Not a Twisted Soul
I write some weird stuff. For all three Prose Challenge prompts I've attempted, the result has been something dark and sinister; I posted Helen's Husband before, and here are the other two. The first was very difficult to come up with; you had to use 'I'd always known there was something wrong with that house,' or words to that effect only with switched pronouns or tenses. It was such an 'aargh' challenge for me because it seemed so cliché - it was pretty much asking for a horror-house thing, and I didn't want to go down that route at all. If you know me, you'll know I don't like being obvious! Instead I went for another character-study style thing, and in the end the story concludes that actually, there's nothing wrong with the house at all... so I think I led that quite astray enough for my taste. Here it is:
He’d always known there was something wrong with that house.
I can’t believe now that I didn’t see it. Every two days, like clockwork, we’d bring a big dinner over for him and tidy round the house a bit; just general upkeep that he couldn’t do himself anymore. I’d dust the photographs and my eyes would narrow; Lucy would put her head on my shoulder and her arm around my waist. He was never able to understand what I saw in Lucy; why I loved her. It was beyond him and his generation to understand, I suppose… it hurt sometimes; the way he looked at us together. I knew it was just his age, his time. I always knew, but it never made it any easier. I was his daughter, and I wanted him to love Lucy as I did; not simply tolerate her.
He’d just tolerated my mother, too; and hadn’t tolerated her, sometimes. When I was a young girl he’d hit her in the bedroom, away from my eyes. He didn’t bother to hide it when I was older. I’d grown used to seeing my mother bruised, but it had, of course, never really registered within me that it was my father that put them there until I saw it with my own eyes. On my fourteenth birthday, her skin was plum purple and her dress matched. I’ve never liked the colour since.
I don’t know how I tolerated him, sometimes. He’d whisper too loudly about Lucy when he thought she couldn’t hear, asking me when I was going to leave her and find a nice man to settle down with; when would he have his grandchildren? I couldn’t once bring myself to tell him I’d never wanted children despite it all; he had no qualms about upsetting other people, but thankfully I never inherited that trait from him.
Maybe it would have done him some good to be a little bit broken. He was so argumentative; so criticising. When he wasn’t hissing unsubtly at me about my choice of partner, he was complaining; what about? The television, the news, the government, his cough - but of course chain smoking somehow escaped his blame - and the house. Yes; he was always telling anybody that would listen that there was something evil within the walls, something wrong; and I’m sure you’ve gathered from what I’ve already told you that he wasn’t quite friendly to Lucy. It says a lot about how desperate he was to have somebody understand what he meant. With hindsight I think he was frightened; he wanted someone to extend a hand and pull him out of the hellhole in which he believed he lived. It was his own ego that killed his chances in the end.
If he’d asked I’d have offered to have him moved to some sort of home, but then I suppose he’d have been offended by the suggestion. I can look after myself. He couldn’t, of course. That was why he never divorced my mother, I think; he might have loved her once, but in the end she was someone to wash his clothes and brew his tea. My poor mother died at quite a young age at only forty-eight; she broke her arm falling down the stairs - at least, so she told the nurses - and she took ill in there. She never returned to the house, and only as she lay there dying did he find it in himself to visit her.
I wasn’t with him when he died. If I had been, he might not have died at all, but then again the doctors reckon death came almost instantly. They found his body snapped and twisted, face covered in glass from those photo frames he’d kept on the mantel. We’re still not sure what happened; according to the expert who examined the wall, there had been no reason for the fireplace to collapse. He hadn’t even touched it, they think, before it fell - nor the mirror which hung above it, and note the past participle; it, too, fell and shattered right across his forehead.
I didn’t cry when they told me. I think they expected me to; I think they expected floods. ‘They’ includes the police, the papers and the photographers; it does not include Lucy. I think she understood - she stood there with her arm around me, and the serious look of her face didn’t stretch to her eyes. We both felt... guiltily relieved, I think. Of course, in the interview for the local paper I was devastated - the grief hadn’t really settled in, and I wanted to spend some time with my family. Really, we started packing our bags. Perhaps you’ll think badly of us, but we knew what my father was like.
