The cloying scent of decay permeates the room,

burning my nostrils,

turning the air thick.

The dead girl lays naked on the gurney,

her limbs carefully arranged,

in a façade of composition.

Her file sits atop a table,

in the possession of a man in a thick winter jacket,

The men crowd around her,

hands stuffed in the pockets of their coats,

holding scalding drinks,

some shivering still,

weak.

I want to scream at them,

“do you not see the girl? She lies there all alone,

no jacket, no coat.”

I want to tear through them,

violently slash through paper-thin flesh and rip through eggshell skulls,

“she is cold.”

I sit quietly in my designated corner instead.

A man sighs,

the sound loud in fragile silence of the room,

he reaches for the girl, and from the corner, I flinch.

(Despite what I say I am,

I am weak.)

He tugs the white sheet over her face,

I fall limp.

The papers flutter loudly,

the men move around him

as he murmurs orders,

straining to hear him,

movements jerky and ungraceful,

puppets tugged on by careless strings.

He flips through the file,

I study him from my corner,

I am only an observer, not to interfere.

This is the natural order of things,

predator and prey and bystander,

all in one room.

Who is the greater evil?

He, the perpetrator? Or he who did nothing?

I tuck in my knees, hands wound tightly,

folding into myself like a house of cards.

The man is smaller than them,

burgeoning belly and a sad, tired face,

balding head and hairy arms,

I smile, “he is ugly,

good.

Beautiful people are too often cruel,”

I glimpse at the pages,

intimately familiar with the details,

abrasions, internal bleeding, clothes cut through, scissors, blunt force trauma.

A lifetime of suffering summed up in a page of medical terms,

cause of death: asphyxiation.

I am a walking memorial of all those before me.

I am a walking memory.

I feel bad for the man,

I have frustrated him,

it is all I seem to be able to do,

the ugly, dead girl taunts me from where she lays,

hidden from the world,

good, I think, you were only ever worth dying, anyway,

she is a reflection of my best, I am a reflection of her worst.

We are both the same.

The man, police detective, they say, is an authority,

authority is bad, police is bad. The man is a

walking danger sign.

I trail after him, room to room,

he looks at me and whispers, “I’m sorry,”

I don’t tell him it’s okay.

The detective locks himself in a room and cries.

He cries for the dead girl and I bristle with envy,

she laughs, into my ear, and I reach around to wrap my hands around her neck,

“this is how you died, nobody cried for you then,

nobody cried for you when you lived,”

she is quiet now.

The girl is as nameless as I am,

yet everybody knows her,

the man trembles with rage,

“a girl dies and nobody knows anything,”

I know, I want to say. I don’t.

She is Jennifer and Stacy and Amara,

she is whoever they want her to be,

she is everybody,

she is nobody.

They wait a week for someone to claim the body,

I tell them, nobody will come,

she has nobody left.

The man’s subordinates agree with me,

“whores don’t have families, sir”

A girl goes missing and nobody breathes a word,

a girl dies on the streets and nobody bats an eye.

I mock the stupid girl when we are alone.

"How much did your life cost? Was it as much as your body?"

the girl cries, a rare moment of weakness, and I scoff,

“What did you expect? Why did you do it?”

she shakes on the cot, surrounded by dead people,

“To survive,”

The man has a daughter who died four years ago,

I tell him that he isn’t special, that little girls die all the time,

I am cruel, of this I am aware.

He spends nights awake searching,

for what, he doesn’t know.

I look at the dead girl on the cot,

the dead girl who wears my face,

I sit down next to the man again,

I tell him he has to succeed this time,

I tell him, she has no one left.

I tell him, change the ending, rewrite the story.

There is an ink stain on the painfully precise calligraphy of my life. The predetermined path is covered in smudges and blotchy color that has seeped through the flimsy paper. Sometimes, when the wind blows a little too hard, the pages fly out the notebook. My mother collects them one by one, painstakingly slow, numbering and fixing and gluing until everything is just right again.

Sometimes I cry until I cannot breathe, until I feel as though I’m underwater, the air thick and painful around me, brutal and choking. Sometimes I shake and bite into the flesh of my arm to keep myself quiet, and my mother holds me through it, arms around me in an iron grip as she rocks us back and forth.

Sometimes I hate my mother. I am an angry child, a resentful daughter. I am a terrible person. My mother quietly cowers and nods along to whatever my father says, my mother defends me until he turns on her, and then all thoughts of my defense are disregarded. She protects me enough to say so, to look me in the eye and tell me “all your life I have protected you” when her protection has amounted to nothing.

Mother, you have never loved me beyond the places you must.

But I do not blame her. There is an angry man in our house, he smiles at me and tells us he loves us, he tells me I am his worst mistake, he holds my hand and brushes my hair back from my face as I am hunched over a thick physics textbook, he looks me in the eye and tells me that no other thing has ever caused him as much pain as my existence, he chides me, “stand up straight, with confidence”, he tells me to drown myself in a river of shame, he cuts me fruit and brings them to me as I work, he beats me until my lip has split and all I can taste is coppery blood. Mother, I do not blame you for being scared, I am scared, too. I will love you for your everything, and despite your nothing.

I scramble around on my knees, searching for scraps of affection and disregarding the bad bad ugly, piecing it together, mismatched patches woven into a tapestry as I try to salvage us, a mixture of what is, what was, and what could never be. Mother I have worn your face as a mask. I pretend I am you, but stronger, better. I lend you my strengths outside, but I am as weak as you on the inside. Inside this house built of too many stones and not enough windows, I cower, too, just like you.

I tuck my chin on my mother’s shoulder, and we both pretend that we will be okay.