Rowan Talia (justafleshwound) wrote in light_of_may, @ 2010-11-18 21:08:00 |
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Entry tags: | #solo, 2009-08-03, rowan |
rip out your throat
Who: Rowan
When: Late morning/early afternoonish
Where: Her house
Rowan was finding herself in an odd state that day. Her mom had already left for work, and she had the house to herself. She didn’t have to work at the bar today, and… she had absolutely nothing to do. She was almost always busy. There was always something to be done. If not work related, something always needed doing at the house. And yet, because of the weather, she hadn’t been needed at the drive-in the past few nights. She was out of chores. She’d studied some, but was having trouble focusing. And in the time since that initial first spell, the power high had worn off. She hadn’t practiced blood magic again. She still kept going back and forth on the issue.
She sat on the couch flicking TV channels (not a terribly involved process when you didn’t have cable), and let her mind drift to and fro, never settling on any subject. That was when the phone rang. Rowan didn’t think much of it – this time of day it was probably a solicitor or bill collector, either of which she could basically placate in her sleep. She reached for the phone without looking away from the TV, which was showing some real court show. Two women were arguing loudly over a salon bill, a lawsuit over an apparently truly hideous weave. Rowan rolled her eyes and muted the TV. It occurred to her that the show would probably be more entertaining this way. Almost forgetting the phone as her mind filled in the voices – “Giiirl, I can’t show up on 8 mile with hair that washed ashore during Katrina!” “Bitch, you look like a dead rat today, so what’s the damn difference?” - Rowan closed her eyes and spoke into the receiver. “Hello?”
There was a pause on the other line. It was noisy, extremely noisy, and finally a voice spoke. Rowan hadn’t heard this particular voice in years, but it made everything inside of her go cold. Her heart stopped, and once its refusal to pump blood was finally accepted by the brain, ice water was settled upon. “Hey, Row. Or, I guess it’s Talia now?” He was smiling. She could tell by the sound of his voice he was smiling.
Rowan hung up the phone. Click! Gone! And she dropped it like it could somehow infect her. That wasn’t enough. Everything in Rowan’s world had narrowed around that phone, and the horrors it was threatening with her. She stared at it, slowly backing away on the couch to get away from it. No, no, no, this wasn’t happening. He wasn’t calling her. As far as she was concerned, he didn’t exist. She didn’t have a father, so how could he be calling her?
She tried to force herself to breathe. This request was refused by her body. Didn’t she know? Her lungs had been filled with ice. They were incapable of breath now. She stared, wide-eyed, at the phone, praying she had just imagined what had happened. Her father did not just call her from prison. He didn’t do that anymore. He had once or twice, when she was a kid, and for a while she’d been forbidden to answer the phone because of it. This had been just fine with her. She’d had no desire to talk to that man then, nor did she now. He had given up. Years ago. So this? Was not happening. Couldn’t be.
Then the phone rang again, and Rowan thought she screamed. She didn’t. In reality, she simply gasped – the first breath she’d taken in over a minute. Her hands were shaking. He is not allowed to call here! she thought, feeling both terrified and angry. The phone kept ringing. I’ll let it, she thought. It can just ring and ring. He’s on a payphone, he doesn’t have that long.
But…
The sound was awful. Every ring was louder and louder in Rowan’s ears. It physically pained her. By the fourth ring, it was so loud that the walls were shaking. (They weren’t, of course. But Rowan was.) She was sure it would just keep getting louder and louder, until the windows and her eardrums alike were shattered. She snatched the phone and jammed the talk button. “What?” she snapped.
“Don’t hang up again, Row. Please.” Her father’s voice. Not a dream. Sounding… sad.
“What?” she repeated, louder this time. “What do you want?”
“I saw your pictures.” Pictures? Rowan blinked at nothing, puzzled by this answer. What pictures? Who on earth would be sending her pictures? Her mom had never sent him anything, not even school pictures. “In that magazine. A contact sent it to me when he heard about it. Talia Row. Still not using my name, then?”
For a moment, Rowan was distracted enough by the situation with a new horror. The pictures had been published? She was in a magazine? Up until this moment, she had been in blissful oblivion as to the subject. She hadn’t known. Whisper hadn’t told her, and life had been good when she didn’t know. She was in a magazine somewhere. She had to find out what. And figure out how to avoid everyone she knew finding out.
“You look great, Row. I’m very proud of you.”
That statement brought Rowan back to the heart of things. To the cold place. Cold, scared, angry, sick… it was a dark place, and one she never cared to be in again. She wanted to curl up and hide inside herself, where no one could ever find her. And then – “Are you making a lot of money?”
