Cry Baby | Katherine Hancock

R!P T

TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE STAR

Hailey Sipes

There was little the girl remembered of the man. Her eyes had dared not settle on his face when he’d creaked open her door, so she memorized the details of the rotting wood of the crawl space around her. Memorized the scuff marks on his large, black boots as he just brushed past the soft crack between her and him. All the while, she kept her lips sewn shut. How long had she been sitting there? She could not remember. Hair hung limp from her shoulders, knotted at the back of her skull, glossed with the shine of grease. Curled in the corner, head buried in her knees, her spine twisted like a sickly old wolf’s, hunched and gruesome. The emptiness in her belly birthed a beast, feral and untamed. She feared that if the man were to find her, the fatigue might win out and she might lose, or perhaps the primal hunger instead, and the win would be far too much for her to bear.

The stars that glimmered in her eyes mere days before had spit and sputtered and died out. Days. At least, that’s what she thought. The concept of time blurred together in her mind. Minutes felt like hours, hours like seconds, days like millennia. She wished she could claim that at least she went down with a fight, the gaseous light spending its last breath creating a supernova. She wished she could claim she did just as much damage to the man as he’d done to her, shattering him to pieces in her final moments of shining. But her death was more of a simple fade, her light flickered out without consequence, without notice, and amongst the billions of others – no one would miss her. Her line had been cast, her catch much larger than she could carry. The bass flopped in her palms, slicing and ruining the flesh. Yet the blood dripping from her hands lacked the pain she’d expected.

Crimson stained the floors, stained her jeans, leaving them warm and sticky at first, but then just stiff and scratchy. The splinters of wood nestled into her skin, and the girl reached out her fingers to grasp the sound of her mother’s voice, chiding her as the horse drawn carriage took them around the city on tour. You need to clean that. She’d say. The girl remembered her words, the way she’d look down at the gash on her knee where she’d tripped and fallen onto the concrete. But the melody was lost in the deep crevices of her mind. People claim that memory loses its grip on the faces of loved ones first, but she could still see each and every detail of her mother’s face. Each blemish, each perfection.