Short stories and stuff

Love Me With the Lights On

      The orange light glowed low above my head, like the light of a single candle stick straining itself to reach as far as it must as I stepped before the judging glass, once more seeking its acceptance. My hopes fluttered as her gaped smile grew across her plump sugar browned lips, then sank as her dark eyes looked my down, inch by flawed inch.

"You think anyone would want to see you like this?" She said to me, her voice roaring with the disappointment she holds in me, "You must really want to make a fool of me. Look at you!"

My eyes that were drifting to the muck brown carpet beneath the black combat boots Mom bought me. On the mud like rugs laid the yellow sweater that often complemented my mud like skin, but I've worn it once these past two months already and she would have a fit if I wore it again.

The anger in her voice began to elevate as she screamed, "Look at me!"

I looked at her, really looked at her in the low-lit light and seen only the things that I could never be.

"Would it kill you to straighten your hair?" She asked me crossly, "Your afro belongs in the 70's, where you can drop them boots off too, because they don't work for you. Maybe if you put on a little make up like I suggest then I could let it slid but you ignore my request. As if you don't see all those pimples and scars and marks, we both know you got a lot to hide."

I ran my fingers across the bumpy paths of my forehead, looking deep into the dark spot that surround my face, making them all I could see.

"Focus!" She snapped, "Keep those bland brown eyes on me, if you ever want someone to look twice at you. Though I'm not even sure if you'd be worth the glance. You blind in with the dirt, the trees, the mud, count yourself lucky that I even see you, but I can't see past that gap that spaces between your two front teeth. Unless you plan on playing the live-action Goofy, I'd suggest you take care of that like I've said many times before, if you'd just listen to me! It's like you don't want to be pretty.

You'd prefer to be alone all your life, looking like a runaway slave while everyone else is being everything you could be. Beautiful, happy, loved by any man they want, while you sit in this room with the only person who can look at that face not even a mother could love. She always told you to be pretty, she never wanted ugly kids, but you disappoint her just as much as you disappoint me. Go on a cry, no one's going to take petty on the girl that the world can't even see."

The tears began to swell in my eyes, my fist began to shake in their clutches as I closed my eyes.

She shouted, "Don't you look away from me! Don't you dare not look at me! Look at the mess you've made of yourself. Nothing that can't be fixed with a nice weave, some dental surgery, a waist trainer, and the skin bleach that sits on your shelf, staring at you; just waiting to be used, but you won't take the freakin' step!"

"Shut up," I grumbled.

Only to hear her laugh, "Oh Duckling you don't want me to do that. I'm the only one who would ever talk to a fungus like y-"

"Shut the hell up!" I roared, fist slamming into the judging glass, that crack and shattered, leaving shards of it to fall onto the carpet that was the color of flawed water, like I am the color of flawed skin, yet my blood still bled red like the blood of the fairest of queens as it dripped down my fingers and onto the fallen pieces of her that surrounds me.

"You can't get away from me," She all chuckle, each part of her, all around me, from the wall to the floor beneath the combat boots mom got me. She lived in every small shard, watching every flawed angle on this body I cannot escape.

One by one each of her whispering, "You'll never impress me, you'll never impress me," as I fold my blood dripping hands over my too big ears until I did the only thing I could do to get rid of her.

I moved from my shattered judging glass, closing my thick purple blinds, slamming the white painted door now marked by my hand in blood, then cut out the lights.

I followed the steps of this room that I know by memory, through the dark until the broken pieces of me crackled between the black floor and the black boots mom got me. I sat before my black looking glass, with my finger I traced the letters, P R E T T Y, in my black blood, then laid back crying my black tears in the pail of the black shards of me, while trying to love the light inside, the part the judging glass could never see.