Buried

It all ends the same, with me getting stabbed in the heart. One of the various gems from my childhood that often enters my mind when I catch a glimpse of my birthmark. Tucked beneath my left breast, I used to wonder about its origins as an eight-year-old inspecting my chest in the mirror. My brother and I would've been killed the same, was the general consensus by the time I was six, as my younger brother's was basically in the same place but on the left side. I remember gazing at myself in the mirror as one of my parents banged on the bathroom door and beginning to form the words that people now admire.

I spent the next four years of my life with towels on my head playing out fantasies of who I once was. First was Adira, a Middle Eastern woman who was forced to do dishes for her cruel tyrants. I would sit on the stair and waft endlessly between the staircase and the kitchen, dramatically telling the tale of a young woman who couldn't leave because her baby needed the money. Poor Adira was stabbed in the heart with shards of a plate when she dropped it while singing her big musical number during a big dinner party. I have no recollection of the baby. He was most likely was sent to the cellar where he was lost among the prisoners.

The story of Tammy soon replaced Adira. Unlike her predecessor, she was more privileged despite being a slave. Being blessed with predominantly white features, she had been taken into the house once her father died and was raised by his widow as her own child, as she never had children of her own. Tammy grew up to be a radical. Despite never knowing the truth of her heritage, she knew the struggles her mother had endured at the hands of her father and tried to fight for women. She joined abolitionists and later suffragists. She wrote news articles. She marched. She campaigned. A male friend of hers began to court her, and they wed when she was seventeen (way before the idea of "statutory rape" came into my young mind and probably before it was identified). She soon had her own daughter, a little girl with the hardest hair to tame in ages.

However, she was jailed during a campaign and when she came back home, her little girl was in the arms of her cousin, who wore a new golden ring. Furious, Tammy blacked out and awoke to scrubbing her baby's clothes in a sink of blood. Her daughter was crying as was she, and the kitchen floor was blood-soaked. She was halfway through cleaning when the police came, and she was put in an asylum. Asylums were brutal (as I was learning in school) and the young women were doused in water and beaten mercilessly. Tammy, no longer able to do anything but stammer her young daughter's name, gave up. She would inhale the water they were dunked in and laugh through beatings to make them hit harder. One day, she passed out while being dunked in water. She awoke but couldn't clear her airways. She choked to death staring the evil people who had captured her in the eyes, and hadn't seen her daughter again.

Tammy was replaced by a bevy of characters with no beginning and no end. There was a boy that got tackled too hard by his dad, then his younger brother who did drugs until he couldn't feel the pain. There was the girl whose heart was broken so she tried to get it out. There was the baby that got into his mom's cleaners and thought the green stuff would taste good. There were the two girls who were fighting and one pushed the other not watching where they were and her friend was impaled. There were the swordfighters, not to be confused with the bullfighters or the fools that washed up on Circe's island.

They came and went, little blurts of stories that came out at the most inopportune times. They continued until I got a character that wasn't going away any time soon.

Her name was Ingrid, and she and her sister, Shannon, visited my mind every night for about a year and laid out a terrible tale. They lived on an island in the middle of the sea in a large black mansion. The place was always rainy and windy and the girls would play tag and race throughout the house. they were almost always alone as their mother got sick and died two years before we became connected. Their father had sailed away on a tiny boat, and they were being raised by their brother, Michael. Michael had a dependency problem and would normally leave them on the island while he went inland for them to work leaving the nine-year-old and her six-year-old sister to play alone. Ingrid truly enjoyed it.

But, Michael went off the deep end one day. He couldn't leave due to a bad storm rolling in, so he secluded himself in his room. A red hue always distorts the image, but he does cocaine for hours until he can barely see. He can hear the girls downstairs giggling, they'd been giggling for hours, and it's annoying him. He pushes the rest of his stash into a mug and clumsily stomps down the stairs. The girls are playing one of their favorite games in the kitchen and barely notice their brother until he throws china around the room, hitting Shannon and knocking her out. He smashes every single plate and throws food at the girls until the stash they had for the storm was all over the kitchen, including his sisters.

He drags them into their bedroom and the picture is swirling now, like the scary scenes of Rosemary's Baby. Ingrid did her best to spare me the details, but I understood that her brother lost his mind and tortured the girls for two days before killing them and tossing them into the ocean. Every night for several months, I let her tell me a bit more about her story in my dreams. On the last day, when the final part of the story was laid out, I shed a tear and stayed around until after the police officer left and the doors were shut forever. After a bit, I woke up to a wet pillow and very little recollection of what I'd witnessed.

Once her story was done, Ingrid didn't disappear. My perception of her hadn't changed over the year. I honestly think it'd upset her. She wouldn't talk at all, she'd just stay close enough that I could see her and sit on the floor looking at me. After a while, she asked why I didn't hate her. I told her I had no reason to be. She asked why I wasn't scared of her. I told her I had no reason to be. She asked whether or not I still wanted to be her friend, and I told her yes. Over the week or two that followed, I saw less and less of Ingrid until she was just another forgotten memory.

I was growing up by then. My mom and I had turned her old office into my bedroom. I was going into middle school. I had new friends. Most importantly, I got my very own computer, a Windows 95 that I shared with my brother. I tried writing Ingrid's story, but it just wasn't right to tell. Even in this piece, a lot of the story has been cut. It's too graphic, but now I don't feel horrible for spewing someone else's story, even if it's someone I probably imagined. I guess it's finally time for me to tell her story and the others, though they're less in detail. Ingrid ultimately is just as much of a part of me as this odd-shaped birthmark under my breast is, and even though I left her story behind when I moved, she's always moved with me.