8/7/?? Dear All,

Do you remember the tint of the lookers on the last sap you saw today? I do. It was brown. It’s the tint of this old rock we live on, save all the watery parts. That belongs to the Bluies. Lucky for me though, this sap I saw won’t be a bugger anymore. She’s soon off to the place where eyes are Closed and I just pray that there is a god to banish or welcome her when she gets there. For her sake, I hope death’s not just becoming a wormhouse, because that sounds humdrum.

(Bear with my writing. I know it’s not so good.) So, I’ll tell some about her. Mary-Anne’s her name. She’s 22 years old, but looks older. She has nine fingers, but not because she was born that way. When she was 15, she chopped one off because it kept making her boot all the time. Her mom kept saying how fat Mary-Anne was and so every night after eats, she went upstairs to the shitfarm and put the finger down her throat. After a month, her mom started saying how she was “looking better” and all that rot, so M (I’ll call her that now) decided to start throwing up in garbage bags instead of johns so she could leave them in her mom’s car trunk and sleepsack. She wanted to show the woman why she was “looking better.” When her mom found it, she screamed only because it was lumpish, and M heard her from her bedroom. That night, M smiled as the knife came down on the finger. She’s only thrown up a few times since then due to nausea or flu.

When M was 17, she fell in love with a chick named Christine. She told her mom about it and got whacked a dozen or so times with a fly swatter pretty good. Her mom said that “no girl can love another girl that way.” Granted, M was still a little twerp, but she was in love. And so, M and Chris (I’ll call her that now) started scheming and planning to book town at the stroke of midnight on M’s eighteenth birthday. That didn’t work though. M’s mom went into her anklebiter’s room two days before she turned 18, while she was at the crapshoot (sorry, that’s school), and found all of her dress stuffed into two duffle bags near the closet. Not among the pie of pack was a picture of the mother standing all lackluster with M, which was the only item laying on the desk near M’s bed. There was a lookie near it and her mom opened it and read:

Dear Mom,

Things on the desk are rubbish. Feel free to put them in a rummage sale or something.

Mary-Anne

So, when M got home that day, everything in the duffle bags was tossed around the house in one of her mom’s drunkfits. M started bitch-talking at her mom, who by then had downed a walloping bottle of Grey Goose (she spent a pretty penny on herself, that woman). Getting all meanlike, she threw the dry bottle at M’s head. It missed and then M went over and punched her square in the grimace. That didn’t make her pass out, so she hit her one more time real good. Naturally, the pigs pulled in moments later ready to arrest someone and found the house a shitfarm from the fight. Shauna (M’s mom) was incapacitated and all bloodgush on the floor. The neighbors had phoned while M was still at the crapshoot because they heard crashing and screaming next door.

Her mom decided to play the whole thing off to the law like she had been a victim of her own little anklebiter for years. That was the reason she started pounding the Goose so much (she said). She showed the pigs the runaway note and told them of lots of past bad behavior, including M’s finger-cutting. She powdered the stories with enough rubbish to get Mary-Anne checked into some boobyhatch south of town for crazy teens, but it wasn’t max security or anything. She got to leave, but her offtrots were bossed by some bighead.

M’s mom sent her a lookie when she was 19 and it said:

Dear Mary-Anne,

I’m getting married on August eighth and you should come. I know that’s only two weeks away, but I doubt you have much of a schedule in that crazy house anyway. I want you to meet your new dad.

Shauna

M had spent the first year at the boobyhatch sneaking around with Chris during the “visit” and “free” hours, as they were called, but the two grew apart fast. M wasn’t in love anymore and neither was Chris. They talked about it and then decided to stop seeing each other. No big fights. Two broken hearts. But M was happy that she’d been loved at all and that she had the chance to give love back. It made her feel all primo and special.

On August 7, M was in a great mood. She sat combing out her headbeard after a long shower and put on a bit of eye and lip tint. She was wearing the sweater her dad gave to her when she was ten, just one day before he went to that place of Closed eyes. It was loose on her then, but it fit snug now. She had cushy pants and shoes on and her favorite socks, which had Christmas trees on them. The Velvet Underground was playing one of her favorite airs. She was in her room. It was bigger and cleaner than the one she had at home and she liked it. She loved her earthbrown lookers more than ever that day and gazed in the mirror all widelipped. In the breakfast hour, she sat without a shitsay in the world, feeling perfect for the first time in her life. And just before she put the three pills in her mouth that would certainly do her in, she scribbled a little poem:

I am finally me. No bighead tellin’ me who’s me.

Never thought I’d get to be me. At least not until the wormhouse.

Love you All, M.