So much alone time it isn’t good

Rhiannon is in her blue box a blue box in a basement the white pearl in the middle of nowhere screaming sky blue is the color of nowhere the ceiling of the desert and she is not sleeping the blue is not weeping and she cannot sleep though she wants to because dreams would be better than this

So much so

Rhiannon grew up in Nevada. She grew up in snow and the thick pine trees blocked the sun and she won’t tell people this. It doesn’t matter. She is a marble statue and a goddess of ink spun of spider webs and a ghost and the wielder of the wicked needles. She has no past. The people want no past. They want her needles and the magic of the needles the holes in their bodies her body tied down to chemicals and sex and the myth that comes with it

For a young girl

Rhiannon doesn’t want to know the cabin and its roughhewn walls but she does know it and the concussion of fists on her flesh, fists that want her flesh more than the flesh of the others, though it could be worse it could be the other flesh the secret flesh and she hears Daddy moaning at night and Molly crying but Molly will shoot herself on her sixteenth birthday and Rhiannon will only remember the coffin in a huge room like an ocean liner and finger sandwiches and coffee and uncles and aunts and flower petals and long ticking silences. She will never see the cabin again. She sees it right now. It lives in her mind. The blue room is forcing it out of her. The blue room is dredging up the chinked walls and the exposed beams in the roof and the windows that made neat little frames of nature, and she can smell it, cedar pine and moth’s wings, moths dive-bombing the caged light. She can’t hear that song now without tasting blood without bruises roaring in her hips or the sound of Molly whimpering in the deep dark night and Daddy moaning long before Mommy found out and sweated over the carrots and flung the onions and gave Molly the shotgun

Pat Benatar it was

Rhiannon is four years old. Molly is fifteen years old. She is coltish and beautiful and her shining brown hair is like wings and there are cinnamon freckles on her nose and secrets and Daddy hits Rhiannon so hard she can’t breathe but she still loves him and he doesn’t hit Molly but he fucks her instead and Molly hates him and loves him with her pretty plastic smile and the teeth she wishes she had and Mommy likes to hunt. Molly likes to kill things. Mommy kicks Daddy to the curb. The brains won’t come out of the walls.

…hit me with your best shot hit me hit fire away and so much alone time isn’t good Mrs. Heath isn’t good for a young girl

It’s safe in the blue box with the white silk and water runs somewhere and she thinks of footfalls but she can’t come out of her mind and the smell of cedar and the sound of moths frying in the acetylene blue the choking the sparks the smoke

I wanna hum I wanna fly away too

Rhiannon thinks of the hummingbirds. She thinks of the feeder and the hot days she wasn’t used to yet in the desert and their little red throats that made her think of Molly’s brains but in a good way, like the little red spots were empty spaces on the inside and the wings would propel her smarts up to heaven, one IQ point at a time, the hummingbirds beautiful at the feeder outside her bedroom window the feeder hung up by her mother and filled with sugar water and Rhiannon wished she could be small enough to be in the red spots with her sister’s brains, curled up tight with the good memories she doesn’t remember, Rhiannon on her bed with the sister she can barely remember all tied up with Pat Benatar and the moaning in the dark and the imperative of her father’s fists and the shotgun, the shotgun Daddy would use to shoot the hummingbirds away from the windows except he never had, it was in her imagination, the shotgun was for deer and bears and Molly got confused

Hum hum fly fly heaven heaven

She wants a piece of paper. She wants to write it down:

I have no womb.

My sister has no brains.

My hummingbirds have no throats.

Rhiannon cries. First there is weeping and the weeping burns too much and so her chest loosens up and the sobbing tears up out of those old bruised places the hollow place the negative space where she cannot make her own monthly blood and fill it up with semen because it’s better than nothing the memory of the shotgun strangles her and how it must’ve sounded going off and clear as day she remembers the time she put sugar water on the walls of the cabin for the hummingbirds, wishing they would come and drink the stains into their pretty red throats and carry Molly’s brains away so her Mommy could stop sneezing over the onions and thinking about them.

Rhiannon cries and there is a pipe full of rushing water and the world is coming apart but it’s okay. The chains are holding her down.