Crying all the harder, I put my head to my knees. This only angered the pacing tiger, who grabbed something and threw it to shatter against a far wall.
On a roar, he demanded, “Tell me how to make this stop!”
And I snapped. “Just hurt me already! I’m worn sick from waiting!”
Lifting up an entire chifforobe in rage, Vladislov ripped it apart. No longer man in form, no longer rational. He broke the simple things in that creepy room, bellowing smoke and braying like a wolf.
“Hear me, woman!” Demonic in person, in voice, on every level, that winged monster turned on me. “I will not. You don’t need a devil. You torment yourself enough to put the entirety of hell out of a job.”
Chapter Eight
Pearl
What a mess…
Not just the room, but my insides. Guilt I could not explain weighed on me. More than that, the things he said, about how long it had taken me to learn how to read. How I had drawn letters on brick with rocks. The decades of practice so I might have one redeeming quality.
I too could quote scripture… verbatim.
Misspeak and receive a strike with a cane across the shoulders.
As a child, I'd memorized every part of the bible that made it clear to be female was to be evil. I could recite prayer with a rosary until my fingers bled.
I could kneel on rice, be beaten with a stick, and be hung from a tree.
I could be raped.
But I could not navigate this world. Not that I had ever navigated my own well. Always hungry. Always ashamed. Always last in line and first under fire.
Stick-thin, starving, lonely, waiting to be delivered.
Waiting for exactly what now sat before me in ruins. A room with a window. Companionship.
Food.
As embarrassing as it was to admit to myself, I was tired of starving. Rats, stray dogs, bugs when I was especially desperate. Vomiting after a meal. Hearing the priests screaming the first time my fangs elongated.
I had prayed for my entire life to be cleansed of my urges. I felt less.
Because there was a whole world of things so beyond my scope that I just stuttered and drooled like the idiot I was.
A demon had torn every last bit of furniture in my room to shreds. All save myself and the bed. I bore no scratch or bruise.
That was a lie.
My pride was heavily bruised.
I worked hard. I loved to work hard. It was the only thing I’d ever been appreciated for. Never late, did the job without complaint. The model cigarette girl, or waitress, or cleaning lady.
The very priest that came to offer me the Eucharist each day believed I was mad. I certainly felt it. But I could not forget the feeling of that weighted paper between my fingers, the script in my own hand. Penmanship I had copied from a discarded letter I had found in the streets.
Penmanship of a lady of worth.
Why did all the things in this house always get broken?
Powdered wigs and mud, he said. Yet my costume was from my last years I could remember. Even the nightgown with its ruffled collar and plain cotton. I was the very joke he’d made. Cloche hats, sack dresses, a party in theme to the Roaring ’20s.
Ridiculous in every way.
Cold now that the inferno had left. After he had broken sad copies of my former cheap furniture.
The whole room was so at odds with the rest of this penthouse. And yes, that was the proper word, as I had been corrected like the idiot I was, more than once.
A veritable castle in a city I remembered but didn’t know.
“Cigarette?” My calling card, my trade. A word that came easily to my lips.
A thing that was out of fashion and deadly, not that anyone knew such things back then.
Tobacco caused cancer. Which I would never have. Just like I would never age, and even starvation had not killed me. I was this forever.
On a planet that was round.
And apparently humans had walked on the moon. THE MOON!
Staring at the wrinkled cotton of my nightgown, at exposed arms that were no longer barely bone and flesh… I didn’t know myself.
And I should have.
All I could think of for those three days I had hung from a tree as a child was how I was born of evil and deserved to die. But never did. The branch broke before I did.
Darius raped me in body and mind, in so many ways I knew I could not remember. And I endured.
Stupid, ignorant, a pointless decoration in the room.
“Please forgive me.” Out of nowhere, he arrived, on his knees, his head in my lap as he sobbed. Those wings of his twitching with each massive inhale that stretched his ribs.
Who asks the forgiveness of an idiot?
And what idiot rests their hands on the shoulder of a weeping devil?