Ice Cream and Hyperbole

Every day after work, Winston Mansfield walked his chocolate lab with the white spots on his feet for exactly forty-five minutes. He called the dog Spot because that was its most dominant feature. He and Spot would walk out of the house, stop to urinate by the mailbox, and continue the route down the sidewalk to the left for one half mile at a brisk pace. First he passed the houses of the rest of the middle class, modest sized, single story homes painted in a variety of colors from white to off-white. Two years ago, a woman and her two children moved to the neighborhood and painted the house across the street a vibrant blue. They were from out of town. Six months later the woman moved. The city repainted the house white after numerous complaints, and all was well again.

Half a  mile down the road, Winston turned left again entering a winding suburb road where the houses grew an entire floor in height. The houses were immaculately painted white with a darker off white trim. Each door was painted in a light color of the occupant's choice, never dark or unseemly. Winston loved to live in such a creative neighborhood with its variety of door coloring. It was an azure sky, the houses forming sharp lined clouds. Left, right, right, left, left he turned down the well paved street until he came to the one dark spot in what had to be the entire city. Three quarters of a mile after the second left turn was a small single story house, a sheep among the gods. The house, if one could call it that, looked like it had been abandoned since the beginning of time. The door was black with red trim and protected by a separate screen door. The roof was red and falling apart, much like the rest of the house. The walls were decayed wood and were at one time painted black. Time and exile had turned the paint a fair gray. The boards on the windows were painted black and the yard was unseemly. More than once had he tried to petition the city to tear down the old house and remove the blemish from the otherwise flawless skin of his life and more than once he was denied, each time citing a section of the city charter preventing historical landmarks from being torn down. No one knew what had happened there that made it a landmark and no one cared to find out. The people avoided the house like white after labor day.

After exactly one half a mile, Winston turned left, walked another half mile past more modest homes, turned left again through another subdivision built for a king, and finally arrived back at his home on Plainsview Drive. The two mile walk took forty-five minutes at a brisk pace.

Every morning, Winston Mansfield woke up at exactly six am. He dressed in the clothes he had laid out the night before, ate his low calorie cereal (one cup with half a cup of soy milk and a piece of toast), read the morning paper, fed Spot, and began the drive in his white hybrid car to the office where he worked. On his way, he stopped at a local coffee shop for his daily morning latte. He arrived at the office at exactly eight am.

Every day at five pm, Winston Mansfield waved goodbye to his coworkers, shut down his computer to conserve electricity, asked the boss about his wife, and drove home from work.

“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

I wasn't always a monster. I was born to a loving family. I was privileged growing up. I went to a nice college. I did everything a young girl should. It was always going to end in blood. It had to.

My mother use to tell me that I have and old soul. She would look at me from across the table, her eyes bloodshot from the wine on her breath and say to me, "you've done this before." I spent hours in front of the mirror changing my face, trying to see what she saw.

I saw a girl. Just a girl.

There is little to say about my younger school years. I had a normal childhood with normal friends. I was happy then. My father would read to me before bed until I was thirteen. He started with the normal ones about elephants and birds, but when I got restless he would move on to the masters of horror and mystery. The monsters in those stories kept me awake at night, fearful of what was lurking just inside the shadows. He told me I was safe as long as I stayed in bed, under the blanket.

When I was eight years old, my brother and I would play together. It was innocent at first. We played Cowboys and Indians, doctor, Red Rover... all the games young brothers and sisters are supposed to play. Sometimes we would play house. I cooked the plastic food and washed the plastic pots and pans while he took care of our pretend Barbie doll children. At night we went to a very real bed where he performed his very real husbandly duties. He was fourteen at the time and I didn't know what was happening.

My parents didn't believe me.

My mother called me a liar and kept insisting that I'd told this lie before. She hurled insults at me through gulps of wine, the red staining her teeth and lips like an open wound. My father said I read too many stories and couldn't go around telling people such horrid fallacies. Nevertheless, he looked concerned.

He talked with my brother about it the next day, who of course denied everything. Father believed him and I never again spoke a word of it to anyone. That was when I first learned to lie. He came to my bed again that night. He would slide his hand into me, telling me all the while how toxic I was. "Why do you make me do these things to you?" he would ask me. I cried silently, not giving him the satisfaction of an answer. It went on until I was ten and he found a high school crush.

All things considered I had a normal high school experience. I wasn't too damaged by what happened and it never happened again, so I let it go. I had friends but I wasn't terribly popular. My senior year of high school I managed to win the title of Prom Queen. My date was a sweet guy, Dexter. He knew my limits and accepted them without question. I can still see the look of alarm on his face when his name was announced as Prom King. We danced the rest of the night away like normal high school teenagers should. It was beautiful.

That made it all the more bittersweet when we broke up to go to different colleges. I chose a college on the West Coast and he wanted to stay in town. Dexter was very much into tradition and lasting values, which lasted as far as my best friend's skirt. I wasn't too broken up about it.