I did better than anybody. Sometimes when I close my eyes I see my mother, violet Violet at my birthday party, and that melancholy expression on her pretty face. She had always been a very beautiful woman. Lucy tells me I look like her sometimes, and it’s a kind thing to do, but not because it infers I’m pretty, too. It means I don’t resemble my father, and in my eyes there’s no compliment higher. He saw the bad in everything - especially in that house. We never saw it, but now I think I understand.
The way my father was unpleasant. He was crushed under the weight of the marble fireplace he’d stood in front of as he looked into the mirror that stared out with grandeur from above it. The photographs that were in the frames on the mantlepiece were still in tact around his head. I was allowed to take them once a photograph of the scene itself existed. The first, right beside his twisted neck, portrays young mother Violet with me in her arms, a smile on her face as though she knows something the photographer doesn’t. I’d like to think she knew how he’d died, but she’d never been like that, and he was still good to her back then anyway. Right beside his weak, wrinkled neck there’s a photograph of me and my best friend at the time, Abby, aged seven. Abby wasn’t allowed to sleep over at my house any more after one incident in summer. I didn’t understand at the time, and I don’t dare to think about it now, because I think the answer my mind has come up with is correct... for once I’d rather be wrong. In the last photograph, my little dachshund Pippi looks doe-eyed up at the camera, unaware that before she’d be dead within two years. I’ve always suspected it was my father’s foot that had crushed her ribs and killed her after the medicine bills got high, but of course there’s no way of knowing... it’d be ironic now. I almost hope it was him as I look out of the car window, one hand on the wheel. I’ll never set foot in that house again.
Lucy’s hand rests gently on mine and she even leans across to kiss my cheek as I put the car into first gear and take off down the street. Our suitcases are already in the back; we’ll be on the motorway to London within the hour. I don’t look back with my eyes, but I do with my mind. Father always said there was evil in the walls of his house, and I always thought it was nonsense, but now I see it. It had seeped into the wallpaper, a relic from the swinging sixties, and it had buried itself in the shag carpet. It was in the yellowing net curtains; it was in the leaves of the plants on the windowsills and the faint, musky scent of tobacco in the air... but what father sensed wasn’t really the house at all. Maybe that damned house knew it too. There’s something wrong here, he’d complain. It’ll get us all one day. Well, my father had looked into the mirror that day and evil had stared right back at him - and coincidence or not, the heavy marble fireplace and the ghosts of his past had crashed down around him as it did.
Yes; he’d always known something was wrong with that house... but never in his bitter old life had he guessed it was him
The next story was from this week's prompt; another I struggled with. You had to include the character of a girl called Hannah who liked changing the way she acted and dressed every month or so just to ensure that she's different from everyone else. This was what I got.
OK, I think you're probably thinking I'm an absolute psychopath now, but I'm not that bad. I just didn't want to infringe on Stargirl's copyright!
She is glorious in the sun as she walks across the pathway between her lessons. Her golden hair is masked beneath last month’s fading dyed shade of chestnut brown, which doesn't suit her so well, but of course she's still very beautiful. She’s never been anything but, as much as she likes to think she’s an ugly duckling sometimes. They call her crazy, and I think they could be right, but at the same time maybe she’s a lot saner than the rest of us. In all the time I’ve known her she’s been many things, but never a fashion victim; isn’t that an achievement? How many people can truly claim, hand on heart, that they have never looked around a mainstream shop and at least wanted to wear something in fashion - possibly only because it’s in fashion? Many people do and then grow out of it, but Hannah never grew into it. If you ask me, that’s something special.
This month she’s come over all bohemian; she’s just handed a flower to a giggling third-year girl before pecking her on the cheek and strolling off without a care in the world. It - that flower - will be on the floor within five minutes, but for now her and her friends are taking turns tucking it into their hair and posing with it. Another marvellous thing about Hannah is that she makes an impact on the world around her, whether temporarily or permenantly. Today it’s only temporary, but it won’t be long before her mind stretches to changing the world. That way, she’ll know nobody will ever be like her. Nobody’s ever come close to Leonardo da Vinci, after all, have they? Florence Nightingale, Joan of Arc, Marie Curie, Marilyn Monroe... I suppose they’re more likely role models for her. Lots of things change about Hannah, but she’s always been something of a feminist.
Momentarily, she turns her head and looks around the square in the middle of all the school buildings, and somehow her gaze reaches me. She smiles.
I think I’m in love with Hannah Sparrow.
