I was late coming home. That was how it started. I could smell the whiskey on his breath, and he was shouting at me before I even walked in the front door. You were with him, he said. You were with him. You were fucking him. He says fuck with extra 'F'. Fffucking him. You were Fffucking him. Weren't you?
I was saying goodbye. But it's no use explaining.
He hit me often enough that I knew it wasn't worth fighting back, but not often enough, because it still hurt.
Taylor had never been to my house. I never let him come anywhere near it. But suddenly he was standing in the doorway of my room. I was on the floor of my little girl bedroom, lying like a broken doll. Dad was hitting me with his belt buckle, I just kept my head covered. He came in before it got too bad. I was glad, because I didn't want him to know, to ever know what really went on in that room when we parted ways and I shut my doors in his face.
Time stopped for one second. They stared at each other, the heat of their equal and opposite anger falling on me like an anvil. In my head I shouted at him to leave, for the life in danger now was his, and it didn't have to be. It shouldn't be. He didn't listen. Taylor lunged, half the weight of his counterpart, yelling and tossing hands, elbows, and knees, clumsy and stupid until somebody tripped somebody else and they both toppled onto the floor. I was scared now, because Taylor was underneath my father, and my father was throwing fists at Taylor's chest, pummelling him, and he couldn't move to defend himself.
I jumped on my father. I grabbed his arms and his chest and pulled his fists at me, but he stopped - as if he didn't want to hit me - as if he hasn't done it a thousand times before. That's when the worst of it came. The part that Taylor has never and will never come to terms with. The part he always leaves out in the telling.
How it progressed into what it was, I will never know. I just remember sitting on that bed with the pink little girl sheets, and he was standing in front of me. I remember his eyes, staring into mine, searching for answers that I could not give. His pants were to his knees, and my father had him by the balls, squeezing him as he suffered an interrogation in which every answer was wrong. He had tears, but he did not shed them. He was brave. For me.
"Do you love her?"
"Yes."
"You fucking liar."
Taylor was shaking his head and wincing as the grip on his balls grew tighter. "No."
"You don't know what love is. You're a fucking washed up drug addict. You're just using her. You're using her like every other fucking bitch you've ever had."
"No."
"Well, fuck. If you love her so much..." He let go and pushed Taylor at me on the bed. "Take off her clothes."
Taylor shook his head. His expression was vacant, and when asked again, he shook his head once more. "Take off her clothes! Take off her clothes!" My father grabbed Taylor by the hair, and his jack knife to his throat. "Take them off, or I'll cut your throat."
For a moment, Taylor seemed vaguely okay with this notion, but a second later, when my father let him go, I saw the tears gathering in his eyes as he began unbuttoning my shirt. He looked up at me, and I touched his hair, and mouthed my allowance to him. To tell him it was okay, it was okay as long as we both got out alive - and I was more concerned about his life than mine. My Dad swatted my hand away from his arm.
"Don't you touch him. Only he touches you. Because he wants to touch you."
Taylor slid my shirt off my shoulders with care. He was taking his time, obviously stalling, and I could see from where I was that his hands were shaking. My father whipped his back with the belt which caused him to yelp. "Hurry up, we don't have all fucking day."
He moved a little faster, but not much so, and pulled off my jeans, but not my underwear. When he leaned forward to take off my bra, I could hear him whispering, "I'm sorry" in my ear. Hurry, hurry, hurry. He yanked my panties down with tears streaming down his face. He dropped the clothes to the floor and waited. My father took a good long stare.
"You too. And don't make a chore of it."
I could sense his humiliation, his blush had spread to his neck as he stepped out of his jeans (which were already down to his knees), and his shirt. Underweight was no an understatement. From the front to the back, you could see every bone in Taylor's body. He crossed his arms across his chest. "What are you, anorexic or something? Or is that from the drugs?
He just shook his head, over and over. I wished he was fucked up. I wished he was so he wouldn't have to remember this. He was crying now, and my Dad pushed him on top of me. He held me in his arms, for a second, staring in my eyes, wondering why I wasn't crying. Wondering how to turn off his mind like I had mine. I hated watching him at that moment. I wished he had never walked in the door. I should have told him that there was nothing to gain in saving me.
"What are you waiting for? Fuck her."
"No... no." He shook his head, refusing again.
"Fuck! You've done it before. You do it all of the time! Why don't you show me how you fuck my daughter...?"
"You're fucking sick. You're sick."
"What, do you need help? I'll give you help." He reached around the front of Taylor's body and aggressively jerked him off while he cried. "Come on. Are you impotent, too?" Eventually, Taylor managed a hard on. Sort of. He shook his head violently as his half hard penis was forced between my legs. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." He said, again and again, as our dry, raw parts rubbed against each other, causing a rug burn sensation. He held me tight and squeezed his eyes shut as he buried his face in the pillow behind me to try and block out the sound of my father's insults.
"Why are you crying? Isn't this what you want? Go, pretty boy, show me your ammo. Fuck my daughter. Fuck her like all of your groupie whores. Fuck her." Over Taylor he whispered dirty, unrepeatable things as he smoked a cigarette and watched, with his hand in his pocket. Love her hot sweet pussy. You love her hot sweet pussy. It's a slut trap. Slut. Slut. Slut. Slut. Slut. Slut. Fffuck the Slut.
