Distressed musing

Every morning, wake up to this. Every morning, cover your ears. Every morning, hope it doesn’t get louder, louder, louder, loud, loud, LOUD-

“Up, brat.”

Loud.

“I said UP!”

Be quiet, please…

“I don’t have the time or energy to wait around. Get the fuck up and get ready, or stay here all day and see what I have time for later. Your call.”

I can’t move…

It doesn’t matter whether you can move. It doesn’t matter whether you can bear the pain in your legs, arms, chest, the pounding in your head. Is this headache from the shattered glass? The screaming? From the bruises? 

It doesn’t matter.

Get up.

“Finally. Get your shit ready. I’m busy today, so if you’re not out in five, I’m locking the door. Got it?”

“Got it,” you croak out, a hoarse whisper, scratchy against a dry throat, against a bruised throat, against your will. 

“Go, then.”

Standing is an effort, but you haul yourself to your feet. Five minutes is a good timeframe, even with the ache in your legs. Five minutes is enough time for clothes, shoes, and your bag. Five minutes is enough to walk to the door, out the door, even if you stumble. Just remember the things you’ve practiced. 

Number one: Stay silent. Speaking isn’t just dangerous, it’s foolish. The more noise you make, the more trouble you’ll be in, so don’t make any noise.

Number two: Move quickly. You have a few minutes to get out on a good day, so you can’t waste time by standing around. Even a deep breath to calm down is time you could be spending getting out. You don’t want to - you can’t - miss your window.

Number three: Don’t move too quickly. There are creaky floorboards, small divots in the wood, boards sticking up just enough to trip you if you’re not careful. Remember the pattern of steps you take - keep tight to the left wall of the staircase and hallway, take an extra wide step over the loose board just after the staircase ends, mind the split in the wood halfway across the living room. 

Number four: Lift the door before you move it. The handle is secure, but the frame creaks if you don’t hold the door just right. You know how to hold it. Two-thirds of an inch off the ground, give or take a tenth. Not that you know what that means in inches - you just know how much wiggle room you have. Hold the door up at that angle until it’s closed - set it down only after the door has shut.

Number five: Get far, far away before you stop to catch your breath.

It’s a long walk to the library, but it’s a worthwhile walk. You learned the same day you got booted out for the first time that you couldn’t loiter anywhere near the house. People know you, or at least they know your father, and if they see you they’ll ask questions. If you answer those questions honestly, you get hit for tattling. If you answer those questions dishonestly, they tell your father, and you get hit for lying. If you don’t answer the questions at all, they ask your father instead, and you get hit for ignoring your superiors.

So really, you can’t be close enough for anyone to ask you questions.

The library is safe. You don’t go to school, not quite old enough to be in the classes, and even if you were, you’re not sure he’d take the time to put your name on the roster. But while the library isn’t exactly suited for children barely older than toddlers, it is suited for people who don’t have anywhere else to be all day. 

And it’s good for people who like to read, you know. A giant building filled floor to ceiling, wall to wall, with nothing but books and other learning materials. If you’re not old enough - or not allowed - to go to school, you may as well find somewhere else to learn things. The librarians know you by now, and they know the length of the walk to your house, the patterns of bruises you tend to carry, the way you limp on bad days, the way you never wear a coat even in the rain or the cold. They don’t ask questions, they’re the only people who don’t ask questions, and you know they talk about you but you don’t hear what they say. You can only assume they don’t say things they want your father to hear, because he would have heard them already if they did. Everyone knows your father, or at least they know someone like him. And anyone like him is bad news.

You take your shoes off just inside the entranceway of your safe haven, even though you’re not obligated to do so. Too accustomed you are to the ease of walking more quietly when you’re treading in socks and not proper footwear, and just like your home is a place for silence, the library is a place for quiet, even if it isn’t quite so restrictive. You don’t like to make any noise anyway. Not unless you have to. So you take your shoes off just before you enter the real building, leaving them just under the holder where most people leave their umbrellas when it rains or snows, where they leave their coats when it’s cold outside, where they leave their hats and scarves when they don’t want to wear them around indoors. They leave in the entranceway the things you don’t have, and because you don’t have them you know they won’t get stolen.

