Shed Some Light

I’m alone in the dark and all I can smell around me is all the shit that is in my hair.  It’s not a pleasant smell and makes me wonder, not for the first time, what’s in my hair.

Outside the door someone coughs.  A smoker’s cough, lots of wheezing and hacking.  Trying to get that blasted tar from his lungs.  It’s not going to happen, mister.  You’re ruined for life!

I’m waiting, in the dark, for my daddy to come back.  He went to get cigarettes—that’s how I knew the man outside’s cough, daddy has it too—and hasn’t come back yet.  Teddy says that daddy left and is never coming back.  I told Teddy to shut his face.  Now Teddy won’t talk to me at all.

Sometimes I wake up and there is light peeking through the cracks around the door.  Other times it’s just as dark as in here.
When mommy was alive it used to be the two of us that waited for daddy.  Now it’s just me.  I’m cold and I'm lonely.  I’m not hungry anymore but I can’t remember the last time I ate.

Singing to Teddy has become a common pastime.  I sing to him “My ABC’s”, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, and “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”  I sing and Teddy would just sit there and stare at me.

Once, while there was light peeking around the door, someone tried to turn the door knob.  I knew daddy had locked it so I wasn’t scared be would get in.  After awhile, after banging on the door for awhile, he left.

Another time, after seeing the light peeking around the door and going away again many times, the man came back.  This time he had something with him.  He hit the door with it.  Hard.  Really, really, hard.  Little bits of the door splintered to the ground.  I screamed and then Teddy talked to me for the first time in a long time.  “Sofi,” he sad, “shut the fuck up.  You know you’re dead!  No one else can hear you.  Just shut the hell up.”

After that I was quiet as the man chopped away at the door.  I was thinking about what Teddy said to me.  It wasn’t like Teddy to be so mean.  That was the way daddy talks.

When the man outside broke down the door I was standing silently in front of him with Teddy held tight beneath my chin.  The man was as big as daddy.  He stood in the place where the door had been.  His face was scrunched up the way I remember daddy’s being after I had made a mess in my bed while sleeping.

The man stepped past the doorway and I could see the green grass of my backyard.  Just beyond the grass was my house.  Only that wasn’t what the house looked like when I went into daddy’s tool shed.  

The man pulled a flashlight from his pocket and shines the beam of false light around the little shed.  The light stops on me with my Teddy now hanging limp in my hand at my side.  I hear the man curse something awful, just like the way daddy used to curse at mommy and me.  He stares at Teddy and me for a bit longer before stepping backwards out of the tool shed.  He shouted loudly to someone.  “Ellen!  Call the police!”

A short fat lady walked onto the back porch of my house and called back to the man who now stood facing her, just beyond the entrance of the shed.  “What’s wrong Erne?”

“Just call the cops.  There’s the remains of a little girl in here.”  The man said to the fat lady, ending with a sigh, just like mommy would when she would tell me why daddy had to hit her.