• He had never meant to do it; he had never meant to do a lot of things. He stood there feeling her life trickle into his toes, oozing into his shoes as he stared at her in an eerie silence, the wind screaming a thousand words into his deaf ears.
    She had always been plain, the type of painfully plain that was worse than being achingly beautiful or achingly hideous. She had two brown eyes, a thin mouth and a nose of no importance. Her square hands held a pencil in the correct triangular grip, the index finger pushing against the pencil’s grip, the middle finger tucked behind. Her handwriting was plain chicken scratch, no special signature loopy Y’s or quirky K’s. Her attempt at being a unique poet had been abandoned at “roses are red”. Her listless hair tucked behind a round ear with frightening normalcy when she had bent her head to take up concentrated painting. Her painting wound up looking like dead Picasso instead of a flower vase.
    Her square chin quivered when she warbled a middle C, she had hit the note, but with a frankness and lack of sweetness that murdered the note before it had even started to leave her cream colored teeth.
    Size 8 feet twirled in a circle, her blunt toes sinking into hard points tapping a wooden floor. Plié, chassé, grande plié, up and down, untanned legs bend down to meet the floor, an untoned arm arching in unnatural geometry over a strict ponytail. Stretching her leg behind her black clad waist, her arabesque topples into a wooden bar.
    A pointy elbow pooled onto a wooden table, hands sinking into cool clay, her wide wrists twisting like a shedding snake. The table spins roughly, jerking with each violent tap of her bony ankle. The vase collapsed into a twisted bowl, her exasperated fingers sighing with a defeated slump, flicking chalky clay from nail bitten fingernails.
    She had tried being musical. She had twisted mousy brown hair into a tired bun, shimmied into a too tight bright black dress, unmanicured feet shoved into black sandals with sad kitten heels. She had pressed flattened fingertips into unrelenting keys, a fisted bow slid harshly on metal strings, rough sharp fingernails scraped acoustic guitar strings. She threw all the wood and metal at the wall in sobbing frustration. Her mom grounded her for scratching the wall then repainted it white.
    She had tried to become the world’s valedictorian, acing each test and class with the brightest flying colors that could possibly be found in the world. But she had dropped that vacant dream more and more with each most unsatisfying B. The red B was so unholy, neither the loving A or the sad C and below which left you room to improve.
    She had tried smoking in the bathroom, spent 10 minutes looking for the perfect rouge, smoothing it on a small mouth. She settled the cigarette daintily between short scarlet fingernails, glowed the tip with a matchstick hidden in her white sock. The smoke billowed vindictively in her mouth, charging down her throat and suddenly into her lungs. She spluttered and choked, hot saliva flying from the confines of her grey mouth, the cigarette slipping from twitching fingers. It rolled onto the damp floor, the crimson ring around one end smudging in the water.
    The beautiful girls wore pleather and tight vinyl that showed every crevice to every questing eye, their arched heels clicking and announcing their arrival to the waiting world. They spoke shamelessly, their fingers draping sensuously on a dreaming shoulder as corkscrew eyelashes fluttered at a hummingbirds pace, fanning a heated face. They laughed coquettishly about last night, always last night, when the stars and the fairies and their interpretation of the world came to life. Last night, she donned an uneven skirt that danced on the top of her thighs, a shirt that clung too tightly to her ribs, and the mask of kohl, rouge and powder. She found the wobbly sound of her heels hitting gum splattered pavement disturbing, the fetid odor of alcohol ridden breath breathing against her ear bothersome, the swaying music of gyrating bodies seeking life from each other perturbing. She only stayed for 5 minutes, resolutely tugging a mystery man’s sweater around her body as she plowed out of the smoky scene.
    The ugly girls sat by themselves, secure in their unique rebelliousness. Their passion intrigued strangers. Their strange habits of always having the volume setting at 15 or tying perfect bows with their shoes strings endeared them to curious observers. People fell in love with their unheard of talents, with their staggering personalities. She tried having a strange habit, people just thought that being OCD was annoying.
    She tried being one of those people, those people who carried around razor blades and wrote disheartening poems about suicide. When she realized that no one could care less, she had pressed a new shiny exacto knife razor against her veiny wrist. It had sunk agonizingly slowly into her flesh, like cutting through an old potato, not registering in her mind until she saw red. Pain flared in her brain, sharp like needle points. She dropped the stained blade on the marble tiles and decided that those people were retarded.