He went limp inside of me after not too long, and through his tears attempted to fake an orgasm that he couldn't have. Slut. Slut. Slut. Slut. Slut.
"Wow, didn't take you very long. Is he always like this, Annissa? Stop crying, you faggot. I thought maybe you'd at least be a good lay. As it turns out, you were pretty regrettable. Jesus, stop crying. Be a fucking man." He tossed his cigarette aside and reached for something out of my sight.
I couldn't tell, at first, what he was doing, and why Taylor was staring at me the way he was. With complete vacancy. But when I heard his zipper, and saw the flood of tears again I knew. I screamed, as right above me, holding onto me, my father fucked my boyfriend. The tears he cried turned to screams, and over and over I felt thrust after thrust, and heard yelp after yelp. I was trapped in my own nightmare, unable to move from Taylor's iron grip, screaming with all of my heart in a room where nobody seemed to hear me. He wasn't even done when Taylor, unable to scream any longer, unable to cry any longer, leaned over the side of the bed and vomitted on the floor. And that wasn't even it. It wasn't it. The moment I felt Taylor's arms loosen my father pulled him up and wiped the come he had smeared all over the back of Taylor and my own thighs, and stuck his fingers in his mouth, and even though Taylor kept vomitting, he stayed with him, after every retch, wiped glob after glob of the jizz on his fingers off on Taylor's face and in his mouth.
Finally he stepped away, and we were allowed to put our clothes back on. "You'd better clean that up." My father said, pointing to the puddle of liquid vomit spreading across the floor. Taylor didn't look up, but he was standing in the doorway like he would've asked. "In the kitchen." Said my Dad, as if he had just spilled a beer. Taylor stood up and went helplessly into the kitchen to get the paper towels, while my father stayed behind to watch me dress. I was crying softly, hoping he wouldn't notice. When Taylor came back he had a pile of books in his hand. Hard cover encyclopedias. Too weak, he placed them on my desk before he started throwing them, as hard as he could at my father's face. And when he hit his shoulder, he picked up another book, and another. He hit him with encyclopedias until my father fell over trying to block them. Taylor then got on top of my father and hit him in the face with the fattest book he had, bashing his nose and teeth with the bookend and screaming, until I pulled him off and dragged him into the hallway, where he tore pictures off of the walls and knocked things over until he got tired, fell over, and cried and cried.
"Tay, come on... get up, get up... We need to go. We need to get out of here."
And he agreed, taking my hand and holding tight as we walked out the door. That was when we got in his car and drove for miles and miles, hours and hours. Radiohead was in the CD player, but Taylor ejected the CD and threw it out the window, and the rest of the ride was completely silent, sans the sound of the tires against the pavement. He didn't say a word for four hours. Dead silent, until he got tired and stopped on the side of the road next to a corn field. We were somewhere outside of Boyd. A panhandle town. Seeing him then, a bruise on his cheek, his hands shaking on the steering wheel, (whether from fatigue, malnutrition, or trauma it was impossible to tell) made me realize that we either had to leave and never come back, or say goodbye... and I wasn't prepared to do either.
"If I turn this car around..." He said. "If we go back to Tulsa... You have to promise me. You have to promise me you will never go back to that house. You have to promise me that."
"I don't know, Tay..."
"Promise."
I sat silently for a long time, staring out the window trying to recapture those memories of my father from before my mother died. When he wasn't a drunk, when he wasn't abusive. When he didn't touch me at night when I came home from Taylor's house. I tried to remember the days when things were wonderful, when he pushed me on the swings, when we would talk and laugh and love each other, but all I could feel were Taylor's arms locked around me and thrust,thrust,thrusting... and I simply did not think I could live with that image... with that feeling. "I promise."
Taylor turned off the car and locked the doors. He crawled in the backseat, and I followed. "I can't let it end this way." I said. "I can't let you go this way."
"Who said you were letting me go?"
I didn't answer, and after a few minutes I asked, "Make love to me?"
He shook his head in refusal. An understandable refusal. My privates were still burning and I imagined he was no different. I knew how it felt to not want to be touched, even by the person you love more than anyone else. But he needed to know. He needed to know I loved him, so I kissed him on the mouth - his dirty mouth filled with all of the nasty things that he didn't want to share in a kiss. Then we fell asleep, restlessly in each other's arms, until Taylor couldn't stand it any longer and got back in the driver's seat. He wanted me to go home with him, but I knew I couldn't. I couldn't face his family when he looked like he did. I couldn't stand while he explained why the seat of his pants was covered with blood and why I had two black eyes. I was ashamed, and when Taylor dropped me off at Shannon's house that night I drank until I blacked out. I made the decision then to do it, and when I returned to my own, empty house, TV, phones, radio, computer - all gone or smashed and a note on the door from my father about how much he loved me, I started the water.
In the living room I left the letter I wrote for Taylor - the only person I could think of that might care - and I took off my clothes, leaving them neatly folded in my drawers in my room that smelled like death. I took every pill we owned, it didn't matter what it was. I filled myself with the drugs, and I got in the tub holding a blade in my hand. The tub overflowed onto the floor, and in my stupor I struggled to turn it off. I couldn't speak, I could barely breath as I made the cut across my neck. And then the world faded into black. And then the world, and the feeling of Taylor's arms around me screaming No No No in my ear went away.
and it is dawn
the world
goes forth to murder dreams