For the short time that she was whole, Patience was unaware of how fragile that state of being was.

July was finally drawing to a close, and so at first, there was little explanation required as to why the windows were left cracked open at all hours of the day in favor of the bulky pedestal fans that for as long as she could remember, studded each room every year just as surely as the summer itself came every year. She distinctly recalled the absence of sound where there had once been too much, the whirring of the fan blades replaced by the song of the crickets that resided somewhere outside her window in the sparse grass. She waited impatiently for school to begin again so that, rather in a soup of her own sweat, she could sit in an air conditioned room. She would be a fourth grader.

School provided another reprieve; it was outside of her capabilities to understand exactly what they were about, but well within to understand that they were once more occurring with more frequency. Every time they were within each other’s company for more than a few minutes, they snapped at each other with the ferocity of street dogs. Her mother used words like bum, lazy, and unmotivated. She coated them with a layer of venom that left them tacky, allowing them to stick to her father’s skin long after the arguments subsided. Sometimes, the venom rubbed off of James onto Patience, and so she learned how to watch for the signs, to listen for the slamming of doors, to feel the roughness that was the tension in the house after a particularly bad argument. If she was lucky, her father packed her a bag the second the two of them crossed the threshold of the house and dropped her off at her grandmother’s house so that she wouldn’t have to see whatever screaming match he seemingly anticipated. If she wasn’t, she was left to entertain herself until bedtime rolled around.

By then, she was meant to already be scrubbed clean with water that for some reason didn’t get hot and waiting on her bed for her mother to listen to her prayers. Shanice was uncharacteristically patient with her during those times, displaying a maternal gentleness that was almost completely unknown to Patience. Whenever she managed to convince herself that her mother hated her, as she so often did throughout her life, the phantom of her lips against her temple as she lay on the brink of unconsciousness served as a connector that always brought them back together.

He arrived on the coattails of darkness. Appearing first through word of mouth rather than flesh and bone, Patience knew him only as That Bum. The words had no inherent, extravagant meaning to her; she knew only that they were bad from the way that her mother spoke them. They floated through the windows and out onto the porch where she often resided, pinched and swollen with the exasperation that her mother seemed to wake up with. It was the same tone that indicated a whooping wasn’t far behind, and so whenever she heard it, Patience was sure to remain from underfoot.

Bills were due with no money to pay them. Her mother did her best to conceal this fact from Patience; she tried to schedule the arguments between 8 AM and 3 PM when her daughter was out of the house, but when it happened that money became scarce enough that she was sent to school with too little on her school account for even the reduced price meals she got with increasing frequency, they began to spill over again.

James clearly couldn’t pay the bills by himself, so why couldn’t Shanice get a job to help? The suggestion in and of itself was an insult to him as soon as she verbalized it.

“Why the fuck you think you need to work?”

“Because our daughter needs to eat, James. You want her to starve, is that it?”

“She eating just fine. Just wait until the end of the month, it’s gon be a lot left over. We had a good month this month.”

“Okay, and what about when it ain’t a good month? What then?”

This was usually enough to silence her father. The arguments grew in capacity until her mother set aside an extra ten minutes in the morning to stuff clothes into her backpack so that she could go straight from school to her grandmother’s house. A pair of socks in her pencil pouch, a shirt tucked between the pages of her Math notebook. Then, abruptly, they changed tune.

“I don’t want That Bum in my house,” Her mother’s words were flat, sharp like the length of a sword. It was so callous that had it not been her own mother who’d said it, she would’ve been unable to believe that the very man she spoke of was sitting right there in the room with the two of them.

“Girl you acting like he ain’t gon be paying rent while he here. He even gon’ put down for groceries. You wanted the bills paid, this how imma do it right now. Just for a couple of months, aight? Chill.”

Patience moved away from her bedroom door as her mother’s footsteps pounded past. The faint hum of conversation that she left behind. Her name called out so suddenly that she was afraid that she had been caught eavesdropping. Only once she had assured herself that there was no undercurrent of anger in his voice did she throw open her bedroom door, flying down the hall to the living room. Her parents’ door was shut tight with finality and as she passed, Patience could hear no sound from within.

