#prudence mortimer

Prue knelt on the kitchen floor, her body turned toward the wall, rigid and stiff with building pain. A layer of hard, uncooked grain coated the linoleum beneath her like shards of opaque glass. The grits dug into the pink of her knees, carving divots into her skin. She’d been kneeling there long enough to feel each granule grind against her bones. Hundreds of tiny knives. Her knees reddened as they swelled and blood pooled under the membrane of her skin. Adjusting her weight offered no relief, just drove the pain to another swath of dermis. Later, when her punishment was done, she would be allowed to brush away the grains and gather them into a jagged pile to be swept up and reused. Then, she would curl up on the cleared off tile with her knees bent, and she would gingerly pick out the grits nestled in the artificial dimples covering her skin. 

She refused to cry. The glass-like shards sent stinging pain swimming through the channels of her nervous system, and in response, an ache welled up in her throat, tightening and constricting. Her shoulders, looking like the stones that jutted out of the kitchen fireplace, angular and clad in a sooty black, rose in a sharp slant as she pulled in a deep breath. The lingering smell of cornmeal, fried oil, and milk touched her lungs. She pushed the breath out through her nose. With each slow breath, she forced the horrible tight ache of tears down. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t give her father that. Staring at the wall, she imagined him sitting at his desk in the tepid green light of his office, surrounded by civil war memorabilia indicative of his antiquated, chauvinistic character, a twisted snarl of smile on his face as he ruminated over the torture he was inflicting on his youngest daughter. The evil in his heart would be reflected in his dark features, his low, thick brow shadowing his eyes, the visible discoloration of his teeth as his lips pulled back in that cruel smile. 

In truth, little Prue didn’t know what went on inside her father. The tyranny that to her seemed like bloodthirst and a deep set craving for inflicting agony instead stemmed from a tumultuous fear and love for the Lord. In the name of God, he passed judgment with righteous paternity, believing his high-handed guidance would force her into the way of the light and save her from holy wrath. The grits digging into her skin would be her salvation. 

A few short years ago, when Prudence was a few inches shorter but no less skinny and sharp-boned, she stood in the threshold of the kitchen and watched her sister, Mercy, a teenager at the time, endure in muffled agony the same punishment of kneeling on grits. Mercy had sniffled and kept her sobs quiet, trying not to incur more wrath as silent tears rolled past her puffy eyelids and down her reddened cheeks. Her crime had been sharing the same spacious, open air as a teenage boy in her class, without a chaperone. They’d been close enough that they could feel the comforting warmth of each other’s awkward bodies, but not close enough to feel the soft stroke of the other’s skin. 

The girls’ mother had watched passively, her pale features making her seem a detached ghostly apparition, as their father announced Mercy’s sentence. While Mercy was made to pour grits onto the floor, their mother had left the room, floating on silent feet, too faint of heart to abide the suffering of another, but too cowardly to emerge from her specter form to speak against her husband’s cruel idea of justice.

Prue’s expression twisted at the memory, her nose bunching and turning up, her small lips pinching together hard. She hated them. She hated her mother’s passivity. Her indifference. Her cowardice. She hated her father’s iron fist. His tyranny. His righteousness. She hated that Mercy had been too weak to hold back her tears, that she’d shown weakness in the face of their father. She hated all of them. 

Prudence let her resentment boil hotly, building within her like a wretched, bitter stew, festering in her heart. She focused her gaze on the wall, her dark eyes sliding over the thin paths in the wallpaper, spindly veins beneath thin, aged flesh. The pattern was a whisper of what it once was, the flowers now sickly shades of paled pink and green, the birds yellow-brown blemishes of death. At the baseboard, the wallpaper curled and pulled away on its seams, disgusted by itself. Her gaze fell on a moisture stain, a tawny blossom around bubbling, stiff paper. 