    Life allowed her entrance into the world of romance once, she had given up on turning the knob of that bitter black door ever since. He had been beautiful, in such a human way that she felt like writing him songs. He had lively brown eyes that sparkled green if he was standing by a plant, foppish mahogany hair that had veins of gold shooting through at random spurts. He had a gap in between his two front teeth, she always wanted to stick something pretty in it. When he talked to her, his raspy voice aggravated her senses to a new high, her answering voice measly and drab in response. She thought she could take on the world and its diversity, until she came crashing down with a silent boom when he pressed against her too tightly and begged with a demanding word. He was over her by the end of the night, sandwiched between a blonde and familiar redhead.
    She was dateless to her own prom, a friend of an acquaintance as a date was simply too humiliating. She had grand scheme of arriving on the top of the stairs, with all eyes on her, admiring and astounded, men clamoring after her graceful hand. But her hands were far from graceful, they spilled spiked fruit punch on her ivory lap and she never danced once, her pin curled hair admiring naturally curly tresses from the sidelines.
    She got accepted into a decent state college. Her parents threw the acceptance letter onto the coffee table and continued discussing taxes. Her dad’s coffee mug left a brown soggy ring on the white paper.
    They had given her the wrong size graduation gown, she disappeared in the suffocating black and when they tossed their hats in the air, she never caught hers. It drifted off in the breeze somewhere, she just watched it fly away.
    She got a dog, a cocker spaniel. It had loved her at first, pawing at her thigh when she came home, panting wet breaths on her hand, but she came to realize that the dog liked her neighbor better. He needed a dog and soon he had one, free of charge. The dog never recognized her, and when she whistled wetly, it merely stared at her with blank dewy eyes before racing back indoors.
    Her neighbor never really thanked her, he had the jaw of an actor and the eyes of a heartbreaker, he didn’t have to answer to anyone. He went jogging with the dog every morning when she was watering her dying shrubs. He would grant her a nod as she watched them pass, the sun glinting in her eyes as it reflected off his goldenrod hair.
    She had moved to the suburbs, some Stepford wives resort where conformity was key, the egg white houses pristine in violent sunlight. She watched the dashing doctor woo the dying patient on the Soap Opera network; she made herself frozen breakfasts, lunches and dinners and remade her bed 5 times a day, the benefits of writing business proposals from home. The neighborhood was surrounded by some fantastic forests.
    She was walking in them one day, closeted by thick evergreen air. The trees hedged her in, sly roots snagging at her pumas. She batted branches aside with an impatient hand, she had mastered the trees’ tricks long before. Her ears felt heavy, muted by the whispering flowers, and the crunch of her toes on pinecones. A large trail loomed out in front of her, white and winding in the green and brown. She stepped out and realized she was a deer in headlights.
    She never realized how cruel cars were until she felt the bumper bending her calves. The round glass window offered her no friction, it was cold and unforgiving against her sliding cheek. She felt her lungs fly out of her mouth as the hood of the car massaged her curved back. Her eyes met sparkling brown, green flecks reflecting the trees. She had never hated so much in her life before, as red sullied the brown jagged forest floor, she saw the unrecognition in those empty eyes and she knew that he didn’t remember her. She felt her heart turn black as his mouth gaped open, the gap in between his two front teeth was a thick black line. She felt her brain coo.
    He had never meant to do it, he had never meant to do a lot of things. He stood there feeling her life trickle into his toes, oozing into his shoes as he stared at her in an eerie silence, the wind screaming a thousand words into his deaf ears.
    He had known her somewhere, he decided, as the unimportance of the woman washed over him. Her dull brown eyes stared at his ankles, her index finger stretched out at barely brushing his now stained right shoe. He pulled his foot back ever so slightly, feeling the red stick to his flesh. She was probably from those days, one of the many, the many who walked in and from the monotony of his life. He scuffed his foot against the forest ground before turning back to his car. He lit a cigarette, feeding it to his lips as his finger quivered over the numbers on his phone. He snapped it shut, her unimportant form twitching in the corner of his eye and clambered into his car, snapping the metal key into its home. He fed her one more glance before driving off. She had never meant anything to anyone anyways.
    She continued to twitch slowly, her hand stiffening in shock and she knew that she wasn’t dead, or even dying. She watched the numbers on the back of his car shrink in the distance, the blood tickling the side of her face. She considered just lying there until the brown earth swallowed her whole, until her bird bones turned into fertilizer for the weeds. She just laid there and considered, knowing that no one would come looking for her, she had never meant anything to anyone anyways.