You saw her once, twice eating petals off the roses in your garden. You’ve forgotten how to converse with children, you cussed between the wheezing and she stared right past like you were simply a knurled twig catching the wind in its leaves.

One morning you found her; purple stockings, blush mittens and a head of sunlight curls- asleep with your cat, Ginger, in your backyard. Her face was lost in the fur and repose and she slept soundly as you cut through her curls, knife icy in your recycled paper fingers. You tied a ribbon around the hair and sewed it in to your next doll. You named her Lucy and stitched a red heart into her chest. At nighttime the beating is so loud you move her to the bathroom with the door closed. You never tried removing the pins.

You don’t remember your dreams, but you remembered this one.

The faded leather couch whispered to the veins in your arms and the creases and wrinkles in your hands that she was coming. She was coming dressed in white, with her doe eyes and her shrunken frame; but you were ready. Time skipped in places. Your fragile hands pushed her skull against the floor of the bathtub (you read somewhere babies craniums are soft when they are just born) her skeleton was lithe and you felt it bending in to the arch of the tub. Suddenly the skin on her back was filled with tiny holes and as you pressed needles down into her skin, tearing through the blank skin/the gaps, she wailed. Her back contorted and she struggled as the needles tore up her soft skin and she bit down hard enough to take the leafy skin off your knee. But the sun reeked through your eyelids and you woke.

You had a child once. Peter with mousey brown hair and a long spine. You never saw him much. He never sees you much. You broke his ribs with the wooden legs of a chair and you read him fairytales, kissing his forehead before he slept.

She’s out there with her skipping rope in the morn. Out there drowning in clouds and dew and singing the songs she learnt in prep school. There’s age-old darts next to your hollow knuckles, they’re blunt at the ends and your hand stutters towards them for a moment but misses and falls on the handle of your china teacup. The tea you make always tastes like stale earth and soot, but you like it.

She’s skipping tirelessly, her feet kicking at the ground in a perpetual rhythm, you blink and she seems closer. You close your eyes a moment and when you open you can reach out and stroke her freckles, tear her eyelashes out one by one or pierce her rose cheeks with a dart. The beat resonates throughout your eardrums and you contemplate chains, locks and heavy duty duct tape. She plants her red shoes by the door as she always does.

You haven’t left your yard in years. One afternoon you promised the weeds you would, you brought them to your face and snarled, telling them you’d give up and leave this place, leave them to overthrow the flowers, strangle them in a dirty brown mess of veins. They wilted as you exhaled. That was August;

That August she had a birthday party. You swore you could smell helium, it was musky and found residence in the back of your oesophagus; you willed the wine to wash it away. The noise soared and balloons sailed off through the blue, you tied the little girl to them in your mind and snickered. She was a tiny speck of flailing limbs beyond the clouds, suspended by red- you wished she could picture the fall but instead you fell asleep.

Afterwards you unearthed her necklace from below the grass and you hung it from your bedpost, pendant dangling like a spider from a chain web.

She’s the little girl, blonde fringe tasting long eyelashes, at four oh eight pm trudging down her driveway, eyes soaken up like she’s crying. You coughed and fogged up the glass with ancient breath and specks of saliva as she noticed the carved hollows of your face, jutting elbows on your windowpane and splintered lips. Fogging up the glass just enough- to miss her see right through you.

The curtains are draped across the sky, dried blood red casting shadows she can’t tell the ends of. A dim flicker of a light and maybe a filter of moonshine illuminate the crevasses of his eyelids, forehead and awry mouth. His skin tastes of sweat and earth.

She was with her father in the afternoon, sharing his eyes and wearing the yellow dress he bought her. He was a quaint man who studied birds and told her she looked like a canary; he bought a voluminous cage (from the very same balding man he sold her to) and kept her in there at nighttime.

And now, three oh clock in the morn, the balding man has her; he’s filling her eardrums with his panting and his guttural wheezing. He’s filling up the gaps she never knew she had and she’s aching and fluttering between the imaginary and the unpalatable- her happy place and this smutty one star hotel room. She can count his teeth on one hand.

But she’s never scared; she’s rarely anything but grey eyes and just maybe a subdued murmur. She never smiles, guffaws or frowns. It’s easier this way.
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She feels twenty-two, truth is she stopped counting and thinking long ago (she abated most things, but thank god she never stopped breathing). To a foreigner she is long ebony hair and a short skirt. She is stunted pubescent hips and willowy bones. She is a legal child. To her the foreigners are cheap wine, deep aches and money; oh the money.

The street is her vociferous, bright-lights home. Without traffic the world is too quiet and sometimes the voices creep in. She knows the other girls, she hears them talking- red lipstick on yellow teeth- their voices scratch at her ears but she never really replies. She fingers the fabric of her shirt, staring out but never really seeing; letting the streetlights haze into a myriad of moons.

They always choose her. Together the girls are a garden of Fescennine flowers on the sidewalk and hers always seems to catch the most sunlight, drawing in men with her air of anonymity and her baby face.

” She’s the daughter I always wanted to fuck” He wore a gray suit and underneath a swelling of a stomach, he came close to her as he said it, spit trickling down from her bare shoulders. She didn’t avert her eyes until he slapped her. Hard and rough until she saw nothing but traffic-light red. She stared vacantly until he pulled her along the sidewalk like a dog, emaciated with sleepless bruises beneath her eyes.

He could have shattered her, heaving his weight and falling against her like hail. She was so small beneath him, such a tiny thing you’d hardly see her there at all. She hushed her eyelids and felt her body dream of thorns, she felt the blood slow in crushed veins and she felt the stabbing in her stomach, time and time and time again until he collapsed. A mass of sweaty skin in folds; hiding thick flesh and crippled bones. She stole air from the outside and let the wintry wind tear through the leaves and rumple her hair.

She had luke-warm tea and burnt toast for breakfast and then she had nothing once more.

In the afternoon she’s drowning in smoke. Listening to the beggars plead with wispy voices and watching the foreigners feign care with clinks of metal. There are signs down and beyond the road, all screaming for attention with ostentatious colours. She leans with her back against a concrete wall, collecting glances without effort and sighing clouds of fog. She licks her cracked lips and traces the jutting lines of her pelvis. Someone passes, he imagines lying her flat in ink and then pressing her on paper; a skeletal stamp. He shrugs and she never lifts her eyes.

That night she sleeps alone in a crowded room. She inhales urine, sweat and vomit but doesn’t notice. She still tastes the metallic bitterness of her lipstick along with the salt water. She’s had so much practice no one can tell she is crying any longer (would anyone care?).

She embraces her used frame, curling into a ball and sucking the tips of her thumb. She escapes in her mind- somewhere, anywhere, nowhere- and drifts until she forgets that she’s just a doll with a pulse and a vacancy, and that’s all she’ll ever be.