Chapter Three
Viridian green splitinto gold where the angel’s wings melted, dissipating into nothingness. I hovered my fingers over the faded jade ground, touching and feeling the despair reaching through the painting. Tracing the outline of the glowing off-white of the angel’s robes, I imagined she was me. Her hair tangled at her shoulders, twisting off them and falling in clumps beside her face.
Distant and hollow yellow drops from above, a rain of fading light dirtied her robes, fell with her hair, and pooled at the ground where her knees sat. The angel was losing her freedom and saying goodbye to her flight. Her holy loyalty broke in the same place her wings did, banishing her to a life of suffering.
I cradled the signature at the bottom of the canvas. My fingertips held it, the prints at the tip of them etching the memory of the feeling for all of eternity. There, in blackpaint, was my name in swoopy, almost lyrical writing. The last painting I ever finished. It’d been so long, I wasn’t sure my hands knew how to hold a brush anymore.
Would my hands shake too much? Had I forgotten which colors soothed the ache in my soul and which ones matched them? I could hardly imagine a color wheel without a stabbing pain rushing through my gut. The idea of caressing the rough texture of a clean canvas was foreign to me now.
Footsteps stomped against the hardwood floor, startling me. I opened the cabinet doors and shoved the canvas into it, closing them just as Jude walked in.
In the glow of the hallway light, he almost looked angelic. Not in the warm, inviting sense, but in the way Lucifer deceived his victims. Instead of the gunmetal blue I fell in love with, his eyes flashed red and devious. “I’m leaving. You gonna be good?”
He wasn’t asking about my well-being. He was asking if I’d be obedient enough to follow his unspoken orders. I nodded in response, shuffling to stand from my knees.
“Ah ah, down.” The blond of his hair sparkled as he moved, a warning sign in light flashes only. He called to me like I was a dog doing tricks, only I’d never received a reward for doing them. I sank back down on my knees, hiding the scowl creeping up on my face. “You look so much better like this. My little Elio. Gonna have everything done when I come home?”
Everything and more, but will it be enough?I straightened my spine, even as Jude’s hand caressed the side of my face. “Yeah, I got it.”
The smile on his face slowly rotted my soul. Piece after piece, I lost parts of myself I didn’t know still existed. “Don’t forget dinner.” He patted my cheek twice before bending down and kissing me.
I wanted to recoil, but I didn’t. I wanted to scream and yell, tell him I was leaving, that I was sick of his shit, but I didn’t. I didn’t do a damn thing as he turned and left because what was there to do? I’d lost my wings so long ago, I couldn’t remember what it was like to take flight.
I was stuck here, in a nightmare of my own making, year after year, day after day. Once the front door clicked shut, I sighed in relief and then chastised myself for doing so. There was nothing to be relieved about.
Pulling myself off the floor, I found some strength to clean the bathroom first. I hated the bathroom the most, with its mocking mirror and the sad reflection in it. My eyes stared back at me, the skin beneath them tinged with dark purple and black. Purple used to be my favorite color. Now, I was so sick of it, I never wanted to see it again.
By the time I reached the kitchen, my knees were bruised to match most of my body, and my hands ached with the sting of bleach. When I moved my head too quickly, the world in front of me tilted and waned, the dizziness no doubt from the amount of cleaning products I’d been using. That, or the lack of food in my stomach. I needed fresh air desperately. I needed to get out of the house. I needed to eat, or succumb to the idea of dying from hunger rather than fists like I’d always imagined I would.
The kitchen tile wasn’t white enough yet, though. It wasn’t shining under the shitty, flickering light. It’d needed to be replaced for a long time now, but we didn’t have a ladder to reach it, and I wasn’t tall enough. We’d neglected it for so long, I knew that soon, the kitchen would be another shroud of darkness, and I wasn’t so sure it’d become light again. That, or I’d get beaten for it even though it was totally out of my control.
I scrubbed the tile so hard, I thought my hands would splinter and fall apart. My skin was perpetually dry andcracking, the center of my palms aching when I flexed my fingers outward. No amount of lotion could soothe the burn.
Sweat from my forehead soaked the front of my bangs and dripped down my nose, falling onto the floor. I froze next to the cabinet at the corner of the room, panting. My lungs were begging for a break, along with my exhausted arms. When I looked at the tiles stretching before me, I smiled at the slight gleam coming from them. Jude would be satisfied. He’d have to be.
The sun hurtto look at. It hurt to be under. I could feel the tiny drops of moisture beneath my skin bubbling and churning, ready to burst into nothing. Jude wouldn’t be home until six, and it was only just after two. I had time. At least that’s what I kept telling myself.
I shouldn’t be here. Being at the park meant being close to where Crescent worked, which meant potentially being close to Crescent. Though I didn’t want that, a part of me desperately did. There were so many memories in his eyes, a million echoes of laughter in his smile, and a hundred thousand different reasons to stay as far away from him as possible.
We used to be best friends, having grown up together from elementary school through our senior year. The day I told him we couldn’t be friends anymore still haunted me, a vengeful ghost of our forgotten past.
Sometimes, I saw his twisted frown and watery brown eyes in my nightmares. Crescent used to be my everything, but suddenly, my everything became my nothing. Shittyparents and even shittier bullies at school meant my one and only friend became my entire family, entire world, and my only reason for living. Until Jude came in and swept it all away, a tide in the black sea of despair, wiping it out, leaving only mud in its wake.
The Miller family took me under their wing when we were just little kids. They’d adopted me as their own, going as far as paying for every field trip and enrolling me in painting classes on the side. I missed the long, drawn-out talks about our inner selves and the teaching of peace. I missed sitting in nature, picking out all the life forms swirling around us.
I missed so much I could never have again.
Underneath the large tree, I was encased in a bubble. Children laughed around me, along with a few dogs barking for joy, their owners giggling and yelling at their antics. So many lives in all different stages, all gathered in the same place. None of them knew that, just off to the side, a wallow of emptiness hung around the same patch of grass and daisies day after day.
I was in my own bubble, shrouded in the same hopelessness I’d felt the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that one. I liked knowing that no one paid me any mind, in some morbid way.
“Are you stalking me?”
I whipped my head to the side, landing my gaze on the bench. There, with his legs spread out and a dirty apron spreading over his chest and stomach, was Crescent. The one man I didn’t want to see.
He smirked down at me. “So?”
“Stalking you would imply I had an interest in you in the first place.” I brought my gaze back to my lap, fiddling with a blade of grass I’d plucked. “Shouldn’t you be working?”