The bell rings for her next lesson, Art - which, with due thanks to the powers that be, is with me. At her desk, that muddy brown hair of hers falls in waves past her shoulders and pools on the desk. I wonder how she can see what she’s drawing, and once she starts painting I wonder how it doesn’t emerge purple from the pot, having fallen into it. Sometimes she chooses to be bad at drawing, but in truth she’s really quite a skilled artist - today, to my pleasure and surprise, she has allowed to let this talent show. I head over to her desk.
“Can I see, Hannah?” She gives another beaming smile - oh, God, I think I’m melting - and spins the paper around, swinging her hair over her shoulder with a hand. I bet she wants to cut it soon, but if I have my way I won’t let her. It’s too lovely to be chopped off and discarded. She had painted a red admiral butterfly perched on an idealistically organic-looking world, and the effect was stunning, if a little too nicey-nicey. That’s the only problem with her current persona; she’s just sweetness and light, which is nice but it makes me feel odd being around her. She doesn’t seem real - she doesn’t seem mortal. Like a butterfly princess... oh, God, I want to pin her down. It sounds far less disturbing in my mind than it should. Deciding I’d best pass my judgement and leave her be, I look back up at her with a soft smile on my lips, thinking all the while that I wish she’d just jump up and taste them. “That’s really good.”
“Thank you.”
Funny how her response carries more weight than mine, and she’s only completing the adjacency pair. My hand moves up to absent-mindedly rub the back of my neck as I walk away; God, I feel so immature. I’m probably being way too obvious... doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. All I have to do is keep walking, and I do; back to my own seat, where I do nothing but think about her. They lock you up for admiring people like this; they call it obsession. It’s not an obsession - I merely see in her what others unfortunately do not. Some days I look at her and the way they treat her and she’s Carrie; she’s that easy target that’s the butt of every joke. She doesn’t deserve it. She doesn’t deserve it.
My hand tightens around the pencil I’m holding, but thankfully a distraction arrives in the form of a paint-fight between two boys in the class. Of course, though, occupied as I am, my mind never really leaves her. My thoughts are inappropriate for my surroundings; I hear her shallow breath in my ears and watch her eyes squint shut, her toes curl... the redness in my cheeks can be attributed by everyone around me to the heat of this paint-fight, but really it’s her. It’s always her.
---
The most skilled of butterfly catchers do not spring immediately, and nor do I. It is a month later when I finally see my opportunity to act; I’m seeing red, but it’s not as I imagined. It’s not red passion or the blush of a first kiss - or more. It’s anger. Her bohemian phase didn’t last long after that Art lesson, and now she’s gone back to wearing those gothic Lolita dresses she liked a year or so ago. They suit her, and they’re most pleasing to the eye of an admirer, so it isn’t the image change that troubles me, or even the switch in personality to be a more pouty and little-girly; these are qualities that, perhaps embarrassingly, are to my taste. What troubles me is her favourite accessory.
His name is Joseph, and the way she looks at him makes me sick to my stomach. She’s mine. She’s mine. Last month I recall him laughing at her as she sat with her eyes closed against a tree in the school square, sunflower in her pretty, windswept hair and dress cut charmingly to suit her body shape. She’s sixteen, but in that region which attracts the most interest from my gender she hasn’t quite flowered yet so much as just begun to germinate, if you will. It doesn’t matter to me - but it mattered to him. He laughed at her; I watched him - and yet there they are, holding hands as they walk together to lunch. I can’t have it. I won’t have it.
It’s not a phase. She’s positively glowing in the warmth of his affection, and it hurts that it’s not my affection, my arms; my car that she rides home from school in. Joseph Manners is a butterfly collector - she’s just another creature he wants to deflower and keep forever on his corkscrew board. I can’t let that happen to her; oh, God, any girl but her.
She hasn’t misbehaved, forgotten her homework or even done it badly, but she ends up getting herself a detention anyway. “But sir, I...”
“Never mind ‘but’, Hannah. I’ll see you after school.”
She rolls her eyes at the girl who sits next to her, though the girl who sits next to her is not her friend. She never has been, and never will be. That girl is one of those who likes to laugh, and if my memory isn’t mistaken she, too, forms part of Joseph’s sorry collection. “Yes, sir.” Her eyes are dark as she leaves the classroom, and she greets that boyfriend of hers with a grumpy reaction as he tries to kiss her. I smirk inwardly as I pass - at least her bad mood is good for something.