No harm in leaving your shoes - nobody would bother to take them, what with the holes and worn fabric and lack of any proper insulation. What with the fact that they’re barely useful to you, and entirely useless to someone who can buy their own things for them and their children.

When you walk into the library, you feel immediately the sense of familiarity that comforts you when nothing else can. On very cold, very wet days you sit at the table nearest to the fireplace, smoke billowing up the chimney and leaking out the sides of the flame’s stone enclosure. But today is warm with the breath of spring, the year’s early cold snaps having finally come and gone, and so you place your bag at a table in the corner, setting it gently beside a chair too big for you, a chair you will climb into in a few moments. Just after you pick your book.

“Hello again, Anna,” one of the library staff greets you. “We do still have the one you didn’t finish yesterday, if you’d like me to find it for you.”

“Yes please,” you mumble, and she steps behind her counter for a moment, rummaging through a bin before handing you the unfinished reading material. It’s certainly not appropriate for your reading level, or it wouldn’t be if you had the reading level of an average five - four? - year old. 

“If you need any help finding something, you know who to ask,” she says, and smiles at you before she turns back to the desk where she keeps her work, papers and books that you’ve never gotten a proper look at. You’re not sure if they’d be boring or not - you do like to keep yourself busy, though, and you’ve thought before that maybe someday when your father is gone you might like to work here.

No, you always remind yourself, you don’t want to work in a library.

You want to be a singer.

When your father is gone and you’re left at home alone, days where he isn’t there and doesn’t care to force you out, you do sing, mindful of the creaking of door hinges and floorboards when he returns - the creaking you’ve learned to so carefully avoid. You used to wonder why he doesn’t bother to walk around them, but now that you’re five - four? - you know that he doesn’t need to be afraid of the noise, and you do. When you were little - you’re still little - you thought he just didn’t like the noise. Now that you’re older - but not old enough - you know he doesn’t like your noise, and that’s a very different thing.

That reminds you of something you do still wonder, though. He hates you and everything you do, so why does he keep you in his house? You’re not usually welcome there, and he hardly does anything at all to make staying there worth the trouble it causes, so why are you never just kicked out for good?

Maybe, you think, it’s because he likes having someone to bother, and if he didn’t have you, he wouldn’t have anyone. He’s not lonely - he has lots of friends, friends that drink and smoke and make messes in the house - he just likes having people he can be mean to with no consequences. 

His friends often complain about their children, and he commiserates, talking loudly about how much of a pain in the ass you are, how he does so much for you and you’re so ungrateful. Of course, he does this while the door to your room is locked from the outside, and while he has not fed you in days, so you don’t think that him doing lots for you is an accurate statement. 

You finish your book - a story, a sad one, about an animal that gets kicked out of its owner’s house and learns to survive in the woods.

You are not so different from that animal, you think, except that you couldn’t survive in the woods.

When you climb down from your chair to return your book to the shelf you remember finding it on, you are tapped lightly on the shoulder by someone whose arms are lower to the ground than those of the people who work here. A young boy, taller and older than you and better fed, looks at you curiously.

“Excuse me,” he says, and his eyes are shiny, where yours have never been, “can you help me find a book?”

“I don’t work here,” is your immediate response, stammered out of your ever-nervous mouth. He furrows his brow, and you panic just a little. “But,” you append, “what are you looking for?”

He smiles. “I want to read about animals, and your book has an animal on it. So I thought I would ask you.”

“Oh. Okay.” You look at him, and he looks back at you, expectantly.

There is a long silence, and then he continues. “So… do you know where to find books about animals?”

Oh. He wanted an answer. Well, he should have said so. Nobody gets things if they don’t ask for them. Not except your father, who gets whatever he wants all the time, but this boy is not your father, so he needs to ask.

