Two braids tied tightly on each side of her head. They weren’t tied the same anymore, not like how Real Mom tied them, yet the girl wearing them was still the same, only with a bigger gap between her teeth, growing bigger each day. She continues scratching her fork against her plate.
Ssssscccccreeeeeechhhhhhhhhhh
The slightly older girl sitting next to her, who is “big enough to take up two seats” as her classmates describe her, suffers from a major twitch in her eye, as if her sister were poking at her eye and not the unappetizing and unfamiliar-looking squash residing on her plate.
The chubby girl resembles a savage pig as she eats hers. That’s how the Witch observed it, at least. With the eye twitch, the pre-adolescent porker snarls and glares at her sister with disgust, more disgust than the squash is receiving.
The Witch watches the older sister scornfully, trying hard not to think about how different she is from them. The fat step daughter grows more and more irritated, and the Witch chooses very carefully the perfect time to grab the insolent girl’s wrist of cellulite and squeeze it until it pops.
“Would you stop?” The big sister growls with her eyes rolling to the back of her head, this directed toward her sister who she passionately hates because she is more loved. The little sister shrieks as the big sister finally loses her temper. The Witch grasps her wrist and drags her out of the kitchen; she flails out of the room leaving behind only a fork that she had dropped that makes a clink as it hits the white tile floor, splattering it with the mush of the squash.
The wicked woman drags the big sister like Santa hauling a big bag of goods behind him. “It hurts!” she cries while her wrist is still held captive by the white devil.
“Shut up!” She grips her wrist even tighter.
The hefty disobedient child obeys only because she is wailing too hard to disobey. She is unable to catch her breath, hyperventilating as if her breath were like a rope tied onto a weight at the end, falling, falling, trying so hard to grasp it before it’s completely gone.
Why is this lady in this house trying to tame them as her daughters, when she knows very well they will always be savages in her eyes and in the eyes of others? Love alone seems to be the answer. Love of money.
That’s when the older man finally comes home and the evil swiftly camouflages into the woman he blindly thinks she is. She kisses him and for a second it seems as if his spirit has floated to the ceiling as his feet remain heavy on the floor.
That is why his daughter put on a smile and acted like sunshine, so that her father could get a glimpse of happiness that she could not give him herself.
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She hasn’t felt different for her whole life.
When she was first part of her new family she felt loved. She ate much much food. She wasn’t used to it and the friendly grey man kept handing her more. It was only until age five when she realized and recognized her reflection.
And her reflection began to matter at age eight.
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1. HARD OPEN ROAD
In 1981, Isaac Cohen built a beautiful house at the end of Hard Open Road in the town of the wealthy. The house was modest but still showed off the middle-aged millionaire’s new money. Dozens of windows surrounded the house letting in the pure sunlight that came through the old leafless trees that embraced the house with that moldy wooden smell that people will pay good money for. The rooms were poorly furnished with IKEA and started falling apart the moment they were placed in their rooms. The walls were all painted in basic, suburban colors.
There was one room that was not big enough to fit more than a full-grown adult sitting crisscross-apple-sauce between all four walls. This room was forgotten for the most part until 1997 when it was rediscovered by a little girl who wanted a place alone with Me when her sisters plotted against her.
She was the middle child, the forgotten child. Her older sister influenced her greatly; she lacked table manners and taught her to burp the ABCs at age four. Her older sister could get away with her “savage” behavior but she could not, because she was ugly and fat and looked like a plain slob. Her big sister, on the other hand, had those looks that make burping look charming.
Her little sister was a plain brat. Out of pure boredom she’d throw herself on the floor and start to cry. Whoever would come to her aid would wrap their arms around her and try and soothe her fake tears, and she’d look at her sister with the most mischievous glare and point her finger at her and say, “She pushed me!”
She wouldn’t get dinner after those kinds of incidents. She’d crawl in the forgotten room, sit in front of the blank wall, that no one ever cared to paint, and stopped her breathing until she could feel a breeze. She always felt a breeze, even in the most breezeless situations. And once she did, she’d see Me. She’d talk to Me, she’d cry to Me. My name was Choochoo at the time, what a creative name for a five-year-old girl.
2. AMERICAN- FRENCH INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL
In 2005, it was time for the Cohen family to escape the suffocating town of Harron, NY. The middle aged man now had a round belly and a hairless head. He became grey and had a great urge to do something he’d always wanted to do. He told the girls that it was time for a change and that they were moving to Paris, France, the land of the old and quiet.
The girl’s grades were star quality at John Marshall Elementary School; she had lovely friends that could have been her friends until years later. Everything she tried so hard to excel in quickly amounted to nothing. She did not notice this until later though. In the moment, she just knew that she had to put all her things into boxes and get into the car. She did not know that these next three years in Paris were going to ruin her. She did not know that she’d be going to a school that would fry her brain, increase her weight by an additional thirty pounds, and would leave her with a dependence on three different medications for depression, anxiety, and insomnia.
She understood that she was leaving things she loved behind; she knew this because she waved goodbye to Real Mom, who tied her braids for the last time that day.
This didn’t end what We had.