When she came to stand beside him, James placed a heavy hand on her head and smiled tiredly down at her. The heat of it seeped into her scalp, flattening the fat braids her mother had wrestled her hair into that morning. “Baby girl, this is Daddy’s friend. Say hi.”

She anchored herself with an arm around her father’s trunk of a leg and waved with her whole body. The man on the couch whistled. He had the look about him of ice cream that had been left to sit for too long, melting around the cone of his skeleton. “You sholl is yo’ Daddy’s baby. Got his big ass nose and his big ass lips.”

Patience puffed out her chest with pride. She’d heard it enough to know that that meant she looked like her father, and to her, that was the best thing that she could be. His eyes raked over her, dark brown irises surrounded by pools of yellowed white.

“You one to talk. Yo’ shit got you out here looking like a fish. Fat neck ass dude.”

He was nice enough those first weeks. He took up residence in the front room where the television was, the same one that hadn’t turned on for months. Initially, she dreaded coming home; he was almost always the first to intercept her when she tracked through the front door, swinging her backpack to the floor, patting the indent in the couch next to him.

“How was your day, kid?” If she didn’t answer quickly enough, he poked her side hard enough that she squeaked, twisting away from him. He listened intently when she told him about the french toast sticks the school had served for breakfast, clapping when she told him her score on her most recent spelling test. 

She was used to being left alone when she got home. Her mother hardly noticed when she arrived unless she spoke and her father wasn’t there to begin with; That Bum interrupted the routine. Curled over a Garfield comic book in the safety of her room, she considered that perhaps her mother had been right for once in not liking someone. Then her father began coming home earlier in order to entertain him. As the two of them relived the days before hard flesh turned to flab and before their women hated them, Patience took her book out into the front room and camped in front of the TV, soaking up her father’s presence like a sponge until Shanice came to put her to bed.

Even that was okay. After his arrival, the switches on the wall began to work again. The one that she checked most often was the bathroom light, standing on the tips of her toes to reach it high on the wall. This was the most important one; sleeping didn’t require light and she had learned to open her eyes wide to take in as much light as possible when she walked through the house in the morning before the sun rose, but she couldn’t sit in the darkness of the bathroom. Even a candle didn’t help; the flames painted shapes onto the walls, shapes that her mind took and contorted into monsters from the movies her father liked to watch after she was supposed to be asleep. 

The first time it happened, Shanice needed to run to the store. I’ll be back in two shakes of a rat’s tail, she promised. Annoyed and ancy, her mother promised her her own box of Napoleon ice cream sandwiches if she promised not to sulk or beg to go. A rarity. Twenty minutes at the most. Patience was sure that she could handle it.

A minute into the twenty, Patience emerged from her room with the need to use the restroom. That Bum was where he always was; his laugh filled every crevice in the house. The bathroom door muffled the noise, but then she wasn’t exactly listening out for it. Thoughts of ice cream sandwiches filled her head and it occurred to her that maybe if she sent out a quick prayer to God, he might be able to persuade her mother to allow her to have one before bed. She wasn’t sure when the television cut off, or how long he was pressed against the door before he finally attempted the knob. It rattled noisily next to her head and she jumped.

“I’m in here,” She called out.

It was That Bum’s voice that carried through the thin wood. “I know. Yo’ Daddy just called. He want me to make sure you take a bath before he get home.”

Patience felt her brow crinkle and hurried to finish up. “It’s not even night time yet!” Something she would have never set her mouth up to say to either of her parents.

The doorknob shook again. “Open the door, baby girl. I can run the bath for you.”

Cold water ran down her spine. “No thanks. I know how to do it.”

“You want me to tell yo’ Daddy you misbehaving? He gon’ be home soon, and I know damn well you don’t want a whooping.”

Her hands were still slick when she opened the door. He was immediately too close, his midsection taking up the whole frame, ballooning out so that the only way out would’ve been to squeeze through between his legs. His eyes swiveled in their sockets, to the freshly flushed toilet, the tub, her bare legs.

“You can’t get in the tub fully clothed, girl.”

Patience knew that something was wrong. Her mother was usually the one who supervised her whilst she was in the tub, perched on the toilet seat with her legs crossed as she made sure that her daughter washed behind her ears and between her toes. Since she’d been old enough to do it on her own, even her father had been phased out of the routine, and Shanice more often than not turned her back as Patience stripped, allowing her to slip beneath the cover of the sudsy bath water before she turned back around. That Bum made no move to turn around.

