1- Oatmeal

One minute Jessica Deer was twelve years old, belted into the back seat of her mother’s car amidst the jumble of crumbled take out bags and cans of what her mother called dead soldiers, clutching the handle of her small backpack in sweaty hands. Rain drummed against the car and the tires sprayed large arches of water onto the dimly lit sidewalks and the cans rattled and clinked together. One minute the air smelled of musty rain, and night, her mother’s too sweet perfume, and the oily French fries she’d eaten for dinner.

Then she blinked and she was in a large square room painted a sour green that smelled of pee and vomit, sweat and bleach. She sat in a wheelchair, not the back seat of her mother’s car. Something held her slumping body in place and her head tilted at an angle giving her limited view of anything but the too large hands laying in her lap, and the woman sitting in front of her.

 

Night had somehow become day. The car and small backpack were gone. She felt dizzy and it was hard to think because her head seemed to be stuffed full of something. Cotton maybe. Scraps of fabric. Something that made thinking and hearing difficult. Something that made her woozy and a bit sick to her stomach.

A narrow faced woman sat knee to knee with Jessica and held a half full bowl of oatmeal in one hand and a spoon with the other. She scooped up a spoonful of oatmeal as she talked to someone behind Jessica. The woman’s words stretched and shrank, sounding too deep then much too high pitched for Jessica to understand.

Jessica tried to speak, to ask where she was, where was her mother, why her body didn’t work and why her mind seem as mushy as the oatmeal. But her lips just quivered and only a tiny whimper of sound passed. The woman didn’t notice her struggle, just spooned the oatmeal into her mouth. It was lukewarm and lumpy and sugarless. Some her body swallowed and some she could feel sliding down her chin. The woman caught it with her spoon as if Jessica was a baby and pushed it back into her month.

I’m not a baby she tried to say, but the words didn’t come out of her mouth. ‘I don’t eat oatmeal, never. I don’t like it’, she thought but no words formed.

She couldn’t jerk her head back and protest. Her throat wallowed the oatmeal on its own, her too large hands lay limply in her lap, refusing to rise and push the spoon away.

Why did her hands look more like her mother’s hands, than hers? Hers should have been smaller and browner, not those unless things. Except there was a scar across the back of the right hand that looked like a large silvery j against the pale flesh. J for Jessica, she remembered.

 Her mother’s old boyfriend Jason carved it deep into her flesh on her seventh birthday when he’s been smoking and drinking and breathing in the white power lines. Her mother held her down as she screamed and Jason carved. 

‘Happy birthday baby. Your first tattoo!’ Her mother said when they were finished dripping blue ink from a broken pen into the wound.

The woman spooned more oats into her mouth and Jessica swallowed against her will.

 

They can’t be my hands, but she knew they were because of the J. This too large body couldn’t be hers, but it was. She stared at the hands trying to remember how to move them and after a bit her fingers twitched and curled. The effort brought gray swirling fog which swallowed Jessica into dreams once more.