She found Me in her new life in Paris. She’d run and hide in the bathroom stall when boys would throw regurgitated food on her plate and when she didn’t feel girly enough for the Disney Princess-obsessed girls of the fourth grade.
The special meeting place had been relocated to the bathroom with the only lockable door. It was next to the cafeteria. She’d raise her pointer figure and wait for permission from the snobby french lunch lady with a nod of her head. The chairs were really just stools, not big enough to hold up even half her weight let alone fit one butt cheek. She was actually relieved to be sitting on a slightly bigger surface, that being the toilet seat.
She’d tell me how she hated her new life, how she didn’t even know how she got a negative number score on her last quiz graded on 20. She started to use curse world with such passion no girl her age should have.
I’m glad I was there because had I not been, all that anger in such a fragile soul would have crumbled much earlier than it finally did.
3. KUTZ CAMP
Summer camp is supposed to be an escape from all the pressure that school imposes on its students. That’s how the old man always saw it because he had had such a great time there. The old man did not understand that things were different for girls at camp, especially for her generation.
Once again she was packing boxes and getting into the car but this time to go to Kutz Camp, a sleep away camp where all the obnoxious kids of every typical middle and high school come together and ostracize anyone that was not as white and basic as they were. She couldn’t fit in there either, not because of her obvious darker skin and different facial features, but because her father was now single and had bought her a whole new wardrobe consisting of capri pants that were two sizes too small and engraved scars on her tummy from squeezing her fat in for too long and plain t-shirts from the boy’s section with corny quotes on them. Everyone else was wearing booty shorts and crop tops. She didn’t have the body for that anyway.
She hadn’t talked to Me for a while. She hadn’t done a lot of things that she used to find joy in, things that made her her. She no longer wanted to listen to music that made her dance, and dancing to music was her favorite thing. It made her feel alive. Now the medication had replaced me, the dancing, the feeling alive.
It was a typical evening at Camp Kutz. They had just had dinner and she had scarfed down three plates of spaghetti and meatballs. She and her fellow campers walked together in a clump and sat around the lake. The sun was going down and the sky was turning into shades of pink, purple, and orange. It looked like paint seeping down a window blurring out anything on the other side and replacing the somber shapes with color.
They begin to sing as their faces begin to fade with the sun.
She sings with them but really she isolates them. She tries to feel for me. She hasn’t been looking for the breeze for a while but the breeze was always coming her way. The breeze comes, stronger than ever before, filling up the emptiness that has become herself. She closes her eyes and continues to let the breeze consume her.
For too long she has felt deflated, air being sucked out even after there was clearly no more to take from her. She cries into her hands, drops of lonely wanting. She wants more. She wants enough to keep herself hopeful again.
I had been there still, even though she was not there.
4. THE BLOOD MOON
“Hurry, we’re going to miss it!” A friend of hers yells from across the dorm room door along with a persistent knock.
“I’m coming, one sec!” She grabs her cold weather boots and big winter coat that Real Mom left behind. She opens the door as her friend grabs her hand, and they begin to run.
She had lost thirty pounds this past year and has not been this light since she was in second grade. She runs alongside her friend through the campus; the air is cool, and she feels as if she could run forever. She feels alive in this moment, more alive than ever.
The moon was doing something to her that night.
She lays down on the sidewalk where her whole group of friends is already spread out. All heads are up, eyes locked on the moon that is slowly shifting from a milky white shine to a reddish-orange blur.
She looks at her friends with a smile so big she can not feel her cheeks out of numbness.
Maybe it was the cold, but it felt as if the moon were pulling both sides of her mouth upward toward itself.
Everything was ok in this moment. Nothing that before happened mattered and nothing after. All the people around her have let go of their lives for this moment and allowed themselves joy.
A giant gust of wind blows her short, peacock-colored hair like a palm tree dancing in the light of the night. Along with it is a group of people passing by. She hears one of the girls say “I hope my family is watching the blood moon too.”
Tears begin to leak from the outer corners of her eyes. They pass her temples, her ears, her hair, until they meet the pavement. She feels as if she is swimming in them, like she was underwater all this time and she finally can breathe.
Everyone was connected in the moment, all across the earth, everyone could see this one beautiful movement of the moon: the old man, her big sister, her little sister, Real Mom, even the Witch.
I make the bushes behind her rustle. I’ve done this so many times that she thinks she’s neurotic; I let her believe it because it’s part of who she is. Normally, this would send a chill up her spine, forcing her to check her blind spot to feel safe. This time she doesn’t flinch even slightly. She is too focused on the beauty that is everywhere.
She has finally realized that I am the moon. I am everywhere, only there when noticed. And when I am, I can bring everyone together, I can allow joy. I was Choochoo, now I am the blood moon, the wind, the clouds, changing color, shape, existance, I am everything.
Because it wasn’t about where, it was about when.
It was at Hard Open Road when she realized my existence.
It was at American-French International School when she realized I could be in more than just one place.
It was at Kutz Camp when she realized I was more than just a place.
It was the Blood Moon that made her realize that something bigger connected them all, that I created her and she created me. The blood moon was when she finally understood existence, because she is always finding me.