PINK AND SILVER

            The rain pours down, splattering against the glass of my bare window.  I lie in bed, a child of eleven, with a burning bottom.  I wonder if I pressed my buttocks to that watery window would it cool the hot places where the sole of my father’s shoe had struck.

The light from the street lamp wavers through the steaming rain, illuminating the pink and silver wallpaper that surrounds my bed.  I’m alone with my burning buttocks, the night, the rain, and the pink roses with their silver leaves.  

I don’t recall what I’d done.  Or said.  It was usually something I said.  My tongue tended to splatter like the rain outside against the unforgiving window of adult perception.  My father laid me across the bed, raised my skirt, pulled down my navy-blue school knickers and whacked his shoe against my bare behind; three times, maybe four.

The whack of the shoe against my skin meant nothing to me.  I’d been hit before.  What scorched me was the lifting of my skirt, the pulling down of my knickers, the exposing of my bottom.

I lie in bed, in my damp and chilly room, listening to the rain.  Through the glistening light from the street lamp, my eyes trace the pink and silver roses.  I note how they march in straight lines from floor to ceiling, each rose separated from the one above it by a tiny silver trellis draped in pink rosebuds.

I can hear the murmur of adult voices downstairs; my father’s deep one raised in irritation, my step-mother’s soothing.

My step-mother rarely raised her voice.  “Your father’ll deal with you when he gets home.”  My stomach would twist and knot and I would scurry around tidying my room, washing dishes, peeling potatoes, setting the table, finishing my homework knowing that, in the end, my efforts would prevent nothing.  My step-mother would speak to my father with her soothing voice and I would end up face down on the bed, skirt up, knickers down, buttocks bared.

I discover a pattern to the columns of pink roses and silver trellises; adjacent rows are opposite, trellis next to rose, rose beside trellis. I think, if they fell off the wall, my room would be flooded with pink and silver.  The roses would spill out through my streaming window to assemble in ordered rows outside.  The rain would stop and their pink heads would nod in brilliant starlight, silver leaves glinting under a white moon.  I’d open my window and the room would fill with the sweet, spicy scent of roses. 

I would not be who I was. 

I would be wearing a pink and silver gown with puffy sleeves and hooped skirt, my feet enclosed in silver shoes.  My blunt, brown hair would grow below my waist and turn to shining gold.  My hazel eyes would glow the color of the sea on a sunlit day.  I would become altogether beautiful. 

A boy would come for me.  He’d be eleven or twelve, with clean teeth and a glad smile.  He’d ride up on a tall, white horse and extend his hand to me, pulling me up onto the horse’s neck, positioning me so that, when he picked up the reins to ride off with me to his blue, crystal palace, his strong, young arms would enclose me.

As I lay in my bed, alone, listening to the slapping rain, watching the light from the street lamp tremble across my ceiling, shifting my burning buttocks to a cool place on the sheets, I begin to count the rosebuds crawling over one of the silver trellises……one, two, three, four.