True Crime

by Samantha Kolesnik

Perhaps the part of my brain meant for talking with God was broken or deformed. Maybe when God created me, he disliked his creation and turned off the part connecting me to him, like an artist who didn’t want to sign a bad painting.

My imagination took me places when my body had to endure things my mind couldn’t. My flesh was a monument to bad things I wished I could forget. I wondered if that was what people meant when they said they felt God in their hearts because what happened was not of me. I was not what I did. And I was not what was done unto me.

The whole house was going to burn down and I guessed that whatever—whomever—was inside, they were going to burn, too. Traveling pigs and puppies, God and Moses, those were all dreams, just the same. Only crime was true.

She spat on the ground. “You think them men think us women have feelings? You got a heart that beats, you got feelings, Alice. And every daughter on this earth is just somebody’s broodmare.”

It struck me then how much distance we put between ourselves and animals. Perhaps this was from design, to ensure the very thin line which kept us polite would seem thick and impenetrable. We were all murderers, after all. Some of us just hadn’t discovered it yet.

Every once in a while, I’d wonder what Mama had been like when Lim and I were babies. It scared me. I saw babies from time to time and they were so weak. I didn’t like to think of myself so vulnerable in her arms.

In the bathroom, I’d removed a flat blade from a cheap razor. I’d started to run it along my arm’s delicate flesh. I had wanted to bleed out and sleep forever. I had wanted to cut her hands out from inside of me. I had wanted to stop feeling her fingers—her fingers which reached everywhere.

Every girl in the world was taught not to trust her gut. Every girl in the world knew she was the fool in the play.

There was a fire in my gut, and it was a roaring fire saying to all who dared to slight me, “You’ve seen wrong. I am not the girl I pretend to be. I am a beast.”

It was hard to think of Lim as a boy, big as he was. He never really was a child, after all. And I never was, neither.

Better to be dead than to be like Jamie, sucking and fucking for fives and tens in the heart of night, and for what? I wanted to tear my breast off in that moment and force feed it to the world. I wanted to maim.

The world never accepted the unwanted child. Firmer than any scripture was the belief that no matter how ugly or horrid a child could be, at least the child’s mother would love it. Perhaps the worst damage to society had been the perpetuation of this myth . . . for it orphaned Lim and me. It orphaned all of us. The unwanted. The abused. The raped. The Unloved.

I wondered how the world made its villains and why it never apologized for making them.

There was no evil in the world that was not man’s work. And there was no man in the world that was not woman’s work.

But there was something about me which made people hesitate. I was the black sheep, the sheep with teeth, the sheep even the wolf wouldn’t eat.

All I could do was stare and hurt, a frozen bruise of a woman.

There were people who hurt others thinking others would hurt them. And then there were people who hurt others knowing others wouldn’t hurt them back. The world was all comprised of people just causing hurt.

Like all good monsters, I came not by force, but by invitation.

I felt silly and ashamed because Lena was dead and her baby was dead, too. This hot chocolate wasn’t going to do them any good; it was going to sit and warm my ungrateful monstrous belly, a belly that didn’t hold a baby. A belly that held nothing but a monster’s intestines. I wished someone would just rip them out already and put me out of my misery.

I didn’t want to like the place as much as I did. I didn’t even want to be capable of liking it because that meant it could be taken from me. Nothing could stop a man from taking if he wanted it.

“I didn’t know you had a daughter.” “Have. She’s dead but she’s still mine.”

“But for every one of your brother’s kind and for every one of your kind if you wish it, there are Builders, and there are Creators. In the end, they will see Him. They will see the Kingdom of Heaven and you will be alone floating in the darkness. You will see a light on the horizon and no matter how long you float in your filth, you will never reach it. That will be your punishment—to see a Paradise you cannot ruin.”

I hated having positive memories about Mama because they filled me with dread only one of my kind could know. They made me feel gross from the inside. The positive memories made me feel like I enjoyed the bad stuff. And it was so hard because I couldn’t have a positive memory without the bad stuff riding in close behind.

If I could tell a parent one thing, it would be this: you can be the best damn parent in the world Monday through Saturday but if you hit your kid on Sunday, that’s all the kid will remember. Your hand and the hurt, the anger in your eyes.

Maybe it was the weakness inside me that wanted such a pointless thing as to be able to recall happy moments with him, but all of my moments with Lim were colored by Mama. She was everywhere in my memory’s landscape, shading everything in with her own brush. There was no way to eradicate the thing that had made me, or him. And now Lim was gone, too. I’d never be able to recall a time when I just sat with him, brother and sister, not a worry on our minds, looking to a future full of hope.

The pain of him being torn apart from the inside and beaten was too much for me to bear. It bore a hole in the pit of me and began eating away. I could feel teeth inside my stomach gnawing and chomping. The pain inside me wanted to hurt. My pain needed to feed.

It was a thought that served no purpose, of course. Alice couldn’t speak. Her vocal cords had burned in the fire. They were the smoke that had risen from the house—the collective scream of hurt children rising silent and unnoticed into the sky.

I couldn’t say I felt regret or even understood it, as it were, but I felt a sadness for little Alice. The same sadness I supposed I felt for all little things. We were waiting to be abused, all of us, abused into monsters or abused into ash. If there were someone who could have healed me—therapist, preacher, teacher, father—I never knew him.

Man always thought he could fix anything he saw. And what he couldn’t fix, he sought to destroy.

I had a flyer of Alice’s face folded neatly in my pocket for safekeeping. She might say something to me later. She had all the secrets of the universe in her now. Did God exist? Was life just a long conveyor belt to dust? Did the little broken things like her have a special place in Heaven—whatever Hea...

I walked with a sense of leisure. I made too much eye contact. I invited anyone to accost me. There was a sense of curiosity about what could be done that hadn’t already been done. Flesh could only take so many forms.