The evening is eventful. She knows as soon as she enters the classroom that something is odd; something is out of place. She looks at me like she thinks I shouldn’t be there, and for a brief second, I think I’ve seen past all the layers of Japanese-style make-up, dyed black hair - she’ll make it all fall out one day if she carries on like that - and caught a glimpse the real Hannah. She is vulnerable and young; she doesn’t know what to expect. Nor do I.
“Sir?”
“What are you doing hanging around with Joseph Manners, Hannah?”
The question throws her off-kilter and she isn’t quite sure how to answer. I watch her as she struggles for an answer, and I take a step closer, her a step back. She rushes her words. “I don’t know, sir.”
“That’s not a good enough answer.”
“I don’t know, sir! Why does it matter?” She knows as soon as she’s spoken that raising her voice was a bad idea. “I’m sorry. I; we’re... he’s my boyfriend, sir; I don’t know!”
“But why him, you silly little girl? Can’t you see what he’s doing? Can’t you see that all he wants is what every boy wants?”
Momentarily, she is silent. “Joe isn’t like that.”
“I think you’ll find Joe is. You know how he’s treated the other girls.”
Finally, I think, from my frantic tone of voice, she understands. Her own tone is cautious - she doesn’t want to trust her own judgement because she’s frightened of being right. She is. “Why are you always looking at me in lessons? Why do you care whether or not I’m with Joe?” She stumbles backwards in response to my second step forward, and she hits a desk. I take my chance in the few seconds this gives me and move to block the door. She moans as though she’s expecting me to hurt her, and it incites me to, but I don’t. Not quite yet.
“Hannah...” My hand strokes her face, tender, and she flinches. Suddenly I flinch too, and suddenly I’ve lost control. Suddenly I swing that hand back and knock her to the ground, where she tries to claw her way to safety but fails. Of course she fails, because I want her to. “I’m better for you than him! I’m better for you than anybody!”
She’s sobbing, and it’s startlingly beautiful. It’s mine. “Please...”
My voice softens, because I don’t want to alarm her. My words are gentle, and I speak them with love on my lips. “We could have been together, my dear.”
“No, no...”
The metal leg of the desk moves to her chest of its own accord, and as I push down amidst her screams of pain and fear no tears spring to my eyes. I feel no guilt, no remorse. You’re my butterfly, Hannah... it was only my right to pin you down.
He’d always known there was something wrong with that house.
I can’t believe now that I didn’t see it. Every two days, like clockwork, we’d bring a big dinner over for him and tidy round the house a bit; just general upkeep that he couldn’t do himself anymore. I’d dust the photographs and my eyes would narrow; Lucy would put her head on my shoulder and her arm around my waist. He was never able to understand what I saw in Lucy; why I loved her. It was beyond him and his generation to understand, I suppose… it hurt sometimes; the way he looked at us together. I knew it was just his age, his time. I always knew, but it never made it any easier. I was his daughter, and I wanted him to love Lucy as I did; not simply tolerate her.
He’d just tolerated my mother, too; and hadn’t tolerated her, sometimes. When I was a young girl he’d hit her in the bedroom, away from my eyes. He didn’t bother to hide it when I was older. I’d grown used to seeing my mother bruised, but it had, of course, never really registered within me that it was my father that put them there until I saw it with my own eyes. On my fourteenth birthday, her skin was plum purple and her dress matched. I’ve never liked the colour since.
I don’t know how I tolerated him, sometimes. He’d whisper too loudly about Lucy when he thought she couldn’t hear, asking me when I was going to leave her and find a nice man to settle down with; when would he have his grandchildren? I couldn’t once bring myself to tell him I’d never wanted children despite it all; he had no qualms about upsetting other people, but thankfully I never inherited that trait from him.
Maybe it would have done him some good to be a little bit broken. He was so argumentative; so criticising. When he wasn’t hissing unsubtly at me about my choice of partner, he was complaining; what about? The television, the news, the government, his cough - but of course chain smoking somehow escaped his blame - and the house. Yes; he was always telling anybody that would listen that there was something evil within the walls, something wrong; and I’m sure you’ve gathered from what I’ve already told you that he wasn’t quite friendly to Lucy. It says a lot about how desperate he was to have somebody understand what he meant. With hindsight I think he was frightened; he wanted someone to extend a hand and pull him out of the hellhole in which he believed he lived. It was his own ego that killed his chances in the end.
