Chapter 1

The wind was ripping through the dandelion fields. The fence that stood alone shook but the blue flowers hanging off of it stayed still. A pale girl walked on the dirt road through the fog and mud toward the fence, her long brown hair slapping against her face, covering her green eyes, which seemed blue when she turned them to the sky. She pushed her thin body through the wind, the black Rolling Stones T-shirt she wore as a dress blowing into her stomach. When she stood in front of the fence, the flowers finally swayed. Sprinkles of dew, dying. She pulled them off, the crushed flowers in her hands, falling to earth. The wind never took them.

She sat on top of the fence watching the sky for rain. Instead, she saw the faces that the clouds made morphing from evil to angel in one blink. She ran her hands along the old brown wood, digging her fingertips in hard, crusted blood under her nails. She kicked her legs against the fence, half wanting to knock it over and half wanting to fall with it, but it wouldn’t fall. She rubbed her thighs with the splinters until they burned and then made a fist with her right hand and bit down on it. She bit hard enough to stop her tears. Only cry when the rain comes, she thought. That way the rain would wash away her tears and no one would know. She saw a caterpillar sitting beside her and picked it up.

“No one knows you’re here but me,” she whispered. She laid the caterpillar where she’d found it. She opened her hands and kept waiting to catch the rain. She waited as the sky twisted around her, sealing her in a mist that she wished only the sky could see through.

Three boys came toward her down the dirt road, two short and fat, and one lanky and carrying a silver plastic Halloween sword. All three with buck teeth and zits.

Fuck the mist. It didn’t conceal anything. She jumped down off the fence, her bare feet slipping in the mud beneath where petals now lay in pieces. She walked through the field, away.

* * *

Little unknown things nipped at her ankles, splashing mud against them.

“Sadie Sugarspear.”

“Yeah, that be her all right, that be her, Led.”

Sadie walked faster, breaking dandelions that hadn’t already been broken.

“Her stepdaddy fucks her.”

Someone laughed.

“Yeah, it’s true. In the basement of his funeral parlor.”

“With them ghosts.”

Someone laughed. They all laughed.

“Turn around when we talkin’ to you.”

“She rebellin’ you, Led.”

“That what this sword’s for.”

“Hey. Sadie, ainʼt you wanderin’ alone when it gettin’ dark now.”

“It’s not dark,” Sadie whispered. “It’s the morning.”

“She want more, Led.”

“Turn around, bitch.”

Then she was in the ground with the stems all around and her face in grass mud. “Stick it to her good, Led.”

“Hurry,” Sadie whispered, but a fat boy’s thumb was pressing on her tongue and a sword was twisting…“Ainʼt fit.”

“Make it fit, fuckface.”

“Itʼs only the morning…” she mumbled.

“Fit it harder.”

“Finish it, Led.”

“Finish it.”

“It fits.”

When it fit all the way, she blacked out. When she opened her eyes, the rain she had been waiting for came.

* * *

She was in a little swamp. Her hands squeezed the puddle. She tried her elbows but fell down, her face slamming back in the mud. A warm, wet wind blew through the rain. A disembodied cut of wind pierced through her legs, up her spine—she lifted her face to feel it. When the wind left her, she felt a burning, a nauseous wave of disgust across her chest, and she tried to breathe a little. She waited to hear her own breath but couldn’t as the rain came harder. She kicked her underwear off her ankle and tried to crawl. She laid herself down again on the earth only half an inch away from where they’d attacked her. Inside her, where the burning once was, a hatred arose, a shadow fusing into flesh. She spit. She’d heard every word before the sword was stuck under her skin. Without a tear, just a shaking under her eyelids, she’d heard them play. Without a tear, she scattered her eyes across the evil fields now covered in the descending gray.

She just wanted to die. But she couldn’t die without a daydream. She thought of something good, something that had some starlight in it, something outside of herself. She imagined a single star left alone in the sky, just one twinkle. Feeling the blood through her legs, she held a silence tightly within her that was hers alone, a sacred gift she left in the corner.

She kept her eyes focused on one knotted cloud ahead. This cloud seemed blue, blue as the flowers on that fence. She thought the blue was within the cloud, a swollen cloud with something else beside the rain inside it, something not wet, something half done. She crawled toward it now, a little hope to see something pretty. She heard her own hands slapping through more puddles, felt her wrists, her body tilting on her knees. “Popsie,” she whispered. Her own voice fell to the ground like bloody rain. She looked for her own whisper in a crazy daze, darting her eyes down, then back to the cloud on her horizon.

