down his cheeks and I could see my mom crouched underneath him. When the blood touched her skin it sizzled. Holes like empty eye sockets covered her face.

I don’t remember doing a thing to help the situation.

“You leave and you’ll die.” It was my own quick voice in my ears. I couldn’t stop shaking. Blue digital numbers blinked 3:15, Amityville Horror time. Without a second thought about it, I walked to the kitchen, sifted through my mother’s purse, and stole one of her Halcyon pills. Sniffing it first, I broke a tiny piece off between my two front teeth and chewed it quickly. On the walk back to my bedroom I felt sick and dizzy, but that was just me turning the pictures of my head into something you have to purchase tickets for before you can watch.

Nothing really happened except that when I fell back asleep an opening unfastened itself behind my eyes. My mother was no longer caught in bloody fire. Jesus was gone.

I was grateful for that.

“You’re only going to be like five miles away,” Bryan said. He and my dad unloaded my stuff and brought it into my new home, the Santa Ana Care Facility for the Elderly. Watching my old and worn Strawberry Shortcake comforter hanging over my dad’s shoulder gave me a pain like I missed myself.

“Just put it all in the living room,” I said. I was embarrassed to tell my dad about not having my own room until the cement floors and cracked drywall of the back storage/office area could be converted into something a fourteen-year-old girl could call livable.

Only a half hour ago my head was at my mother’s shoulder, all hot and snot-nosed in the candle ghost scent of the rouge on her cheeks. I wasn’t the first to let go when we hugged. That had never happened before.

“We’re being so silly,” she said. “You’ve spent time away from home before.”

But we both knew this was different. Bigger. From the last ugly toddler fit I threw over not being let in on my diagnosis of obsessive compulsive disorder to the few short weeks of planning what I’d take to my grandmother’s, we had both changed.

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