If he’d asked I’d have offered to have him moved to some sort of home, but then I suppose he’d have been offended by the suggestion. I can look after myself. He couldn’t, of course. That was why he never divorced my mother, I think; he might have loved her once, but in the end she was someone to wash his clothes and brew his tea. My poor mother died at quite a young age at only forty-eight; she broke her arm falling down the stairs - at least, so she told the nurses - and she took ill in there. She never returned to the house, and only as she lay there dying did he find it in himself to visit her.
I wasn’t with him when he died. If I had been, he might not have died at all, but then again the doctors reckon death came almost instantly. They found his body snapped and twisted, face covered in glass from those photo frames he’d kept on the mantel. We’re still not sure what happened; according to the expert who examined the wall, there had been no reason for the fireplace to collapse. He hadn’t even touched it, they think, before it fell - nor the mirror which hung above it, and note the past participle; it, too, fell and shattered right across his forehead.
I didn’t cry when they told me. I think they expected me to; I think they expected floods. ‘They’ includes the police, the papers and the photographers; it does not include Lucy. I think she understood - she stood there with her arm around me, and the serious look of her face didn’t stretch to her eyes. We both felt... guiltily relieved, I think. Of course, in the interview for the local paper I was devastated - the grief hadn’t really settled in, and I wanted to spend some time with my family. Really, we started packing our bags. Perhaps you’ll think badly of us, but we knew what my father was like.
I did better than anybody. Sometimes when I close my eyes I see my mother, violet Violet at my birthday party, and that melancholy expression on her pretty face. She had always been a very beautiful woman. Lucy tells me I look like her sometimes, and it’s a kind thing to do, but not because it infers I’m pretty, too. It means I don’t resemble my father, and in my eyes there’s no compliment higher. He saw the bad in everything - especially in that house. We never saw it, but now I think I understand.
The way my father was unpleasant. He was crushed under the weight of the marble fireplace he’d stood in front of as he looked into the mirror that stared out with grandeur from above it. The photographs that were in the frames on the mantlepiece were still in tact around his head. I was allowed to take them once a photograph of the scene itself existed. The first, right beside his twisted neck, portrays young mother Violet with me in her arms, a smile on her face as though she knows something the photographer doesn’t. I’d like to think she knew how he’d died, but she’d never been like that, and he was still good to her back then anyway. Right beside his weak, wrinkled neck there’s a photograph of me and my best friend at the time, Abby, aged seven. Abby wasn’t allowed to sleep over at my house any more after one incident in summer. I didn’t understand at the time, and I don’t dare to think about it now, because I think the answer my mind has come up with is correct... for once I’d rather be wrong. In the last photograph, my little dachshund Pippi looks doe-eyed up at the camera, unaware that before she’d be dead within two years. I’ve always suspected it was my father’s foot that had crushed her ribs and killed her after the medicine bills got high, but of course there’s no way of knowing... it’d be ironic now. I almost hope it was him as I look out of the car window, one hand on the wheel. I’ll never set foot in that house again.
Lucy’s hand rests gently on mine and she even leans across to kiss my cheek as I put the car into first gear and take off down the street. Our suitcases are already in the back; we’ll be on the motorway to London within the hour. I don’t look back with my eyes, but I do with my mind. Father always said there was evil in the walls of his house, and I always thought it was nonsense, but now I see it. It had seeped into the wallpaper, a relic from the swinging sixties, and it had buried itself in the shag carpet. It was in the yellowing net curtains; it was in the leaves of the plants on the windowsills and the faint, musky scent of tobacco in the air... but what father sensed wasn’t really the house at all. Maybe that damned house knew it too. There’s something wrong here, he’d complain. It’ll get us all one day. Well, my father had looked into the mirror that day and evil had stared right back at him - and coincidence or not, the heavy marble fireplace and the ghosts of his past had crashed down around him as it did.
Yes; he’d always known something was wrong with that house... but never in his bitter old life had he guessed it was him
The next story was from this week's prompt; another I struggled with. You had to include the character of a girl called Hannah who liked changing the way she acted and dressed every month or so just to ensure that she's different from everyone else. This was what I got.