She rose upon her knees at the base of the little hill, walked on them to a log and rested against it. Wicked trees were already there, stripped from a constant flushing of rain that should have grown them, but instead took them apart. Surrounding her. She could smell their wetness. If only the star she was looking for would burn her up.

* * *

She crawled a little closer and more downward to a small black lake within the trees. Woodchips stuck to her skin as she squinted to see a golden dot: the blond hair of her friend, Billy Flath, hunting frogs in the middle of the lake. She made her way to the edge of the water. It looked like black ink. She could wait to drown when Billy left, she thought, but the thought came and went as she fell limp at its shore. It was cold. She was shaking and cold.

“Sadie.” Billy walked through the water to see her.

“I just want to sleep,” she said, stroking the oily water. She turned her face away from Billy and then flipped herself onto her stomach. She couldn’t hear the water parting, but she felt Billy come swiftly.

He knelt beside her. He planted his stick in the earth by her head. She clawed the wet sand. She blew bubbles.

“Nothing,” she whispered to herself. Blowing bubbles harder now, she knew she was fogging up the clouds somehow.

“Don’t mind you crying, Sadie, even though I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything. ’Cause I’m not even doing it.”

She lay still now. He sat still, too. She turned her head to him, gave one look to his stick first, then up to his eyes. They were so blue between reddish rings, so blue within the fading light. He winked at her. She smiled with her lips closed at his shirtless chest, paler than her, with little muscles. Her face clenched and then sunk, expressionless. He winked again as if practicing. He put one hand on her stomach and she shoved it off, then he saw the blood through the hollows of black water and she pushed herself up.

“You can go now,” she told him, crossing her legs, sitting.

“Nope,” he said. “He ainʼt working tonight, and I don’t wanna.”

“OK,” she said. “Then leave me alone anyhow.”

“’Kay.”

He stood above her, his face stuck in fog. He reached his hands out. She looked down, the dark sand and forest litter beneath her. Eyes still down, she reached for his hand. Holding the tips of his cold fingers, she got up crookedly. She lifted her chin, watched his eyes as they came a little out of the smoke, and he stared at her legs. He pulled down her dress, which was sticking to her stomach. One of his eyes was wet. He rubbed it away. He took his stick. “I’ll kill him.”

Billy marched back into the lake, stabbing his stick through the water. Sadie fell down. When she opened her eyes, Billy was above her again. Stickless now, in his right hand he held a big black book and a big dead frog in his left. He laid the frog beside her.

“Biggest one,” he said. She shoved it away. He put it back. “And this. Your daddy’s book. Was at the bottom.” Its water dripped into her eyes. She stared at it. Leaves stuck to its cover. She stood up and walked away.

“Put it back,” Sadie said over her shoulder, crossing between trees. Billy put his frog into his wet jeans pocket and followed her.

“How come?”

She broke off a twig and dropped it. She held her stomach and bent over herself. Pain.

“Don’t want it,” she said.

He limped over beside her, wiped some of the leaves off the tattered cover, and held it out to her. She didn’t want it. He wiped more things off it, brought it close to his eyes and then read the faded gold letters.

“Travelers of the Dust,” he said.

“Throw the fucking thing back in the lake.”

He opened it. She slammed it shut. He opened it again. She broke another twig off a tree and dropped it. She felt a worse burning in her chest now. Her stomach tightening, she leaned against a tree. All the pages were ripped.

“Throw it back in the goddamn lake, Billy.”

“How come you beat it up?”

“’Cause I felt like it.”

They wrestled with the book until she fell.

* * *

The fields and the dusty road were behind her now as she walked barefoot through the night. The only light came through tiny windows scattered about, old fading light bulbs no one replaced until black. She smelled onions, but she could never find where the smell came from. She sucked in her stomach and took shallow breaths until she was home. The little red house, a rotten apple lying on a black sheet, was stuck in faded green grass the rain could never make glow. She knew she made no sound as she walked directly to the backyard, sprayed with leftover water from a blowing weeping willow tree that absorbed the wind no other tree felt. In the very center of the tree was a hole. Like an animal had taken a bite out of it. The tree stood alone, some ancient ruin of Earth.

She put her arms all around it and squeezed it tight. She squeezed too tight, wishing she could break herself. It made her smile to hug the tree. Even though as much as she tried, she couldn’t get her arms fully around it, she felt safe like this. Holding on so hard. Soon she dug her fingers in the hump. It was warm, wet, and soft while the rest of the world was what it was.

