The Girl in a Too Short Skirt

He entered my life in the spring when the snow retreated, revealing patches of fresh grass. The scent of spring was intoxicating, and life was full of promises.

He arrived with the carnival and captured my heart with a free rollercoaster ride and a stolen kiss. That was the start of a summer I would never forget, for better or worse.

We spent every available moment together. I became a regular at the carnival. Everyone was always polite, but I would often catch the women looking at me with pity and the men with a knowing smirk.

The night it happened, I told him I wasn’t ready. He assured me it was fine because he loved me. I begged him not to do it, but he forced himself on me anyway. When it was all done, he said I must have wanted it all along, seeing how I was always dressed in short skirts and let him kiss me the very first day we met.

He left me there lying on the grass, hurting, with my short skirt rolled up around my waist and my underpants somewhere in the bush. I lay there long after the sound of his footsteps had faded, warm blood trickling down my thigh.

I never saw him again, not in person anyway. But I watched him from the shadows every day. Watched him talking to other girls, wondering if he would like them as much as he liked me. After all, he had called me his special girl.

A few times, I saw him leave the carnival with someone. Always leading them along the same path he had taken me. Our special place, he had said. Where nobody would bother us. I never waited to see him come back. I didn’t want to know. I still wanted to be his special girl even though I knew better than to approach him.

I noticed something wasn’t right a few months after the carnival had left the town. My regular bleeding stopped, and my belly got a rounder look. It wasn’t long before I couldn’t hide it from my parents anymore.

They were furious. I thought their fury was justified. Nothing but a slut, my dad said. He refused to speak or even look at me. They sent me to live with “aunts”. Said they would take care of the matter at hand.

The aunts, nuns, were not kind to me. They made it clear they detested girls like me. Girls who got themselves into trouble out of wedlock. I never told them, nor my parents, what had happened. It would have been pointless. And I knew I was to blame anyway.

It was all my fault. I shouldn’t have let him kiss me, nor lead me to the meadow. It wasn’t his fault. He was just doing what men do with girls like me.

When the baby was born, they took her away from me. I got only the briefest glimpse of her before she was gone. I asked what would happen to her. She would go to a good home, I was told. I trusted it would be so. God knew I couldn’t give her a good home. What kind of role model would a girl with loose morals like me make?

With the shame avoided, I returned home. My parents married me off quickly to a suitably sensible man.

This suitably sensible man, older than me by some 20 years, had been told about my past. He had still agreed to take me on. Told my parents that he would soon teach me some manners.

And that he certainly did. For the slightest reason, he’d beat me. Out of love, he said it was, so I would learn humility and re-earn my place in eternity. It became so regular that I became a colourful canvas bearing the marks of his love.

I never tried to stop him. Never pleaded with him. Because I must have deserved it. Because I was the kind of girl who got herself pregnant with a carnie at 16.

It was a blessing that he was older than me, a drunk and a smoker who couldn’t go a day without a greasy fry-up for breakfast. He simply collapsed over one of those breakfasts one morning. I watched him struggle to draw air into his lungs with his fried egg, perfectly soft as always, squashed under his cheek.

He might have lived had I called the ambulance sooner. Had I not taken some kind of pleasure in watching his mouth lopside and his eyes plead for help. I picked up the phone only after his breathing stopped.

So now I was a killer as well as a slut. Not that I ever got accused of my husband’s death. But nobody needed to blame me. I knew I had caused it. Just like I had caused all the beatings. Just like I had got myself pregnant.

I must be evil through and through.

Perhaps the world would be a better place without me.

It is a long way down from this cliff…

- - -

Last-minute Lucy here. Decided to enter at the last moment with a reworking of a story from the archives. Not much remains of the original except the carnie.