“Well,” you begin, “there’s a shelf over there-” you point to one of many spaced evenly and narrowly against the far wall, “that has all sorts of books about animals that live on farms. There are also lots of books about farming, they’re all sort of mixed together. This one is a fiction book, about a dog that leaves home. Those aren’t always kept in the same place as books with the same stories.”

“What’s a fiction?” He tilts his head.

“It’s a book about something that isn’t real,” you reply, matter-of-factly. “Like a fairy tale.”

“But that one’s about a dog that leaves home, and that doesn’t sound like a fairy tale.”

“Well, not all of them are fairy tales. Some of them are just about things that didn’t really happen. They’re made up to read for fun.”

“How old are you?” He asks you, and that is a strange thing to ask after you told him what a fiction book is, because it doesn’t relate to what you said.

“I’m five or four,” you say.

“You don’t know which?”

“No.”

“That’s sad. I’m seven.”

“It’s not sad. Do you want to read this book?” You hold it out to him. “I’m done with it.”

He looks at the cover - there is, as he said, a dog on the front, a stylized dog drawn in the foreground of a forest, a stream behind its figure.

“It looks nice,” he says, and takes it from your hands, and then he walks away.

You turn back to the shelves, looking for something else to read. Maybe you’ll read a book about farming. You’ve never been to a farm, but you know what they’re for, and maybe reading about them will tell you more about them.

You feel a tap on your shoulder again. When you turn around, the boy is standing in front of you.

“I wanted to say thank you,” he speaks, “because I forgot to do that before I walked away.”

“You don’t have to say thank you,” you reply, because he doesn’t.

“Well, my mom taught me it’s rude to not say please and thank you when someone does something for you.”

“I didn’t do anything for you. I just gave you a book.”

“That’s doing something,” he says, and he sticks his hand out to you. “I’m Alan, by the way. My sister and my mom and my dad and me just moved here, and we live across the street. I like to read, but this is the biggest library I’ve seen, so I’m nervous.”

“I’m Anna,” you say. “I read here all the time.”

“Do you have any favorite books?”

“I just read all of them.”

“All of them? Like every book in here?” His eyes are wide. 

You shake your head. “No, not like that. I just read whatever looks interesting.”

“You talk a lot for a five or four year old.”

“You ask a lot of questions for a seven year old. I would stop talking if you stopped asking.”

“Alan,” a woman - his mother, probably - calls from across the room, “stop bothering that little girl and come sit with your sister.”

“Sorry, mom,” he calls back. “Thank you again for the book, Anna.”

“You’re welcome,” you say, and then he turns away again, and runs across the room. You’re not supposed to run in the library, but this is the biggest one he’s ever been in, so maybe he doesn’t know that.

You don’t run, but you do go the rest of the way over to the section on farming. And you stay there and read for a long time. You know what the clock looks like when it’s time to leave - you’re learning how many minutes are on it even though you don’t know how to read a clock, by counting the lines - and so when the little hand is at five and the big hand is at twenty-one, you know it’s time to go home, because the clock in your father’s house says something in between five and fifty-five and six and five when he comes home, and you need to have it timed right so that you come home after him but not when it’s dark.

You spend the rest of the day reading books about farming, and when you walk home starting at five and twenty-one, you are singing to yourself. A song you made up under your breath while you were reading, at first, and then a song from a book you read, that you decided to make a real song with real music and not just words.

In the water, in the water

There are little things all over

And they swim around and flutter

When a person comes to drink

By the water, by the water

There are bigger things all over

And they make the fishes shudder

When they all lean down to drink

When there’s water, when there’s water

From the sky and it’s all over

Then the things that try to live here

Run away and do not drink

When the sun comes, when the sun comes

And the falling water’s all done

Then the things that drink the water

Come back home and start to drink.

It was a nice book. The song is sort of boring, you think. But you liked the pictures in it - the fish and the deer and the storm clouds - and you liked the song.