Of course, she remembered wiggling through the window like this before – a teenager, shit-faced, past curfew, falling in a heap on the floor, out of breath. But everything felt different in the silent and still house at night. She inhaled the delicate perfume of her mother’s lilac scent, stronger than before. Not so long ago, when she entered in daylight, through the front door, when she was still allowed, she would be distracted by her other senses and emotions: the razor-sharp slashes of defense jutting into her like knives, judgement, guilt, and yes, love, cutting with precision. The gush of imaginary blood, thick as honey, pain spilling everywhere. Duck and cover.
Her feet pressed the floorboards, creaks, fear prickling, like ants tiptoeing up her neck and legs. She flicked on her flashlight, shining it around the kitchen, stuck a finger into the loaf of farmhouse white, soft and doughy, her father’s favorite toast in the morning. An intruding memory stomped forward: eating Rice Krispies with banana slices floating in milk, her father peak-a-booing back and forth behind his newspaper snapped out before him. She moved her body to jolt her mind away from such images, pushing the ghostly glow of light shafts around each room: the den where she spent hours before the television, the round dining room table where she struggled with math problems, the powder room where she frequently barfed her brains out. She heard the antique clock on the wall in the living room ticking behind her, just as it had when she told them her many strings of lies. They were so gullible at first, it took so long for them to realize their beloved, perfect girl could be capable of such terrible things.
Refocusing on her task, she entered her parents’ room. Clutching a pillow case in one hand, she opened her mother’s jewelry box with the other, eyeing a familiar heart-shaped pendant, a mother’s day gift. At this, her feet wanted to move, her entire body wanted to run like hell, leave these people alone for once. Instead, her watery eyes caught sight in the dresser’s mirror her own sunken cheeks, matted hair, chapped lips, the track marks up skeletal arms hanging by her sides.
With a headrush, swallowing the rising bile in her throat, she grabbed the jewelry box and dumped it into the case, emptied the medicine cabinet of every pharmaceutical, picked the lock of the box under the bed, taking the cash her father always kept stashed. Gullible. Before leaving -she hoped so hard it ached-for good, she flashed her light into her old bedroom, still the same as it was so long ago, but forced into a perfect order, a shrine, as though someone had died.
Illustration : Shatavisha Chakraborty