Misfits
Part Twelve
Shiloh spent days, weeks, and then even months expecting to have some form of that same conversation with Wendy. There was plenty of room and reason for confrontation but it never came, there was never any resolve from what Shiloh sat and listened to in the dark. Father was supposed to be the hurdle, the argument. Wendy was supposed to be the one who would understand. With those expected rolls reversed it hardly seemed like there was any solid ground to stand on.
More than two years later and those words still stung whenever Shiloh had a stray moment to focus on them. Wendy never talked about that night, or acknowledged it, except to reiterate the values of her argument whenever it became convenient. It was maddening, loving and having to rely on someone who never truly accepted you for who or what you really are.
So yeah, fuck you; because maybe it didn’t help, but it was the only appropriate response Shiloh had on offer when the only person she could count on in the entire world decided, yet again, to quantify her experience as a woman as simply being an imposter, a wannabe.
When sleep finally did arrive for Shiloh it was the fitful nightmare kind. The sort that left the mind uneasy and the body tired no matter how much of it there was to be had. One bit through, before it devolved into nightmare was pure memory. They were both little, Wendy couldn’t have been more than eight or nine, they were walking home, hand in hand from school.
A group of boys was laughing and jeering at something at the edge of the school yard. Shiloh knew a couple of the boys, fellow first graders, the kind you didn’t want to be alone around on the playground. When that information was relayed and an attempt was made to cross the street and away from those boys Wendy was having none of it. She always had a radar, a homing beacon to find someone or something that needed to be exposed and made right.
The boys had surrounded a gopher, the piteous thing was splayed out, struggling, trying to retreat to its burrow. A few of them had sticks, one was still busy throwing small rocks at it. At some point in the assault one of them had managed to crack the poor things head open.
Shiloh saw the blood, and the stuff that looked like raspberry jam leaking out of the little rodent’s head. It was gasping for air and pulling itself along to the familiar darkness of its burrow, unaware that every movement was nearing its last.
The boys were teasing it, poking at it, all of them having a merry old time enjoying the animals last tortured moments, until Wendy descended on them.
Big sis made sure that her charge was secured, half hugging onto a light post before she came at them. The boy throwing stones got pushed to the ground and some of the others lighted out of the place like their shoes were on fire. Wendy howled at the assembled crowd, “How dare you, it’s a defenseless animal.”
One of the older boys around her age pointed down at the rodent, “My dad says those things are vermin, you kill vermin.”
Wendy pointed at the boy. “My dad says the same thing about you people, but we don’t torture you!” She made her point by stepping directly on the poor animal, killing it instantly and ceasing its suffering.
In reality and in that dream memory, the remaining boys ran off and left Wendy as she wiped her sneaker clean across the wet grass.
Where did that girl go? The one who killed only out of pity, the one who believed that you never tortured? The one who had a defined radar aimed only at making things better? That girl got lost along the way, starved out or died from exposure. No matter the cause of death she simply got replaced by someone who took pleasure in the hunt. Someone who took pleasure in killing and prolonging pain.