westley

Beautiful

She had the kind of life that cant be dressed up with words, although it could be undressed. She wasnt a heroine, she wasnt a maiden in distress. She had no prince, no definitive purpose. She was silent, but not spiteful. She rarely cried, and that should be a positive trait, yet she never smiled, either. When she did smile it wasnt for her. It wasnt for anything.

Her skirt slid down her thighs.

She did not live on the back streets, and she never pretended to be the victim of poverty, but she was hungry and cold all the same. She had felt no pain like that of a bum or a curve-backed servant, yet her eyes blurred when she walked, and her head seemed to always be millions of miles from her body. She couldnt control her footsteps, but no one wanted to hold her hand and guide her. She was weak. She felt dirty. They said she was wrong. Bad.

She kicked it off her ankles and across the carpet.

Purity was the sort of clean that her mother wanted her to be as she was dragged to church every Sunday. But church couldnt effect her, it couldnt make her want to be in her body, it couldnt change the way she looked. Her mothers only child, only hope was ...unclean. Sinful. Even held in her mothers hands in a dress that covered all of her horrible, sexual body parts... even then men and boys whistled at her. They licked their lips and looked her up and down. Her expression stayed placid and unflirtatious, but her mother would hit her for it later. It stopped hurting after a while. She must have deserved it.

She unbuttoned her shirt.

Through years of being hated by her mother for having a body that provoked sexual thoughts, she grew to fear anything feminine. She wanted to have the sort of face that made everything she did seem nonsexual. She stopped combing her hair in the hopes of looking unkempt. Then the males called her wild. They liked it. It made her seem to them that she would do anything. She stopped trying. It didnt matter. No one ever held her. No one touched her.

It fell off her shoulders to the floor.

She wasnt devoid of dreams. She did have one dream. She wanted to be someone else. A boy perhaps? No one thinks of you like that when youre a boy. If youre handsome you get nicknames like pretty boy, and you laugh. No one hates you for it. But they all hated her. Her mother hated her because she didnt pray and she didnt have the fear of God in her; she wasnt a proper Christian. She wasnt anything. Heathen. Awful failure. And girls, her peers, hated her as well. They hated her with a vengeance. They said she was an outcast. They called her witch, when in truth they hated her because the boys wanted her. The boys gave her all their attention. Those girls spent hours and money on looking prettyor cute or just like your mother when she was young, and it was laughable in comparison to her. Not fair. Its her fault. Not fair. And the boys, they hated her because she made them have nasty thoughts, merely by walking by, and still, she wouldnt touch them. Men hated her because she was too young. They couldnt take advantage of her innocence. They had daughters that age. They were bad to have these thoughts. Sick. She made them have bad thoughts. She was bad. And she was silent. Still, she didnt know how to hate any of them. She didnt hate them. Strangers stared at her and she looked away. She thought it was her fault. Her mother hit her again.

She reached back and unclasped her bra.

To look at her was obscene. When one caught her eye, blank as it was, it was a sin. All you could see was beauty and sex and forbidden thoughts.. It didnt matter your gender, you wanted to touch her. She was rare. She was special, different, distant, out of your reach. All you could see was beauty. Peoples minds, having been tainted by fairy tales, would create a character for her when they saw her. The sullen princess who longed for a prince to break her chastity. The unfaithful whore. The sexual goddess... Then she would blink at them from behind those startling eyes, and they would look away. It wasnt right. Stop it. Stop it, youll go to hell. Dont look at her.

She pulled the undergarment off her smooth shoulders and let it fall.

She never thought about tomorrow, yesterday, even today. It seemed to her that she had no future or past. People who didnt know her; her mothers friends from high school or the quilting club, or an aunt she didnt know she had, they would say she should be a model, or an actress. She would nod and smile. Then they would melt, because they had just assured her a future. They thought that someday they would be able to say It was me that gave her a push into fame! Me! They didnt know she wasnt listening. They didnt know she didnt hear anything. She had trained herself that way.

It landed on his pants and her hair dragged across her arms as she turned her head.

She would lay down in her bed at night and carve things into her flesh with her fathers old pocket knife. People used to say bad things about her father when she was young. They said he touched her. He didnt. Or perhaps he did, and she doesnt remember. He had smelled like coffee. He was warm, and they laughed together. But he left. Just left... she was too young at the time to remember. Now he was gone. Her bright red blood from the knifes cuts stained her sheets and she fell asleep on top of it.

The light illuminated her breasts as she blew out the candles.

It didnt hurt to be alone. It hurt more to be with people who didnt look at her, and seldom spoke directly at her. Yes, it was better that she be alone. Sometimes she would think about the city. The Big City, as impersonal as her life. She made up her mind to escape, or more like she let herself escape. Off to The Big City. She wouldnt go back home. Her mother would be relieved.

Smoke wafted into her eyes and she didnt blink. Her almost naked body shivered with the cold.

In the city, it was dark at first, but morning came. City mornings were less blinding, but still the dawn shone on her face. She took out her church dress and cut off 3 feet of fabric around the bottom until it was short. Her mother would have disowned her. She ripped off the sleeves and cut the collar into a deep v. She wore it everyday, and people would shuffle by her and try to not look at her. Men still looked. They hooted. She didnt say anything. They kept walking. Men made her feel better, the way they looked at her. They loved her. She understood that women would never like her, invite her to lunch or partys or to go shopping, but she didnt know why. She fell back onto the bench and blinked into the darkening sky.

In the shine of the moon she tossed the last of her clothing onto the floor.

She walked along the streets at night. No one talked to her there, either. Yet one night, it felt different. Something felt different. That night, a man looked at her and winked. He waved her over to him. He told her hed pay her for something. Dirty words were the shadows behind his voice. She nodded. She wasnt so naive that she misunderstand this. She followed him. The shame she felt for being alive was gone. He liked her for it. They walked. The numbered key was put into a lock. The hotel room was plastic. The bed spread was imitation cotton, and they didnt bother to get under the covers.

She laid down. He smiled.

In a fit of facial expressions, strained muscles, heavy breathing, and her fingernails in his back, everything people saw when they looked at her was made true. Acted out in an awkwardly choreographed sequence. With his thrusts, she forgot her past. She killed her mothers selfish attempts with her screams of physical pleasure; ungodly pleasure. She did to this man what older men always imagined her doing to them, while they lay in bed next to their overweight frigid wives. She kissed him, and he kissed back, neither with feeling nor love nor emotion. She was acting out the fantasy of every teenaged or prepubescent boy who had ever looked intently at her and made her skin crawl. Then he rolled off of her and pulled on his pants. He looked down at her, her hair loose around her face on the pillow. Her eyes were as blank as always, but the sweat at her temples was a reminder that she was alive. She wiped it off with a quivering hand. He smiled at her and pulled money out of his pocket. He admired her face and opened his mouth to speak.

Damn, has anyone ever told you that youre beautiful?
She answered;
No

The End