“It will rain again,” she told the tree. “Don’t be sad.” She buried her father’s book in the handmade grave where papers with her writings, her stories, already lay. The tree quivered when she buried the book and then stayed still. She rubbed soil and grass over the grave of stories and in the rubbing she felt a cigarette butt between her fingers, drenched but still intact. She held it, at first refusing to see it, chewing on her lips, and then her face froze and her knees dug harder into the earth, almost sinking. She stared at it, the cigarette butt, and waited. She waited, then she took it to her cheek. She rubbed its frayed fibers there and when she moved it to her nose, she felt a cry. She quickly brought it to her lips, and then came thunder. One boom of thunder, and there were baby lightening bugs flying near the red house. Thunder again, and she quivered from cold. One lamplight came on, the house became redder, the fireflies zapped away, and the screen door creaked open and slammed shut.

“Sadie,” Lilith, her mother, said. One hand on her slinky hip, a cigarette between two fingers, smoke rings swirling to her face, her flaming red hair shining. “Get the hell in the house.”

Chapter 2

The house was cold and wet, and the man was snoring. Sadie kept her hand on the back door as she looked at her stepfather, all six-feet-something of him and his fat gut. He lay plunged into the brown dump of a sofa in the middle of the room. It was dark, yet her eyes stung as if light had struck them after darkness. She watched his belly balloon then retreat again and again in some kind of rhythm. His thin red hair mopped across his pocked-up face and his swollen feet hung off the sofa’s end. She smelled him, his breath, his skin, all the way from there. Vodka stirred through the perfumed air, from her mother. The smell made Sadie queasy as she gently closed the screen door and tiptoed into the house. She glanced at the painting of a fake river above the beast on the sofa. Fake green river, she wanted to shout, everything is fucking fake. Why was there a goddamn silver spoon collection hung up on a wall instead of being used for eating, and why was it shined everyday by her mother for no reason?

Cream-colored walls yellowed with age led up to a ceiling so low she could touch it when she stood on a chair. A brown wicker chair with a red Persian cushion frayed with fake gold tassels sat opposite the sofa like it was waiting for someone to come nervously upon it. She walked slowly through the room, passing fake blue flowers in a glass vase on the wooden dining table. Home.

Her hunger was worse. As her stomach chewed itself she wanted to rip it out. And now she was in the kitchen, all brown with yellow flower wallpaper peeling off walls that were stained with tar. She stared at an old hotdog slammed inside a soggy bun, left in tin foil out on the countertop. She stood over it. The smell of the hotdog was rancid but also heavenly, and she held herself back from vomiting. Her vomit would make sounds and the strange howls that came along with it might wake the snoring beast. She looked at the block of knives with black handles next to the sink, polished like the spoons, and a neat pile of white napkins beside it. He was such a light sleeper, she knew, as she looked at the yellow dish holding a brand new bar of soap. She looked back to the knives, then to the hotdog, and then she passed it all by.

“Hey,” Lilith said, crushing her long brown cigarette into a gold-trimmed ashtray. “You get the curse yet?”

Sadie stopped by the kitchen exit and leaned against the door-less doorway, head down.

“Nope.”

Lilith took her cigarettes out of her denim miniskirt pocket and lit another one with a pack of diner matches that were curled up on the stove. “Was thinking that’s why you’re so moody,” she said through her smoke.

“Yeah.”

Lilith leaned against the stove, her non-smoking hand on her hip. “Had it when I was ten.”

“Maybe you’re better than me then.”

“Maybe you’re too thin is why.”

“So are you.”

“I’m on purpose this way.”

“Your shoes nearly fit me. The high red ones.”

“Theses?” Lilith lifted her red-stiletto-wearing foot. Sadie kept her head down.

“Yeah.”

“Touch ’em again I’ll cut your fingers off.”

* * *

Down the dark little hallway, the sound of snoring grew louder. She wished it was only a nightmare. The shaggy yellow carpet itched her feet like the fields of summer she used to run through. She ran her fingertips along the sticky wall, moving toward her room that seemed so far away. It seemed gone. No lines of light under the three doorways. She should have taken a match from Lilith and burned it all down.

She stood at the door of her brother Gabriel’s room. He was pale and thin like her, his brown hair over his face as he kicked a soccer ball against the wall in the dark. She wanted to scoop Gabriel in her arms and fly away. Instead, she turned from the cracked door and wandered to her room. She folded her fingers over her doorknob. It was warm as she turned it slowly. She entered her room. A hollow wave of light blue air immersed her and she shut the door. She took no breath as she moved to the far wall, to the one window in the room. Too small for her to fit through. She leaned her forehead on the glass and stared through it toward the weeping willow tree. It was darker this night, more than ever, even with the lamplight from the backyard splitting through her. She felt the light dividing her, only neither side would fall. The willow was a fuzz of moss in the near distance and the light brushed her chest and she could still notice the moonlight sticking to the leaves. She breathed on the window. She drew an S in the stain of her breath. She went to her bed and sat at the edge of it. She felt it wasn’t even her bed to lie down in. It was someone else’s bed. Someone who snored.

