Here's the link to the first chapter:
http://youngwriterssociety.com/viewtopi ... 283#210283
II: Of Chemistry, One-Way Tickets, and Icarus
You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave. I don’t know who said that, but I know someone did, and as far as my life is concerned, that quote is remarkably accurate. I fell out of my mother’s womb and instead of landing in the grasp of some maternal, warm woman, the stork had dropped me into the lifeless hands of a distant, shy mouse. For a father I had a drunken mule, and that is being polite. He remarkably resembled one and behaved as politely as one too. I crawled through life with a war waging around me, one in which I was, if Sunday school teachers were to be believed, continuously in danger of being condemned to hell, as was everyone else around me.
When he left me alone, dragged to some church service by mother in another of her efforts to make him repent of his innumerable sins, then his friends would come over and get to know me rather "intimately". After a while, I was used to their rough hands, and though I found no pleasure in it, it was a way to kill the aching hole in me so I let it go on without telling anyone. Somehow, I felt as though it was my fault, and a punishment for something, though I was never sure for what. It began when I was eleven and continued even after I met Johnny. Sometimes when Mom was away, Daddy would join in too, saying, "I never spend enough time with you, do I, sweetheart?"
We were both sixteen years old, young and searching for something, an answer to what love was. He was my lab partner in chemistry, and I found that chemistry was something we shared. We had plenty of it, so much so that we were both eventually sent to detention because of, and these were the teacher’s exact words, we had “wantonly twisted the meaning of chemistry in a project presented to the class and shown a vulgar representation of chemistry which would be extreme even in a sex-ed class.”
After that, whenever Daddy or his friends weren’t in my bed, he was. For once, I learned what pleasure was, and it felt as though the aching hole was being filled with something. Well, it was being filled with something, but the deeper in we got the more I learned that the only attraction we shared was physical. Only, before I could push him away like I planned to, he had slipped a golden ring on my finger and chained me to him.
Before that, though, I'd whisper my Hollywood dreams to him on cold nights, how I wanted to be a singer so bad and get away from all this crap, and he’d take me in his arms, and we’d invariably end up making out. We never talked much but when we did he never had anything encouraging to say when I confided in him just how troubled I secretly was, no, “I love you,” just another attempt at engaging in some more action.
It went on like that, and certainly his desire for sex didn’t lessen after we got married, or after he’d first started chasing his white dragon. I never could find what I wanted in him, so I reached out for more affection and invariably found it, in the arms and bed of my boss. Then, of course, things didn’t go too well with Johnny and his white dragon and he wound up six feet under and I ended up alone again.
I bought the cheapest one-way train ticket that I could and packed up everything I owned in a suitcase. It was one way because after I saw him buried I knew there was no way I was ever going to come back to this place. The last thing that had kept me from going where I want to had just been shoveled over with dirt.
On a day colder and grayer than Johnny’s gravestone, I boarded the train, stepping over the threshold into a new life. The new life, ironically, smelled like mothballs, cheap perfume, and someone’s unwashed stench as I lowered myself down on a seat as far from the front as I could.
As I sat there, on that thinly-padded seat, I remembered a story I’d heard once, about Icarus who had flown to close to the sun and melted his waxen wings, sealing his fate in one dazzling, breath-taking soar up into the glow of the sun. I envied Icarus; before his plunge into the cold maw of the sea,
he had gotten to bask in the unparalleled warmth of the sun, to be uninhibited by anything but the desire to soar higher and higher on his new waxen wings. Never mind that he died, he had lived a dream for a little while.
I made a promise watching the gray world go by that I’d live a dream to put Icarus’s sun-gilded one to shame. The trees outside, old, hunched men, shook gnarled fists at me, their beards swaying in the wind as though their lips were mouthing curses at me. I mouthed curses back, ignoring the occasional raised eyebrow offered me by the other occupants of the car. Johnny got a white dragon, Icarus got his waxen wings, and I get old gray men marching past me with accusatory fists and cursing lips. I went to sleep, still thinking of white dragons, waxen wings, and old gray men.
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