Laura C.

False

You give us hope

Lift our spirits

Give us something we can believe in

Someone we can love

Someone perfect

Do you know what you do to us?

You ruin us

You make the world look down on us

They see us as strange

Weird

They don’t know how to respond

We have to hide

You give us a new world

A place we dream of

Somewhere better

Somewhere we can be safe

Have you ever felt our pain?

The pain of false hope

The pain of being tempted with something beautiful

And knowing you can’t have it

The pain of dreaming of something you give us a glimpse of

Only for it to be snatched away when we reach for it

You give us a new life

Where we can be whatever we want

Where we can do anything

Where the impossible is possible

Do you even know you do it?

Do you realize that you’re taunting us?

We try to resist?

But we just can’t.

***

 

Promises – a short story

      Allyson knew she had it better than some.  She knew there were people who had never had a roof over their head or had never had clean water to drink.  But that didn’t mean she had it good.

 

      At 12, Allyson was the oldest child in her family.  Anthony was a year her junior and Ariana was still a baby at four.  Because she was the oldest, Allyson was more like a mother to them than a sister.  Allyson made sure they stayed relatively clean.  She got Anthony to school in the morning and personally delivered Ariana at daycare.  She cooked dinner for the three of them and tucked her siblings in at night.  She kissed each of their foreheads and promised that someday life would be better.

      She promised that someday they’d have a roof that didn’t leak.

      She promised that someday she would turn 18 and take them away with her.

      She promised that someday there mother would do more than grumble at them and hand Allyson some money as they left for school.

      She promised that someday their father would come home like he’d promised.

      But when Allyson went to bed herself, she wondered if any of that would really happen.  So the day the social worker came, Allyson made sure he didn’t like what he saw.

      The three of them rolled around in the mud and got as dirty as possible.  She threw together a pair of stilts for Anthony and let him use them as he pleased.  She let Ariana run and play and scream as loud as she could.  Allyson stole her mother’s cigarettes and lit one when the social worker came.

      And that day, they were taken away.  And maybe an orphanage wasn’t the best place on Earth, but it was better than where they had been.  Life was going to get better.  Just like Allyson had promised.

 ***

My Sister, Allyson – a companion story to “Promises”

 

      My sister Allyson has always taken care of me.  I’m sure that when we were younger, before our father left, someone else had done the actually feeding and bathing and all that.  But Allyson protected me.  She was always there to take the blame for me.  She blocked the harsh words.

      And then there was Ariana.  Neither of us knew where she came from.  Our father had been gone for years.  I think Allyson may have had some suspicions, though.  Suddenly, there was a new baby in our lives, and Allyson cared for her just like she cared for me

      Allyson always told us how things would be better.  It was always “someday.”

      “Someday” our dad would come home.

      “Someday” our roof wouldn’t leak.

      “Someday” she’d take us away.

      Maybe I should have helped her.  I was only a year younger than her.  But I liked being taken care of.  I liked it when she kissed my forehead and whispered, “Goodnight, Anthony.”

      And then one day things changed.  She built me a set of stilts and let me do whatever I wanted with them.  She let Ariana run around and scream as loud as she pleased.  And Allyson took our mother’s cigarettes and lit one.  She didn’t smoke it. She just stood in the driveway and watched the road.  And when the social worker came, she struck a pose like this was nothing out of the ordinary; we did this every day.

      And as we packed our things and piled into the social worker’s car, she said “I told you I would fix things, Anthony.”

***

The Tragic Tale of Alexander

      Alexander was a greedy being.  In his short life (he was only 19, you know) he’d gotten whatever he wanted.  And he got it right when he wanted it.  For his twelfth birthday, he’d received a monkey that washed his hair and bathed him.

 

      On his sixth, they made the stars come raining down, just so he could catch them on his tongue.

 

      When he turned 16, they got him a car.  But being Alexander, he still wanted more.

 

      It was never enough with Alexander.  You gave him a tap-dancing chicken; he wanted to know why it didn’t do ballet.  You shrank him down to the size of a pea like he asked; he managed to find one smaller than him and complain.

 

      One day, Alexander declared that he wanted a library.  So they built him one.  He strutted inside, looked around, and decided it wasn’t good enough.  He was upset that it didn’t contain every book in the world.  He turned on the librarian and asked how he was expected to learn everything if she didn’t have the most spectacular supply of knowledge ever.

 

      “Ah, my boy, but you do possess every book in the world,” explained the librarian.  “For inside every book in this library contains another library.  You have an endless supply of knowledge, yet you will never be able to read all of it.”

 

      Alexander was outraged.  He believed he could read it all.  He neither ate nor drank nor slept for days.  He just read and read and read.  And because of this, he eventually fell over dead, taking his greed with him.

***

 

The Day my Life Ended

      There’s no reason.  No reason I should have been outside that museum on the morning I was to die.  I should have been doing something exciting, something I wouldn’t normally do.  I would never have the chance again.

 

      But no.  I’d wasted the last night of my life wandering around the Natural History Museum.  Maybe I was comforted by seeing all those extinct creatures and knowing I wouldn’t be alone.

 

      The real question was why I’d fallen asleep on the steps.  I guess I’ll never know.

 

      I took the long way to my doom.  I took a stroll through the farmer’s market.  I bought my last meal from a snow-cone vendor.

 

      I walked past the movie theatre.  I ran my fingers along the spot where my friends and I had carved our names into the wall.  We’d been camping out to get good seats for the last Harry Potter movie.

 

      My long way wasn’t long enough though.  Soon, I was there.  I took the first step down that too short walkway.  The breeze blew through the perfectly trimmed trees.  The rustling of the leaves sounded sort of like laughter.  The trees were mocking me!

 

      The scarlet door loomed ahead, “666,” emblazoned in gold numbers.  I shivered.  Hadn’t I heard somewhere that that was the devil’s number?  Sort of prophetic, I thought.

 

      And then the door was snatched open.  Her dark figure filled the frame.

 

      My mother was so going to kill me.