SHORT STORIES

green eyes

[TW: Talks of abuse]

Please do not read if this could make you feel uncomfortable.

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Drowning. I feel like I'm drowning. Like if I were a ship, I'd be sinking - water is coming into my body. I feel it. I can't breathe, which makes matters a little less bad than it should. I can see mom asking me if I'm okay, but it's all cloudy and muffled. My vision's blurred too.

And all I can see is Sammy.

Her beautiful ginger hair formed in pigtails - hair frizzy from running in the grass fields out in the schoolyard. Grass and weeds sticking out of the nest, but her smile is wide. She's bubbly and giggly, laughing about something she said.

Her eyes close up forming two crescent-shaped lines as her smile widens. When they're open, her eyes are the most gorgeous globes you'd ever seen. They are this bright, emerald green colour and they glow and twinkle every time she speaks.

Her lips are crusty because she always forgets to put on her lip balm even if her mom always reminds her to.

Every morning before she goes to work.

Her arms reach up high to the sky and she makes everything and everyone happy even in the worst times.

She's like a ball of sunshine. Everywhere she goes, she just makes people smile.

At an inconspicuous level, you could see her baggy under eyes - purple, drooling with sleepless nights.

Her white sleeves cover her battle wounds - scars from fighting with her mom.

Every night before she goes to bed.

And those mini cuts on her ankles, those were from when she slices her skin bit by bit every day or two, depending on how shitty her week went.

She says that that spot hurts less than her arms.

Sometimes, if you hug her, she coughs and winces, because you're hurting her. Unintentionally.

There's a light scar on top of her left clavicle - she says it's from this fight she got into with her sister when she was about 4 or 5. She says that her sister left her when she was 8 because she hated their mom.

Her ears are often bruised, so I don't really touch them.

Sometimes her mind is elsewhere and I notice that her eyes are emotionless. You can't see or recognize her green orbs or her brightness and shininess. She's dull and blank - her face is pale and her bruises look more prominent.

You can see her fingers are slightly red and her nails are covered in a bright shade of purple. That's because she's covering the blood - seeping through her shells, there's more damage behind the curtain than she would like to have had.

She often cries to me about it.

On those days. When it hurts the most.

She likes when I rub this sensitive area on this spot on her wrist because she tells me that despite all this pain - she always feels good when I do it.

She used to get migraines in school and sometimes would pass out when she had presentations.

She'd pass around daisies or some other flower to the teachers because she thought they needed some cheering up.

Her favourite teacher was Ms Candace because she said she reminded her of her sister - outgoing, kind, smart and thoughtful. But had undertones of scandalous, a little bit overbearing and overprotective and kind of bitchy.

She used to eat this porridge thing because that was her favourite thing to make when her mom left for work. It was rice porridge, with sugar mixed in it - often caramelized sugar - and some fruits. If she didn't have fruit, she'd just eat the porridge with cucumber.

She said it tasted good with anything.

When she was 10, she would bring a stuffed animal named 'Sidney', it wasn't an animal, but she'd call it one because 'monsters' sounded scary. Her favourite drink was this yoghurt thing that was only good if it was blueberry - in my opinion, (she preferred the grape).

Her middle name is Violet because her mother loved that colour. She wanted to have a dog and name it Frida because she loved Frida Kahlo and wanted to be a freaking scientist because of Marie Curie.

She didn't have the grades for this but she loved to talk about music and dance around to 80s music when her mother wasn't around.

In sixth grade, she wanted to be a nurse, because when she sprained her ankle that one time - nurse Macadamia, our school nurse, had helped her to recover, and she wanted to help people like that.

In ninth, she learned how to ride a bike and bake a rainbow cake. She went to her first wedding.

She found out she liked girls when she was dared to kiss Carol Sanders at a house party (Carol did not feel the same). In the tenth, I met her at a deserted lot where she kissed me on the lips - even if we never met or anything.

She kissed me anyway.

We'd have our first date on her 16th birthday at this new diner that only closed down a month later because the owners were bankrupt. This made her really sad but I told her that we could celebrate our anniversaries at the lot.

So we did.

We got a dog, he was a stray and we named him 'Diego Pierre', the two spouses of Frida and Marie - respectively. She's an artistic girl. She's energy. She's beautiful. She is just spectacular.

On the tenth of April at 8 pm, she fell down the stairs, tumbled down. I was at school doing a science thing. I should've been there. I should've stayed when she said stay. I should've told her to come along with me or something.

Something happened that night. We both knew it was going to happen. But I still left. I left her there with her. Her head was badly bruised, her fingers were swollen and her neck was blue. Her eyes were shunned, something I've never seen before.

"Lexie? Lexie!"

Two teardrops fall simultaneously down my face. I think the right drop won because I can feel it spread on my t-shirt.