Total pages in book: 151
Estimated words: 147649 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 738(@200wpm)___ 591(@250wpm)___ 492(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 147649 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 738(@200wpm)___ 591(@250wpm)___ 492(@300wpm)
Earth Hour, Wind Hour, Breath Hour. I say these things over and over in my head because they are starting to get smudgy.
But sometimes my head gets too full of things that don’t make sense anymore and then I have to stop remembering. Because I only have so much room in my brain. And there must always be a place for Pia.
“Hurry!” Mother grabs my arm and begins to pull me across the sludgy parking lot towards the building. Pia crawled up my coat sleeve while I was being forced out of the car and now she is snuggled up against my neck, burrowing into me to keep warm.
What would I do without her?
We approach a door and I get that fluttery feeling in my stomach.
Doors get me excited. Because doors go places. And every time I walk through one my heart beats fast for a moment. I can’t seem to stop the hope that on the side of that door will be the place where I belong.
It just… never happens that way.
But it happened that way once. I’m sure of it. In my head there is still enough room for the Door of Vinca City. I don’t remember what it looked like. And that name—Vinca—is very smudgy these days, so I don’t know what that is, either.
But there was a special door. A door that… did things.
And I went through it. Father-man took me through it. I know he did. That’s how he got me here.
I’m pretty sure, at least.
But on the other side of this door is just a boring office. We’ve been in lots of these since the father-man left. One time we were getting food stamps and something called welfare. Another time we were going to the doctor and I saw a man who asked me questions about my imaginary bird.
I tried to explain Pia to him. I thought he was listening. For a moment I even thought he could see Pia because he was nodding his head. But then I heard him tell my mother that he was going to give me pills and I would need to be monitored.
I had to stay overnight for this monitoring. They took me to a room, and they gave me little white bitter pills that made me sleepy. And a little while later Pia went away.
I started looking for her. Crying and crawling around on my hands and knees. Checking under beds and behind curtains. Pleading with them—with anyone who would listen—to please help me find my bird.
They wrapped me up in a tight coat and set me on the bed facing up. I couldn’t move, but it didn’t matter. Because I was too sleepy to care.
When I woke up, Pia was back, chirping and being happy, and telling me that everything was going to be OK. All I had to do was tell everyone who would listen that she does not exist.
I said no and they kept me in that place for a whole eternity.
One day Mother came back and said I had to come with her. But every morning after that, when I would wake up in our small, ugly, smelly hotel room, she would remind me that there is no such thing as Pia.
She would want me to say it too. “Say it, Pie. Say it right now or you won’t get any breakfast. Say it! ‘There is no such thing as Pia.’”
If I didn’t say it, she would throw things. And then she would leave. And sometimes she would not come back until I was very, very hungry.
Then I started to wonder if perhaps one day she might never come back.
And so I would say it. And Pia would become smudgy. So the next day I would have to take it back. Then Mother would disappear until I went hungry.
So I would say it again.
And Pia would become smudgy.
Then Mother would disappear until I went hungry.
1
Three years later I understood time.
Three years later I understood a lot.
Doors never went anywhere good, winter was gloomy and cold, schools didn’t teach me anything I really needed to know, and parents were worthless.
Three years later Mother dropped me off at CPS and never came back.
Well, for all intents and purposes, she never came back. But she lurked.
For a while I even understood why she was lurking.
The father-man and the skirt I was wearing that night in the bathroom were lingering in my memory. The way my toes didn’t quite fit in those boots. The idea that I was from somewhere else.
But even that got smudgy after a while and I started to forget things.
And then one day, my past was nothing but glass.
2
I open my eyes and find myself in a forest. I blink, then squint. Because the sun is bright and rays of it have found their way past the upper canopy of leaves and are shining right into my eyeballs like frickin’ lasers.