October by Jessica L J Smith

Janet Berry followed you on your way to the bus, on top of you, breathing down your neck as you walked ahead like a little egg.

I turned to watch the scene like everybody else, only I wasn’t laughing. I summoned the courage to scowl and shake my head as I turned and walked faster toward my bus. All the while, hearing Janet peck at you, “October, why don’t you talk? Why don’t you say something? Can you talk? Say something!”

Your jack-o-lantern face was mostly eyes. Your mouth was just a thin, thin line as she taunted you, poked you, pushed you. You stumbled and corrected yourself, adjusting your backpack straps as you moved in an unsteady line forward. You kept your gaze moving forward, never looking back at her.

I used to wonder what happened to your mouth, did you once have lips? Did they curl and atrophy from lack of use? Remember when I sat across from you at lunch? I asked you if you would mind me sitting there and you only stared at me. What intense eyes you have, October. I wonder what you’ve imagined behind there? Do you think of cruel things you’d like to say? Were you trying to penetrate my skin? What did you see inside of here, October? Was it all hair-strangled bones and bits of teeth? Was I all chewed up inside?

That poem you wouldn’t read in English class, the one that Mz. Hobletzel read aloud for you, it was so beautiful. That is how I knew you think of things in that empty head of yours. I knew exactly what you meant in that poem when you said you didn’t know the girl in the mirror. How I wish we could have been friends, October. I would have liked to meet your parents. Who names a girl October? What does it mean to them? Is it all burnt orange and chocolate? They must have known you were born in the fall of your life, with only winter to look forward to. Does your jaw unhinge when you get home? I can imagine you animated and normal somewhere else. Does poetry pour out of you when you sit under the October moon, knowing it’s your very own?

I’m sorry, October, for the way life is, the way people are, that cruelty is sharpened and practiced on the young. You had to keep your mouth shut all through middle school, carrying on like a real girl. Really you were just a marionette, weren’t you? You got tangled up in the strings, those wild, intense eyes burning out faster than oxygen. Your painted-on skin stretching over that pumpkin head didn’t take long to crumple and peel. Inside the marks of candle burns that had scorched your flesh made an ashy kind of calligraphy. Poetry in every language was burned deep into you. But you didn’t last.

I wonder what it sounded like when your head came to rest on that brittle bed of ascetic leaves? Your empty eye sockets facing up at the networks of anorexic winter branches. It wasn’t a hollow thump. When I hear it in my dreams it’s a two-ton artillery drop from five thousand feet. The kind of sound that people feel for miles. Deep down in the cradle of their spines, it jolts and vibrates the sacrum, the cocyx. It’s the kind of sound that earthworms implode under, six feet deep.

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Jessica L J Smith
Aspiring human, loyal writer, adequate aspirer.

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Tags: fiction, prose