Her body turned to stone as his expression darkened, his lips drawing down into an exaggerated scowl. It stretched his wide face into something she later imagined should sit on the shelf after Halloween had passed, one of the masks that remained even after steeply discounted. It lasted only for a moment, but it was long enough to make her hesitate.

His hands grabbed the hem of her shirt. “Here, let me help you.”

She remembered flailing her arms until he shoved a fist into her stomach, forcing her to vomit up the oxygen stored in her lungs. The beginnings of a scream unraveled the tight knot in her throat. He clasped a hand tightly over her mouth, pushing his face into hers. “Be quiet, you gon’ get us in trouble.” His lips were wet, tasting of fire as they covered hers. His fingers dipped into her pajama shorts, the elastic band pressing his wrist into her stomach. He grunted into her mouth as they searched, pushing her back until her spine bent awkwardly over the seat of the toilet.

He withdrew his hand only to yank at the flimsy pink fabric, straining it against her flesh until it tore. She forgot how to breathe when he began to fumble with his jeans, struggling to find the button beneath his belly. Her mind turned into wet sand.

Afterwards, when he allowed her to get dressed, it was almost hard for Patience to believe that she was still in her home, the one she’d grown up in.

“Now, let’s get one thing clear: this is between you and me, aight baby girl? Yo’ daddy wouldn’t be happy if he knew what you did.” His voice had regained it’s jaunty lilt as if he were asking her to keep nothing more than a stolen sucker a secret. 

She couldn’t think too hard about it to confirm if she had done something to warrant her father’s anger. Maybe she had. Her face was wet.

“You think he don’t see what you been doing just as clear as I do? Walking ’round in them shorts like a fuckin’ ho’.” That Bum continued, hurriedly stuffed her legs into a newer set of shorts. Sweat collected in the sparse facial hair that dusted his cheeks from the effort of moving her limbs for her; she’d gone limp, her body little more than a realistic doll that nodded along to whatever he said.

He sent her to bed with a firm push with his fleshy palm between her shoulder blades, commenting only that she needed to fix her walk before Shanice got home or he would tell her that she’d hurt herself running around the house. Her body pulsed as she slipped beneath her sheets, curling into a tight ball. She wrapped her arms around herself, pressing her face into her slowly dampening pillow. So she was crying. Both of her parents hated it when she cried, and they both possessed the super human ability to tell when she had even if hours had passed. To go to either of them in the state that she was would have been to walk straight into a bear trap and ask it not to close tight around her ankles. 

She didn’t have the wherewithal to roll over to confirm that it was her mother who peeked  in on her an eternity later, a sliver of light slicing through the darkness that she’d resigned herself to. Outside her room, the world continued on, and the freezer door slammed as her mother stored the ice cream sandwiches. She longed for either of her parents to notice her absence, to come check on her, but neither of them did.

Only when the house was still did she finally shift positions, flattening her hand before pulling her journal from the teeth of the springs within her mattress. Her body protested against the movement, and she stifled a cry with a bite into her pillow. A kind of tackiness had slowly grown between her legs, a dirty warmth sticking her thighs together uncomfortably beneath her blanket. It was a foreign sensation, one that she was too afraid to consider the origins of.

Hours later, before anyone woke up, she would find herself crouched in the tub, her pajama shorts dampening around her ankles as she siphoned handfuls of freezing water straight from the mouth of the spout, carefully wiping down her legs until the water that drained went from pink to clear again.

Dark blue was streaked with yellow and orange outside when she finally pressed a pen to the page. Three pages tore before she was finally able to ease her hold on the grip enough to write, scratching the words into the page so hard they carried over onto the next two, pages that an older Patience would later return to and flush down the toilet. It was a morning too ugly to allow it to exist on paper. That made it solid; real. If she kept it inside, the memory was malleable. Deniable.

James stared down into the notebook, fingering the bits of torn paper that clung to the binding as he read one of the final pages before the entries became few and far between. He assumed it was nothing more than a response to one argument or another that she’d had with Shanice.

Dear God,

What did I do?

If there was one thing that Patience and her father could agree on, it was this; pain was the color of yellow, glittery ink.

Next Chapter: 15