He’d just asked her that? Really? Rowan felt the venom inside her mind win out over the bile rising in her throat. “That is hardly any of your fucking business, but no! For your information, I’m not! I still work two real jobs – as does Mom – and we’re still not getting by. Happy?” Really, the modeling did help. A lot. Whisper paid her well – more-so after those stitchy-pictures she’d done, and it now occurred to Rowan with dawning shock, awe, and terror that those must have been the ones that got published – but it wasn’t enough to make her quit her other jobs. It wasn’t enough to survive on just yet, considering the massive debt she was in. It was better than minimum wage, sure. Way better.
She heard a sound, and she hated that after all these years she could perfectly identify that sound. It was a tongue-click and a throat clear, something her father did when he was out of things to say. Something he said when caught in a lie, or when he was out of excuses. He’d made it in court, during his murder trial, a lot. Rowan remembered it for the times he made it in the fights with her mother. Or, when she was very young, in response to her ‘why not’ questions when he said she couldn’t have a piece of candy.
“Why not?”
“It’ll spoil your dinner.”
“No, it won’t! It’s only one piece. We can share it, Daddy!”
The noise. “Your mother won’t be happy.”
“I won’t tell Mommy.”
She remembered that day very clearly. He had taken her to the zoo, on one of their visitations together. Things were still okay. He hadn’t turned her into a monster, yet. He had been a bad parent, though. Anything Rowan wanted, she could always talk him into. Be it a piece of candy or a new toy or just fifteen minutes before bedtime, and then fifteen more minutes. Her mom always had to be the bad guy. Eventually, he’d run out of excuses, and make the sound. Rowan would know to push it a little further, and he’d give in with a grin. She hated that she remembered this. She hated that there had ever been any good days. The only salvation was the knowledge that she knew he most certainly wasn’t grinning now.
“Rowan… I want you to know something.” There were a great many things Rowan wanted to say in response to this, and all of them were mean, horrible things. She only made a very bitter sound. It was something like a laugh. “I’ve talked to a contact. We used to do a lot of business together. He helped me put a little money away-” A little. Rowan doubted that very much. She and her mother had always known he had a lot of money stashed somewhere. “-and I’ve made arrangements to help pay some of your medical bills. From the… the… you know.” He couldn’t say it. The mental hospital.
It was at that very moment that something inside of Rowan broke. There wasn’t a lot left inside her that was still whole – precious little, really. There were only a few pieces of her left in tact, and one of them shattered now. It unleashed a torrent of emotion – absolutely none of it good. “What do you want me to say? You’ll help pay some of the bills?” Rowan laughed. It was a loud, wild sound, and above all things, it was angry. “You sure as fuck better, you son of a bitch! YOU’RE THE ONE THAT PUT ME IN THERE!” She was screaming now. Because he had. He hadn’t signed her away – he wouldn’t have had to. The only surprise in Rowan’s several month extended visit in the looney bin was that it hadn’t happened years earlier. That, and the fact that they let her out at all. “YOU DID IT TO ME, YOU BASTARD! I HATE YOU. I HOPE YOU DIE.”
“Row-“
“NO!” Rowan shouted. “You listen to me, Daddy.” The last word was spoken with so much venom and hatred that she thought it may well be its own entity. Some wicked beast she had breathed to life through some unknown magic. It would crawl through the phone cords and find him. A terrible green slime would drip from the phone and slither into his ear, and never again would he sleep soundly. He’d wake screaming and dripping in sweat every time he tried, relieved to be away from the horrible nightmare of sleep – only to find the real world was worse. Because in the real world, there was no way to escape the memory of what he had done to his beloved daughter. If only.
“I hate you,” she said again, much calmer this time. “I hope you suffer. I hope every day another big, bad motherfucker makes you his woman, and that you can never so much as sit without real pain that makes you sick. I hope you’re violated and raped in ways you didn’t know existed. I hope there is never another day in your life where you feel clean, or like you have anything good to offer anyone in the world. Because you don’t.” Because I don’t. Because of you. “I hate you. I hope you die, and die horribly. And the only mark you will have left upon this earth is an ugly stain that can never be wiped clean.” Me. “I hope that tortures you. I hope you go mad. If all these things happen to you, you will feel one small piece of what you have done to me. I hate you. I hope you burn in hell. And I hope I’m the one waiting for you there.” The world was black and red. Rowan felt sick. She wanted to throw up. She took a deep breath. “Don’t call here again.” She hung up the phone.
And then, she waited for the world to fall apart. To her immense horror, the phone rang. She could never know it, but it wasn’t her dad – merely a solicitor. All the same, the dam finished breaking and she lost it. She yanked the phone out of the wall and threw it with all possible strength into the TV, sending up sparks and everywhere. She was very lucky it didn’t start a fire. She didn’t care. In that moment, she wanted to die. She grabbed everything she could get her hands on and threw it in random directions. She screamed a lot. Somewhere in her fit, she busted a hole in the wall. And then a window. She ripped couch cushions. Finally there was nothing left to destroy. And even if there was, nothing would ever be as broken as Rowan felt. She collapsed to the ground and curled up in the fetal position, and Rowan sobbed.