A Story I Never Want to Tell

I would like to tell you a story. This is not a fairytale with girls with long golden hair or dragons that breath fire or princes on galloping horses. This is a story about a little girl named Kay. Kay was a happy little girl, with parents who loved her and an older brother and maybe even a goldfish. Kay had blond ringlets, big blue eyes and pearly white teeth. When Kay was four or five something happened. Something that shouldn't ever happen to little girls with parents that loved them and goldfish that haven't yet been flushed down the toilet. Kay was molested by her older brother. Her older brother who was supposed to protect Kay and keep her safe and love her the way Kay, now sixteen years old, loves her baby half-brother. But little four or five year old Kay didn't know what to do. Her parents always taught her never to let a stranger ever touch her private parts, but this was even stranger. Kay became angry and scared and confused because her parents had stopped loving each other and her goldfish had long ago died and now she was a girl of about six and her mind no longer fit into the universe. So her parents sent her to anger management, cognitive behavioural therapy, to fix the problem, the unexplained anger, so Kay would stop being a difficult child and a burden on their broken marriage. Kay's blond ringlets turned dirty and frizzy, her blue eyes greyed and her pearly white teeth fell out. And nobody knew why. Suddenly eating crackers shaped like goldfish made her angry and scared and confused, but she learnt to feel those emotions on the inside and never, ever tell because that's what anger management, cognitive behavioural therapy had taught her. Now Kay was perhaps ten. Her parents sat her down and told her that her big brother, the one that was supposed to protect her and keep her safe and love her, had molested their cousin, a little boy of about four or five at the time. Kay felt a sick twinge inside her as she shook her head the questions asked. If anything had happened to her, she had blocked it all out by then, locked it away in the very back of her mind and thrown the key into the ocean with all the fish that had been flushed down the toilet with broken marriages. But one day, when Kay was approximately thirteen or fourteen, she read a book, a novel where the main character had been raped. And she read another because something felt oddly true and familiar to Kay in these books. Like a flood of light after a drought of darkness, she was left gasping for air at what she knew all along had happened to her as a little blond ringleted, blue eyed, pearly white toothed girl of four or five. But she had forgotten how to speak. Somewhere between four or five and thirteen or fourteen, this little girl had forgotten how to open her mouth and form it in the shape of real words with meaning. She had been a girl on autopilot for so many years, keeping anything with feeling inside and now it was too late to tell. At sixteen, now a big sister to her baby half-brother, Kay is a pretend girl with pretend feelings, but she is still angry and scared and confused on the inside of her mannequin exterior. Her skin is made of ceramic-coated metals and nothing can be let out unless her skin is broken and even then, her blood is too thick from the tears shed over dead goldfish so blackened blood trickles out in droplets the size of pin-pricks. She is the princess of her own fairytale gone wrong. i posted this here a very long time ago and i think if i ever find the courge to speak, i might read this at an open mic. to see who hears.