About A Girl

Trigger warnings: child abuse, sexual abuse

Her name was Sam and I could not save her.  She stood as tall as a willow tree and had a tar heart.  She was a cherry pit girl in thrift store floral dresses, at home in the neon light of gas stations or the fluorescent lights of hospitals.  

The first time I saw her, she was eating the guts of a dead kid on the cement floor of the snuff studio that her daddy sold her to when she was a toddler.  She smiled at me with blood in her teeth and gave me a thumbs up when I, only nine myself, cried in response because I was still terrified and sore from filming and just wanted her daddy to take me home so I could put my clothes on and feel like a boy again.

Sam had only ever felt pain, so she was numb to it.  She wouldn’t just bite her nails but gnawed the flesh of her fingerprints to the bone, scabs were her true identity stamped in ink on a shoplifting charge.  Dreamy girl, all cream and crime and crying egg-yolk eyes in school picture day photographs.  She was the only kid who would smile at the camera when the carnage started.  She asked the man, after, if they loved her.  Sometimes she would pick flowers for the girls that survived the film.  She loved dandelions.  

The oher kids in our small, inattentive school called her retarded because she put worms in her hair and sang to herself during lessons.  She would run into the middle of the playground and spin with her arms out, spin until she threw up all over her already-dirty dress.  One day she tried to drown herself by sticking her head under the running sink in the girl’s restroom.  She showed up one day with her hair straw-yellow and said “I’m Courtney Love now”.

She made a home of our hell.  We became a single being, the lines between us blurred by nights spent in the trunks of cars, duct tape across our lips crossing state lines.  We were always on our way to somewhere worse.  

In a bathtub full of her blood, after a pregnancy by her father went the way of the coat hanger, I scooped up the tissue to save in a locket and we buried it as our daughter Shiloh in the sandbox on the lower-grade playground.  We were on the cusp then, and unsure if that meant we were finally headed for life or for death once the blood came monthly.  We were worthless once that happened- girls would turn thirteen and never be seen again and you wouldn't know if they’d finally been snuffed or if they were free now.  So strange that we fantasized a world where you could grow out of being hurt.  We thought, grown-ups get to be safe, so we will be safe when we grow up.  We really believed that.

She had her father’s baby at twelve, on the kitchen floor with him kicking her upside the head “Fat whore!  Fat, fat, fat, who will want you now?” and telling her she’d ruined her body.  Nobody bringing cold rags to her head, nobody in sterile scrubs to trick the baby into thinking it had been born into something clean.  He skipped town the next day and was never seen again.  The baby was smash-faced and slow from extra chromosomes, the kind of thing that happens when men breed with their own.  She named her Winnie after the little yellow bear that lives in The Hundred Acre Woods and makes friends with bouncing tigers and shy piglets.  We made her crowns of dandelions and sniffed paint thinner until the baby’s arms and legs trailed tracers when it tried to crawl.  We fed her milk and honey.  

Sam, too, ate only milk and honey, which she would then vomit once she was sure we were all asleep.  Sam loved throwing up.  In hospitals she would steal five cherry desserts to wolf down in a fury and regurgitate like the toilette was her baby bird.  Mother bird Sam would feed whole cakes to the sewer rats that way.  

The first thing she would do after a hospital trip was a fat shot of heroin.  She was my heroine.  She would loll on the sofa while the baby played with pots and pans.  She shoplifted her a few soft toys, all Pooh Bear themed, but the baby preferred hard, loud things just the way her mother did.  

When she stopped eating, so did the baby.  So she would compromise, both dead set in their way, staring eye to eye going bite for bite.  Then Winnie would fall asleep guarding the bathroom door so that Sam didn’t puke it all back up. Sam would come out of a near overdose with her toddler daughter breathing into her mouth to mimic CPR.  For a while, the baby gave Sam a place in the world.  She only shot up when the baby went to sleep and slept with men who paid her in powder and chocolate from France.  

It all fell apart one day in late June.  Sam looked around the grocery store and realized that every product was hiding a camera behind it and the same lecherous sadists who stole her childhood had been watching the whole time so she started stripping down in the cereal aisle to give them the show they’d been paying for.  Her daughter was three, then.  She kept trying to hand Sam back her clothes saying “Mommy, mommy, aren’t you cold?” and when the cops came to take her away Sam ran and let them because surely wherever they could put her was safer than with a mother who could not escape the cameras.  She saw the lenses in the tips of her needles.  She taped over every window and reflective surface in her father’s old apartment, which she paid for with her body like she paid for everything else.  

They found her in a ditch a few days after The Superbowl.

Her name was Sam and I could not save her.