SHORT: Shelley [2011]

SHELLEY

Shelley was a retard; the other children knew. They told her so at recess, ’most every day in school. They danced around in circles, chanting sweet malign; she smiled as they baited her, too dumb to reconcile…

Shelley’s mind was simple. She liked it when her classmates sang to her; it instilled a pleasant feeling of warmth beneath the prickle of her alabaster skin. Though too mentally ill-equipped to accurately identify the sensation, she knew that it felt like love. And while she didn’t know much else, she knew that she loved only two things in this world: Mummy and Daniel.

Daniel was her everything: her swoon, her starlight clinch, her lasting kiss goodnight. She observed him every day through thick, unbecoming lenses, quietly willing his reciprocation in each casual twinge of distraction. When eventually his soft chestnut eyes met hers over a stolen game of Knuckles in the teacher’s absence, she grinned sweetly at him, revealing the rows of ugly metallic braces clamped to her teeth. Startled and appalled, he quickly turned away in loathing and embarrassment, simultaneously revolted and intrigued by her ardent gaze.

Later that day, he followed her after school. Making sure no-one was around to witness his moment of weakness, he took firm hold of her plump, fleshy arms and pinned her roughly to the nearest wall. Shelley quickly felt her initial panic melt into docile acceptance as she realised that finally he had come for her. He fumbled the lumpen contours of her half-formed breasts as they tussled gracelessly against the unforgiving façade; through the fine padding of her sweater she felt the bricks’ craggy rivets digging harshly into her back, grinding like seashells beneath the feet of an infant.

Overcome with happiness at this surprising development, Shelley felt her soul in ascension for the first time in thirteen lonely years. She breathed in the slivery smell of his adrenaline and tried to pin down his clumsy tongue with hers as he groped beneath her skirt and slid his finger inside her, feeling it wriggle like an arctic worm for a moment of stifled euphoria before being crudely extracted and smeared against her pasty thigh. As their lips parted, he sniffed himself inquisitively before grimacing in disgust; she moaned in uncomprehending enquiry while studying his look of rising dismay. Buoyed by the rhapsody of their correlation, she reached out to touch his face, only to find her hand brusquely slapped away; when her yawning, deaf mouth uttered a hollow, probing sound, he roared some unspecified command before cruelly shoving her aside. She slumped against the base of the wall and watched his footsteps pound silently along the pavement, drifting in gratified reverie while idly contemplating her next move.

That night, Shelley pressed flowers for him; she glued them to the pages of her embossed, pastel-coloured scrapbook, spelling out his name in dry rose-petals. She showed it to her mother, who smiled warmly and stroked her hair as she whispered expressions of unconditional affection into her daughter’s muffled eardrums. Her little girl was growing up, but she wasn’t sad – she was so, so proud.

The next day, Shelley found Daniel at break-time and trailed him to the quad; she wished only to run her fingers through the wisping strands of his auburn hair and relinquish her offering. She held her arms out expectantly, inviting his embrace as her mute expression tried to articulate all that she could never say in words. The look of abhorrence on his stupefied visage conveyed an altogether different sentiment: he would never understand or even begin to abide her intolerable attentions. When she presented him with the hand-made token, he screwed the offering into a tenacious ball and threw it right back at her; when she pressed further, he pulled at her hair, exposing frail q-tips of soft white tissue as the earth of her scalp lingered like chalk on the uprooted sheaves.

Immune to the implications of his violence, Shelley skipped home that evening and made him stout, crumbling stick-men of ginger. Mommy helped her bake them. They bustled joyously around the kitchen, icing the beaming faces together. Later that night when Shelley had retired, her mother placed a ribbon around the precious Tuppaware container before sliding it tenderly into her school bag. How could anyone fail to love her little girl?

Shelley presented her gift during lunch-hour the next day, shuffling shyly towards him while he sat amongst friends. When Daniel observed the horror of her greeting, he picked up the remnants of a thick-set mass of concrete and pitched it squarely at her mouth. She span like an unhinged dreidel, clattering to the floor as the pulverising force of the collision took away her jaw-line; inside her facile mind, Shelley swelled with pride at her new-found communal regard as she observed the other children shrieking with laughter. Loose teeth rattled like fruit-flavoured Skittles inside her throbbing maw, and she dribbled loosely into the dirt while the mob swarmed around her like a pack of ravenous wolves.

Before long, he was upon her, chiselling her face with the unforgiving rock until it could sustain no more damage. Shelley blinked in innocent wonderment as he wrought brutal vengeance upon her ripening features; her skin bloomed to dazzling shades of crimson while he feverishly bludgeoned her obtuse skull into submission. By the time he’d finished, the chanting had all but subsided; the other children stared at her worthless, twitching body with goggle-eyes as he dropped the blood-encrusted slab onto the ground. The filaments of his hairline swayed coolly in the breeze as he knelt gasping above her; in her acquiescent stupor, Shelley noticed that if she squinted hard enough into the sunlight behind him, he looked just like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.

The crowd began to waver slightly as the other children jostled one another before silently breaking ranks. Shelley stared vacantly up at the sky and caught a glimpse of the underside of a passing fly as it casually hovered down onto the ruins of her once-discernible face. The insect crawled over the ravages of her lesioned forehead and she blinked in cavernous disconnection before it tired of the weltered terrain and took off, leaving her alone once more.

Daniel panted in exhaustion as blood poured freely from the warped slump of her contorted lips. As saliva ran down her face and joined the shattered remains of her mouth on the ground, Shelley tightened her aching facial muscles and smiled grotesquely at him with wide, hopeful eyes. She held out her arms in unquestioning acceptance as he sauntered away, before wilting onto the cold stone floor and watching the clouds above her revolve into a whirling ball of cotton-candy. The last thing she remembered was the strobing flicker of sirens.

Later that night, the fly returned to her and they made friends once and for all. ‘Patrick’, she named him, after the handsome star of Dirty Dancing. He buzzed absent-mindedly around the room, humming sweet nothings as she lay still in her metallic crib. Impervious to his impotent drone, Shelley sighed contentedly as she began to dream of a time when she and Daniel would be as one again; she felt her heartbeat synchronise with his across vast chasms of time and space as her puffy, swollen eyes charted its dull blip on the cardiomonitor from the warmth of her hospital bed.

C.C. 26/11/11