OK, I think you're probably thinking I'm an absolute psychopath now, but I'm not that bad. I just didn't want to infringe on Stargirl's copyright!
She is glorious in the sun as she walks across the pathway between her lessons. Her golden hair is masked beneath last month’s fading dyed shade of chestnut brown, which doesn't suit her so well, but of course she's still very beautiful. She’s never been anything but, as much as she likes to think she’s an ugly duckling sometimes. They call her crazy, and I think they could be right, but at the same time maybe she’s a lot saner than the rest of us. In all the time I’ve known her she’s been many things, but never a fashion victim; isn’t that an achievement? How many people can truly claim, hand on heart, that they have never looked around a mainstream shop and at least wanted to wear something in fashion - possibly only because it’s in fashion? Many people do and then grow out of it, but Hannah never grew into it. If you ask me, that’s something special.
This month she’s come over all bohemian; she’s just handed a flower to a giggling third-year girl before pecking her on the cheek and strolling off without a care in the world. It - that flower - will be on the floor within five minutes, but for now her and her friends are taking turns tucking it into their hair and posing with it. Another marvellous thing about Hannah is that she makes an impact on the world around her, whether temporarily or permenantly. Today it’s only temporary, but it won’t be long before her mind stretches to changing the world. That way, she’ll know nobody will ever be like her. Nobody’s ever come close to Leonardo da Vinci, after all, have they? Florence Nightingale, Joan of Arc, Marie Curie, Marilyn Monroe... I suppose they’re more likely role models for her. Lots of things change about Hannah, but she’s always been something of a feminist.
Momentarily, she turns her head and looks around the square in the middle of all the school buildings, and somehow her gaze reaches me. She smiles.
I think I’m in love with Hannah Sparrow.
The bell rings for her next lesson, Art - which, with due thanks to the powers that be, is with me. At her desk, that muddy brown hair of hers falls in waves past her shoulders and pools on the desk. I wonder how she can see what she’s drawing, and once she starts painting I wonder how it doesn’t emerge purple from the pot, having fallen into it. Sometimes she chooses to be bad at drawing, but in truth she’s really quite a skilled artist - today, to my pleasure and surprise, she has allowed to let this talent show. I head over to her desk.
“Can I see, Hannah?” She gives another beaming smile - oh, God, I think I’m melting - and spins the paper around, swinging her hair over her shoulder with a hand. I bet she wants to cut it soon, but if I have my way I won’t let her. It’s too lovely to be chopped off and discarded. She had painted a red admiral butterfly perched on an idealistically organic-looking world, and the effect was stunning, if a little too nicey-nicey. That’s the only problem with her current persona; she’s just sweetness and light, which is nice but it makes me feel odd being around her. She doesn’t seem real - she doesn’t seem mortal. Like a butterfly princess... oh, God, I want to pin her down. It sounds far less disturbing in my mind than it should. Deciding I’d best pass my judgement and leave her be, I look back up at her with a soft smile on my lips, thinking all the while that I wish she’d just jump up and taste them. “That’s really good.”
“Thank you.”
Funny how her response carries more weight than mine, and she’s only completing the adjacency pair. My hand moves up to absent-mindedly rub the back of my neck as I walk away; God, I feel so immature. I’m probably being way too obvious... doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. All I have to do is keep walking, and I do; back to my own seat, where I do nothing but think about her. They lock you up for admiring people like this; they call it obsession. It’s not an obsession - I merely see in her what others unfortunately do not. Some days I look at her and the way they treat her and she’s Carrie; she’s that easy target that’s the butt of every joke. She doesn’t deserve it. She doesn’t deserve it.
My hand tightens around the pencil I’m holding, but thankfully a distraction arrives in the form of a paint-fight between two boys in the class. Of course, though, occupied as I am, my mind never really leaves her. My thoughts are inappropriate for my surroundings; I hear her shallow breath in my ears and watch her eyes squint shut, her toes curl... the redness in my cheeks can be attributed by everyone around me to the heat of this paint-fight, but really it’s her. It’s always her.