The stain bloomed, waxing and ebbing in time with Prue’s deep breaths like an alien living thing, the lacy edges devouring the flowers and birds with a cold, inhuman hunger. The small leaves printed on the wallpaper faded further, blinking into pale, ice-white stars. The blossom spread until it had consumed the entire kitchen. The pain of gritty grains gouging into her knees spread up Prue’s thighs, pockmarking her skin with holes of a dried lotus pod. The sharp stabbing dug into the soft meat of her thighs and the potbelly pouch of baby fat she still carried, over her bony chest, carving into her ribs and sternum, up her neck and cheeks, down the sensitive skin of her upper arms, pricking the veins of her forearms. It spread and burned until she could feel nothing else at all. 

And then, any semblance of the kitchen was gone, and the pain sloughed off, and her skin was smooth and unmarked. She knelt in the vastness of space, surrounded by uncaring stars and impersonal dark matter. Everything between her ears felt electric, fritzing and popping as she let go and sank into the madness. 

The cold disconnection of being settled into her madness was uncomfortable but not unfamiliar. Even at her young age, she had grown accustomed to slipping into this void, guided by a detached, unknowable being. She blinked and looked around. There was nothing and there was everything. Any possibility, any future, any connection to her lay within her reach. Too many possibilities. A nervous queasiness seized her, bile spinning within her. Her heartbeat quickened, a frightened rabbit thumping away.

The unknowable being, formless and bodiless, placed handless hands on her shoulders and guided her. There was no direction in this cosmos. No up or down, no left or right. One turn and she’d lost all sense of orientation. But the unknowable being guided her, still teaching her young mind how to navigate this directionless infinity. 

Above her, one of the stars, a small green one, glowed brighter. A tense buzzing filled the void. Prue’s small frame vibrated. A second cosmos superimposed over the stars, flickering uneasily, as uncertain as the future it would show her. The star grew, burning and crackling. It grew hotter and hotter until suddenly, it ripped open with an angry, burning violence that stung Prue’s skin with millions of tiny pinpricks. Her very cells vibrated and burned. The light of the furious tear blazed white-hot, snapping and sizzling and blinding her. She shrank away instinctively. 

It happened in a fraction of a second. And then she was standing in the plantation house. There was the feeling that Prue always had in this house: the house was alive with something horrible, deep-seated and evil, raised on generations of spilled blood. A heavy, pungent sweat hung in the air. Deep, earthy breathing from somewhere deep inside the foundation. But, at the same time, there was something else. An encroaching lifelessness. A feeling that soon this home, if it could be called such a thing, would have no creature in it but the plantation itself. That dreaded beast would always hang heavy on this land. But soon nothing human would remain. 

In the upstairs office, Prue and her father were the only human inhabitants of the house. And soon, he would be gone too. The stark red of the confederate flags that adorned the walls and desk contrasted darkly with the swampy green light that hung over the room. Prue stood in a body that was hers but not the her of today. Though the bones of her shoulders still jutted out at aggressive angles, the sharp edges of her ribs and pelvis had blurred and softened into something gentler, the round baby fat of her belly had shifted, plushly fattening her thighs and hips. The skin of her arms was covered by modest sleeves, but she could see faint, agitated seams of red haloed by white on her pale hands.

In this woman’s body that didn’t yet belong to her, Prue stood above her father. The man that was once a mountainous tyrant cowered pathetically against the balcony windows, reduced to a wretched, sniveling piglet of a man. Prue watched with the cold passivity she’d inherited from her mother as she inflicted a tortuous end upon him. Her expression stayed disconnected, but a fountain of childlike glee bubbled in her chest, airy and light.

The unknowable being guided her through untold futures of daydreams come true, each one ripping open with a blinding, searing light that seemed to tear open the fabric of reality. As she watched her father, her mother, and sometimes her siblings, come to grievous ends at her own hand, the message was made clear. There was hope. There were futures where she gave herself everything she wanted. Everything she’d ever deserved. Everything they deserved.

With another blinding light, these happy visions sealed themselves away behind the inky fabric of space, and Prue again knelt in the vastness, surrounded by fading stars. As she breathed, the stars morphed, curling into old, printed leaves, and the blackness slowly slipped away, waning and sliding away over a dingy, decaying old wallpaper. Birds and flowers sprouted on the milky green paper, leaving marks like ugly, week-old bruises, mottled sickly yellows and greens. The kitchen reformed and she escaped the recesses of her own mind.