Chapter 3

The classroom smelled like piss and Play-Doh with florescent, headache-inducing light. Sadie just stared out the rainy window. Her eyes were drawn to the leaves tossing through the air. She wished they would not fall, but fly through the clouds to cling to other trees. Her eyes were so bloodshot and heavy she had to work hard to keep them open. She heard one scattered voice. It was coming from Mrs. Brownstone, whose nipples were lactating through her tight white sweater.

She clenched her stomach—the stinging noise that growled from it embarrassed her. Her hunger was so humiliating that she stabbed her pencil to her gut when no one was looking. She knew Billy, who sat in the other corner, his twisted leg sticking out from the too-small desk, was dreaming of big frogs.

She dreamed that she reached her thin arm through the window. She grabbed hold of a cloud and pulled her entire body to the other side. She heard gallops. All the wind became a galloping black horse coming towards her, oily as the lake water, with legs as strong as trees. The horse stood before her like a mountain of black gemstone. A dark, liquid world dangled within its eyes. It was a beautiful darkness. All fell silent as the horse opened its mouth. Upon its tongue was a letter she could not read. She wanted to come closer to the horse’s tongue to read the letter, but she couldn’t find the strength in herself to move. As she imagined herself before this horse on the other side of the window, there was suddenly a tingling of joy through her heart like a new fire scrambling to leap, a little lift in her spirit. The hammer in her skull broke through a door and the pain inside it stopped. And with a breath she could finally take, she paused to think of how to ride him.

Chapter 4

The knob turned. The door made no sound. He was naked apart from the white undies underneath his hanging gut. She saw him through the crack in the fortress she’d made out of two pillows. She shut her eyes. She prayed they weren’t still moving under the lids and everything inside her held itself. He didn’t say a word—he was just breathing heavily. She could still feel the backyard lamplight somewhere in the room, until he consumed it, all the light, as he stood by the window and looked out. She crossed her fingers under the covers. She clenched her legs down to the bones. She bit the inside of her lip. Her heart was booming in the prison of her skin. Make it stop, make it stop. She smelled the vodka breath on the window and she felt him, even with shut eyes, slowly turn around. She felt him watching her because her heart kept beating harder, too hard, electrifying blood stinging through the rest of her.

“Spoiled little brat,” he whispered. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d be out on the street.”

Her nerves scurried toward the light, scratching against her skin to get out. The walls were moving in on her; the room was such a coffin now that if she opened her eyes she’d surely die. A pillow fell down. Half her fortress, gone. A wave of freezing air came over her. To be numb and lie emotionless, letting go of all concern for her own self, seemed to be the answer.

“I’m the head of this household.”

She heard her own breath through her nostrils, the only sign that she was still breathing. She was floating, then running through a sky that wasn’t in the room. Running through a sky that kept falling, somewhere far away.

“I’m the head of this household.”

He sat on the bed. Put his hand through the end of the blanket and found her ankle and wrapped his sticky hand around it and leaned in closer. She crossed her fingers tighter and clamped her stomach again as he clutched her ankle harder. His breath seemed to hurt him now, as if he was struggling for it, and it was all she heard between a ringing in her ears. Soon he let her ankle loose and ran the back of his hand up to her knee. He leaned in closer to get a better grip as he took hold of her leg. His hand went higher now to her thigh and he grabbed it like a giant stone he would throw with anger into a distant sea. Still struggling for his own breath, his chest coming down to hers, he rubbed from her thigh to the crease between her legs.

“That’s something nice,” he whispered, and she could feel his grin.

She was floating her thrown-away body on the sea far away from him and far away from life. Her nightgown was already up to her stomach and he pulled it higher to her neck. Crinkled and thin and satin and white.

“Lick me,” he said.

He jammed his tongue between her lips and his arm scooped up her whole body. He jammed his tongue more, deeper, past her tongue, as far as it could go, taking blood, all the blood she couldn’t swallow anymore as it came rushing. She sucked hard on his lips, trying to suck the vodka off, trying to make herself drunk like him, knowing tomorrow she could always kill herself.

Every tomorrow she had the chance to kill herself.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5