• She could remember a time before now when life was happiness wrapped in rainbow blankets and glittering dreams. The wallpaper in her room danced pink and violet with white unicorns galloping across a flower-filled field of green. Love and laughter lit up her child-eyes with every small treasure they saw. Life had so much joy to one so young.



    Her head pounded at the remnants of years passed and her trembling fingers fumbled over a plastic container. It clicked with the sound of pills shivering inside the orange transparency; the cylindrical shape rolled smoothly in her palms until it found the roughness of the cap.



    Push down hard, and twist.

    That was all she really had to do.



    Inhaling sharply, her hands wrung at the bottle. Something metallic and acrid touched her tongue and she flinched in disgust. Fear had a funny way of showing itself, like a child emerging from his hiding place long after hide-and-seek had ended.



    The memory of something sweet and pepper-minty snaked in, overtaking that bitter taste, cloaking it in the guise of hard candy. She was but a child then, a fragile thing no more than four, and auntie had sneaked her the first taste of heaven.



    "Be careful now, or you'll choke." Auntie had warned, and even as a child, she had heeded those words and savored the flavor. The coolness of her breath as she expelled the air from her lungs came after red and white spirals crunched between those milk teeth.



    "Don't tell your mama," Auntie said, "she'll have my head for giving you sweets."



    "Don't tell your mama." A new voice whispered as large hands groped in the dark and the stench of whiskey on breath washed over her nose.



    She recoiled, wrinkling her face up in a fit as she turned her head to the side making his voice louder in the blackness.

    "It'll be our little secret, just between you and me."

    And no matter how still she lay, watching the moonlight paint the world shades of blue, it had hurt her insides all the same.



    Her forehead rested on the glass of the tarnished gold mirror. The tremors had crawled like some insect along her insides, reaching her shoulders and tickling until they shook. As she met the water-grey eyes of her reflection, she sobbed loudly once before biting her lip hard. She could feel the pinch of broken skin and iron flavor hinted inside her mouth.



    Where did it all go? The age of innocence in pigtails and party dresses while playing underneath the sun? The time of meals 'round the table and brunch after church on Sunday mornings? What happened to the little girl bouncing on grandpa's lap while listening to grandma chit-chat as her needle-points clicked in soft rhythm and the smells of moth balls mingled with Old Spice?



    Lost in the wake of terrible sins. The things most normal folk wouldn't dare talk about outside of closed doors.



    Push down hard, and twist.

    The damn bottle was closed but tight and her troubled hands just wouldn't cooperate. Those dulled eyes were beginning to unnerve her, staring down an accusatory tunnel.



    Like the way he stared at her the night after mama's funeral. Cold and empty before he forced her again- hungry, and powerful.



    "Don't you say a word, baby. Nobody's gonna hear you anyhow."



    She'd been old enough then to know what'd been done was wrong. This was a tragedy in the eyes of the Lord, she'd surely burn in Hell if she kept quiet. Fifteen wasn't a baby, but still too wet behind the ears to go against the words of Daddy.



    Sixteen found good fortune in the silver tongue of a young door-to-door salesman just passing through. Daddy was carted off to prison for what all he'd done to her since the proof of it sat in her rounding belly. He made the mistake of leaving evidence behind and she just couldn't take it anymore, telling all to the inquiring stranger at her door. He took care of it straight and proper, no questions asked, and then swept through town like a Texas twister. Here one moment, gone the next.



    She gave up the baby's life to erase the memories of Daddy. It hurt, just like he had, even though she lay so still when the cold metal prodded into her dark places. One sin gone only for another to replace it. It haunted her from then onward.



    "Murderer," blamed the eyes in the mirror, filled with dread and anger and hate.



    Push down hard, and twist.

    Why wouldn't the damn cap come off?!



    The bottle fell from her desperate grip, rattling on impact. Pills collided with one another in fierce outcry to the disturbance. Dropping to her knees, pressing her pallid cheek to the hard tile, she reached. The flimsy house dress soaked up cold through the floor as she scavenged for that orange container rolling under a porcelain sink.



    "Baby?" Concern spoke from the other room, in the present, and she froze in place at the voice thick with sleep. How a person sounds when they've just woken up from their deepest slumber. Confused and strangely alert.



    Baby.

    Since the first sin, she vowed to atone for it, to redeem herself sometime in life. After things got better and the sun started to play peek-a-boo from behind its veil of storm clouds, she wanted normalcy.



    College wasn't her thing, so she took a low-paying job, but it was something. It fed her and housed her and that'd been all that mattered. She never left that small town and wouldn't Fate have it, that same door-to-door salesman found himself sweeping through again. She was five years older, and so should he have been, though wouldn't believe that he hadn't seemed to age a day.



    He sold her his heart that night with a sweet-toothed grin and handsome face. On a whim they left that town to marry and settle down elsewhere, fleeing like the wind into the sky. She loved him so but he never knew the darkness of her heart. How sometimes she would still sit out front, staring up at the stars blinking from the Heavens, and she'd cry and wonder at why she deserved him or what he could provide.



    Sometimes it'd be days before she saw him back home from his sales, but when she did, they would lay together and tangle themselves in the covers of their bed for hours on end. She felt the safest then, in his arms listening to his heart and hers. All the same, she was sad and would pray for him to never leave again. A baby might change all that, and she'd hoped to surprise him.



    Her sins caught up with her. Just some nights before this, when she discovered the blood in stained toilet water- the pulp of what could have been their child. The doctor said it'd be impossible...her misdeed from years before just made it so. She couldn't carry, it would never happen.



    She lost herself in tears and knew he would leave her always and one day-- just one day he wouldn't come back. There was somebody else out there. She just knew as was the instinct of a woman made paranoid by misfortune. Her husband would go away on business and that'd be that.



    Finding the bottle, she curled her fingers around it and pulled up against the wall, knees to her heaving chest.



    "Baby, you alright in there?" He asked more clearly that time and she coughed softly.



    "Just fine. A little sick." Her volume hardly rose above a whisper, but it was enough for him to hear. "I think..."



    He waited. She could almost feel his breath coming through the thin wood of the bathroom door.



    "I think we might have a little one." She lied, hanging her head in shame. Maybe he would stay then if he thought it was true. Then there would be rainbow blankets and glittering dreams once again, with laughter under the sun.



    "Are you sure, baby?" He held uncertainty in his tone, keeping at bay something which seemed like disappointment. How it hurt her he would never know.



    "Would you quit goin' door-to-door with a little one here?" She hated her meekness, the hope dangling in front of her like a feather teaser to a curious feline. "I couldn't do it alone."



    He cracked and she knew. The thready pulse beating against her throat skipped and palpitated with the sinking of her heart. It plummeted into her stomach when he said he needed work to support a family- he'd not quit that job in a million years. The benefits were too good.



    She closed her eyes as he shuffled off, back to bed, mumbling to her not to be up all night. Her hands clenched the bottle so hard that her knuckles bleached themselves of pigmentation and she sobbed once more, silently. He would go, leave her here, in this place to rot alone. He would never know the torment of the sins languishing within her soul riddled with guilt and loneliness.



    She could remember a time when things weren't so awful. When clear skies and butterfly nets and fishing at the creek were things all children did before they grew up much too quickly.



    Her hands stopped their shaking as she shut her eyes against the past and the present to hurry along her immediate future; where nothing would hurt and sins were erased and she'd just live in a place hiding from the eyes of the Lord she'd disgraced.



    Push down hard, and twist.