Wendy’s Woeful Night.

This one might be for the macabre, so I must joust a trigger warning for non descriptive assault.

On one common night, I sat at home with a fresh paper bag of Wendy's breeding grease on my comforter, originally ivy now evergreen. I couldn't care, my eyes were glued to the TV- a cheap, 150 dollar thing that had horrible audio and burnt my retinas but I couldnt look away from the reality show depicting strangers vowing for their last chance at love if an atomic bomb dropped. How insipid, some were 24 and had they even tried love without needing 15 minutes of fame? My lips keep finding the amber bottle neck, chugging around the stupidity.

The text comes in not too long later, a friend beckoning me out. One quick glance at the time tells me it's nearly four in the morning but what else was I going to do other than rot in this onion ring smelling hole? So, I do the only normal thing my drunk mind says, which is to climb out the window.

My window- half the size of a normal one that seats the basement. I cut off the bug screen with a pocket knife, and feel the cold air hit my face as well as my back- because my mother had slammed the door open, robe on and a fiery look in her eye.

"Where are you going?" She asks, rightfully incensed as I just broke a piece of her home.

"Out." I say helpfully, my torso already angled out into freedom. "Party being thrown."

I hear her sigh, and I know she's taking a moment to look at the massacre of my bedroom so I pull myself out to glare for no reason other than she seems to be in the wrong. This is my space- who is she to judge if I want to eat greasy food and drink my weight in cheap liquor?

I stumble to my feet, throwing on a hoodie thats stained but I cant be asked to find anything nicer.

"Please, don't go." She says suddenly. And it sounds like a plea, or even a warning. If I was six beers sober I might have heeded it. My family has never been wrong- my grandma calls me to ask why Ive taken the rosary off my rearview mirror without ever seeing it. I like to joke they're psychic But as it was, I rolled my eyes and clamoured to the hall way to make for the back door which would have made sense in the first place without desecrating the window framing.

"You don't control me." I say. "I'll be fine. I'll be safe. I have my friends there."

"You don't know those people." She says. I imagine she means my friends, and I spin on my heel to glower.

"You don't know shit." Is my departing words as I make for the Yber sitting idle in the alley.

Not much later, im at the place the party is being hosted. All is fine, for a bit, until a man joins the fray of us and starts to pet my hair. But I have a cup of moonshine my friend made, and it's wonderfully blurring the lines of morality. He follows where I go- if I am outside, he's there touching my toes with the toe of his boot. If I go to the bathroom to hook up with someone who I think may be missing teeth, he waits at the door like a dog with a bird in its jaws.

And when I go to bed, he follows.

If I had listened to my mother- if I had registered that fire in her eye for what I had been, swirling pools of sense and worry, I may not have ended up how I did the next morning. I know it is not my fault, and I could not have prevented it. Perhaps my friends could have, when they heard a belt undoing. But they are not responsible for the actions of a monster. They couldn't make the devil quit his day job, of sending his pioneering demons to attack a drunk girl.

My girlfriend broke up with me the next day because of the assault, though she never knew of the cheating. Perhaps that is karma. Perhaps my mother didn't want to find her daughter crying, and her sleepless night was in time with my horror filled one.

Not all butterfly effects are good. Some monarchs have clipped wings and singed holes in their skin. Some butterflies find solace in that stale bag of Wendy's the following day.