The Highs & The Lows

Wow, it's been over a week since I last posted. I've been busy living the highs among the lows. It amazes me how in one week alone you can be so completely happy and yet so completely sad. I wish to write about everything once I get the chance but silly me I have overslept and missed my first class (again). I leave you with creative exercise #4. This one I had to make 20 copies for my turn in workshop tomorrow so I hope you as well as my classmates like it!

Highland Inn
I’ve lived here in this podunk town all my life. With a population of less than one thousand, Eagle’s Lake never made onto a map. Our biggest claim to fame is that we are fifty miles south of New Orleans. Someday, I’m going to leave this place. At least that’s what I keep telling myself. I live with my mother in the old Highland Inn. I hear it used to be a nice place back in the day even though the only customers were travelers passing through too tired to drive on to New Orleans. For me, Highland Inn is a place of misery. Many of the rooms are rented out nightly to men who come down from New Orleans looking for a cheap good time. This is how my mother makes her living. I never have been able to make friends since at school I’m the daughter of Marisa Evans, known as the biggest “Eagle Lake Whore” of them all. I never knew my mother when she was prom queen, a 4.0 student, and captain of the varsity cheerleading squad. From the gossip I overhear around town, my mother got mixed up with some older kids who were passing through and dropped out of high school with only two months left to graduate. No one heard from her for over a year and then she drifted back here used and broken. Her long red curls had become a rat’s nest and her unblemished milky face was now filled with craters of sorrow. I like to imagine my mother as not a junkie prostitute, but in all her glory of before. I would plead with my father to get her help if only I knew who he was. I guess that’s why I thought Rick would be the one to save her. Rick Jones had found himself taking up an extended stay in Eagle’s Landing for he needed a place to “find himself.” Rick was a writer. From my window I could see the dusty road out front and would catch him stealing glances at my mother as she came and went each night. Rick claimed he only worked at night and liked to sit on the front porch with his typewriter and a kerosene lamp as his “fuel for the fire” as he called it. Even though he typically had a stench of liquor, I liked Rick. I liked the way he looked at me as if I were a real person and not just the junkie’s mute daughter. I liked Rick so much that I didn’t mind when he asked if he could come into our room to meet my mother. I told him to come by around six knowing that she should still be sober and alone but he insisted on making a night visit. My mother was out by the time he showed up so I invited him in and offered to make him an egg and toast sandwich since that was all we had in the fridge. I didn’t know what he was doing when he came up behind me, took the knife out of my hand, and put his hand on my breast.
“Rick what are you doing?”
“Don’t act like you don’t want it.”
I tried to push him away but with his two hundred plus pounds he was much too strong. I struggled to get away as he dragged me towards the couch and that’s when I felt it. It wasn’t simply the first feeling of penetration but the feeling of warmth as blood poured from my abdamen. Rick had stabbed me. Mother, I want to call out, Mother, I am dying, but she is falling once again into the arms of a man she loves.