---
The most skilled of butterfly catchers do not spring immediately, and nor do I. It is a month later when I finally see my opportunity to act; I’m seeing red, but it’s not as I imagined. It’s not red passion or the blush of a first kiss - or more. It’s anger. Her bohemian phase didn’t last long after that Art lesson, and now she’s gone back to wearing those gothic Lolita dresses she liked a year or so ago. They suit her, and they’re most pleasing to the eye of an admirer, so it isn’t the image change that troubles me, or even the switch in personality to be a more pouty and little-girly; these are qualities that, perhaps embarrassingly, are to my taste. What troubles me is her favourite accessory.
His name is Joseph, and the way she looks at him makes me sick to my stomach. She’s mine. She’s mine. Last month I recall him laughing at her as she sat with her eyes closed against a tree in the school square, sunflower in her pretty, windswept hair and dress cut charmingly to suit her body shape. She’s sixteen, but in that region which attracts the most interest from my gender she hasn’t quite flowered yet so much as just begun to germinate, if you will. It doesn’t matter to me - but it mattered to him. He laughed at her; I watched him - and yet there they are, holding hands as they walk together to lunch. I can’t have it. I won’t have it.
It’s not a phase. She’s positively glowing in the warmth of his affection, and it hurts that it’s not my affection, my arms; my car that she rides home from school in. Joseph Manners is a butterfly collector - she’s just another creature he wants to deflower and keep forever on his corkscrew board. I can’t let that happen to her; oh, God, any girl but her.
She hasn’t misbehaved, forgotten her homework or even done it badly, but she ends up getting herself a detention anyway. “But sir, I...”
“Never mind ‘but’, Hannah. I’ll see you after school.”
She rolls her eyes at the girl who sits next to her, though the girl who sits next to her is not her friend. She never has been, and never will be. That girl is one of those who likes to laugh, and if my memory isn’t mistaken she, too, forms part of Joseph’s sorry collection. “Yes, sir.” Her eyes are dark as she leaves the classroom, and she greets that boyfriend of hers with a grumpy reaction as he tries to kiss her. I smirk inwardly as I pass - at least her bad mood is good for something.
The evening is eventful. She knows as soon as she enters the classroom that something is odd; something is out of place. She looks at me like she thinks I shouldn’t be there, and for a brief second, I think I’ve seen past all the layers of Japanese-style make-up, dyed black hair - she’ll make it all fall out one day if she carries on like that - and caught a glimpse the real Hannah. She is vulnerable and young; she doesn’t know what to expect. Nor do I.
“Sir?”
“What are you doing hanging around with Joseph Manners, Hannah?”
The question throws her off-kilter and she isn’t quite sure how to answer. I watch her as she struggles for an answer, and I take a step closer, her a step back. She rushes her words. “I don’t know, sir.”
“That’s not a good enough answer.”
“I don’t know, sir! Why does it matter?” She knows as soon as she’s spoken that raising her voice was a bad idea. “I’m sorry. I; we’re... he’s my boyfriend, sir; I don’t know!”
“But why him, you silly little girl? Can’t you see what he’s doing? Can’t you see that all he wants is what every boy wants?”
Momentarily, she is silent. “Joe isn’t like that.”
“I think you’ll find Joe is. You know how he’s treated the other girls.”
Finally, I think, from my frantic tone of voice, she understands. Her own tone is cautious - she doesn’t want to trust her own judgement because she’s frightened of being right. She is. “Why are you always looking at me in lessons? Why do you care whether or not I’m with Joe?” She stumbles backwards in response to my second step forward, and she hits a desk. I take my chance in the few seconds this gives me and move to block the door. She moans as though she’s expecting me to hurt her, and it incites me to, but I don’t. Not quite yet.
“Hannah...” My hand strokes her face, tender, and she flinches. Suddenly I flinch too, and suddenly I’ve lost control. Suddenly I swing that hand back and knock her to the ground, where she tries to claw her way to safety but fails. Of course she fails, because I want her to. “I’m better for you than him! I’m better for you than anybody!”
She’s sobbing, and it’s startlingly beautiful. It’s mine. “Please...”
My voice softens, because I don’t want to alarm her. My words are gentle, and I speak them with love on my lips. “We could have been together, my dear.”
“No, no...”
The metal leg of the desk moves to her chest of its own accord, and as I push down amidst her screams of pain and fear no tears spring to my eyes. I feel no guilt, no remorse. You’re my butterfly, Hannah... it was only my right to pin you down.