four; genevieve

she had never heard silence before – not really, not once. she was born alongside him, born with his words battling hers, competitive and aggressive and his own. she loathed him and she loved him, loved him like a familiar tumor, turning your stomach inside out – but really what else are you supposed to do when you’re born with the voice inside your head.

there wasn’t silence, there was conversation, there were sleepy mumbles and hasty grumbles and feisty remarks, and there was lingering lust and subconscious whispered confessions. and just like that, genevieve had never lived a day of her life alone. they had just grown together like twisted trees, and she never batted an eyelid.

they called him a phase, a deep deep desire to never let her body wither all alone and unconscious. they drugged her and whispered into her sleeping ears, praying to the good sweet lord that whatever daemon possessed her would slip out silently like tears. but what they never noticed was the haphazard sultry whispers that always brought him back. genevieve spoke with the words of the wind, in tunes that only existed in lands long since extinguished – and it was her curled tongue that kept the voice anchored to her mind. they all watched her, watched her walk with poise and watched her talk with eloquence – they watched her exist entirely honestly and whole and they worried. how can a girl, a girl so small and so aware, how could she live in a world knowing that her mind was shared with invisibility – shared with blank space, a blank canvas, that could never be whole, not ever exist outside of her soul.

like a town with pitchforks the people protested. protested to the profanity they didn’t know existed – protested to the potent potential lies that encrusted a young girls mind, capturing her in a land of make believe and mystery.

and one day when they were napping, curled together like an over-grown plant – tucked between a tree and wooden shed, sharing secrets and screaming subtleties - they came for her.

the priest had a face like a rock – curved in ways that would never change, not for the wind and not for the ocean – he was hard and cruel and kind, wrapped together in a coat of bruises. and he whispered words to her open wounds, ignoring the screams that slipped from her lips – ignoring the fact that he didn’t know if they were even coming from inside her.

the family that once held her dearly, stood with eyes wide and milky, confused and mad at the man they themselves had created, begging to destroy their own monster.

nobody asked genevieve, nobody asked if his voice hurt her ears, or if his view of politics disagreed with her own. nobody asked her if he annoyed her, if he drew her attention away from the words on a page, and forced her to stop breathing. nobody asked her – and so they didn’t know. they didn’t know the voice talked her off the edge of a cliff. the voice stopped her hands when they pressed too hard against her wind-pipe. they didn’t ask because they thought they were right, in all the wrong ways.

once the stone-faced priest had left all his words floating in the air, plucking at the hairs at the back of her neck, she felt him shift. the voice that always tucked between her left ear, and the crook of her neck, the voice that she was born listening to – lived next to, and shared her life with. he was being pulled from her, like poison through a vacuum.

an inexistent family watched with horror plastered on their ignorant lips. their eyes swelled into white puddles, dripping across their faces as they watched her distort. watched her tear in two. they cried in confusion as the man walked away from her. she was small, she was so small and now she was half of what she once had been. the man was bigger, but he was wrong. his face was impossible to look at, and his body bent in ways that ignored every rule ever written. genevieve cried then, cried in confusion and pain and solidarity.

the man made a noise that nobody heard, it was pain and impossibility and terror – it was confusion and unbearable shifted smoke, and he was homeless – lost and wandering. he stared at genevieve with an intensity that nobody could see, except her. and she watched, watched with her withered body as he escaped. she saw regret and terror in his face, and she saw his legs move with an uncanny swiftness that was not necessary. they could not see him, they never would, they would never understand as long as she lived.

she lost control of her legs, she lost control of the contorted movement of her limbs and she collapsed in a pile of broken sinew and shredded bone and she cried tears of white blood cells and she broke clean in half – and she watched half of her run past her house, and slide down the road. and she screamed, watching her family erupt, watching their panic as she knew that she was never going to be the same, never going to move with poise again.

for genevieve’s seventeenth birthday, she asked for a new red bicycle, or a set of encyclopaedias to line up along her shelf, like the set she admired at her grandmothers. instead she got an exorcism.