Wounded

Wounded

by

Greta T. Bates

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

World Castle Publishing, LLC

Pensacola, Florida

Copyright © 2023 Greta T. Bates

Smashwords Edition

Hardback ISBN: 9798891260450

Paperback ISBN: 9798891260467

eBook ISBN: 9798891260474

First Edition World Castle Publishing, LLC, September 12, 2023

http://www.worldcastlepublishing.com

Smashwords Licensing Notes

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews.

Cover: Adam Martin

Editor: Karen Fuller

Please Note:

Please note that Wounded contains scenes with self-harm and mental issues and may not be suitable for all readers. Reader discretion is advised.

And she saw the world not always as it was, but as perhaps it could be with just a little bit of magic.

-Cinderella 2015

Chapter 1

NOW

"For many moons, I’ve toiled. The process has proven futile. I clean, I scour, I go into the cracks and crevices, and it is never enough. I’ve been made a maid in my own temple, my own home. Even in the shadows where I’ve flashed a light to find the grime, I’ve dusted and swept remnants into a receptacle only to realize time and again there is more work to do. So I stay, sullen, wallowing in the cinders, eyes swollen from so many shed tears in tattered clothes, typically dirty faced, smeared and smudged with ash.

Days, years passing, spending time, fluctuating from bouts of melancholy and lightning quick surges of mania. There were days of productivity, trying and trying again, hoping to be seen, to be enough. Hungry for attention. But there were many more days of barely doing what needed to be done then, outing the lights, drawing the curtains, and the descent into darkness would…

I tossed the pages onto the floor. What a pile of shit! This was not how I was supposed to be spending the summer before my senior year, going through my mom’s things: piles of paper, boxes, drawers, scraps of scribblings. My mom, now locked away for safe keeping, thought she was a writer. She was always looking for that ‘big break’ in one way or another. But her words, her personality, it was all so overly emotional, so self-involved. Me, me, me. Just all her. She was constantly reliving her pain and trying to make anyone she came in contact with do the same. There was never a short answer to, How was your day? It was always something like, Well, you think you have it bad? Let me tell you what happened to me. And then you got the Debbie Downer story, and it didn’t even have to be about her. Sometimes, it was about somebody in town, and more often than not, you got some sad story she’d seen on TV. Anything to bring the conversation back to herself, her taking on somebody else’s pain to get into the spotlight. Can’t you see how miserable I am? That was the gist of every conversation I ever had with her, if you could call it a conversation. It was usually one-sided. Classic narcissism. Her moods—up and down and up and down—withdrawing, attacking. Until it was time for the padded cell.

I can’t speak for my grandmother, but my mom, she was part of that generation, the women who wanted to be rescued, the ‘someday my prince will come’ damsels in distress. Those women they all had the Princess Obsession. I blame all those fucking Disney movies. The princess wants to be rescued, the shoe fits perfectly, she and the prince live happily ever after. Anthropomorphic creatures dancing and singing, ‘The End’ appears in cursive, fireworks go off, and as the screen fades to dark, we’re left with the happy couple kissing. Puke. Were they kissing? Or was she waving goodbye? Here I was, only 17, and I knew the world definitely didn’t work that way. I’d seen the movies, too, but my logical brain knew that was a different time. When we’d left Mom at The Spa, I glimpsed her as I looked back through that tiny, glazed window on the door, all smiles, waving like the gal at the end of the movie. No glass slipper, though. No shoes at all. Was she finally having her happily ever after, too far gone to realize she was never getting out of this particular hole?

I’d spent my life tiptoeing around her, trying not to set her off, trying not to send her into one of her moods. There’s this thing about the darkness, though, those deep pits of despair. If you weren’t careful, you could find yourself falling in, clinging to the edges of the opening, wondering, How can I get out this time? Like grandmother, like mother, like daughter, ancestral crap. Sure, I was concerned about myself, too. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. It wasn’t just personality traits or disorders that I feared inheriting. The older I get, I see them when I look in the mirror. My grandmother’s eyes, my mother’s eyes—this is a trait we shared. All of them and me with those wide set light blue eyes. I saw them in my reflection. Every. Time. That was where the similarity stopped, at least with myself and my grandmother. However, I did get Mom’s blond locks and her fair skin, but now my hair was more blue-black. I took care of that inherited trait with a little help from a Manic Panic box kit. Now, it was up to me to try to make sense of all the mess.

So here I am. Summer before my senior year, stuck at home, searching, sorting, and pitching when my life should have been late mornings, long days, and bay side sunsets. I had faced the fact that Mom wasn’t getting out. She wasn’t ever coming home. Yes, if I had to admit it, I felt relief. It was the truth. And now, here I was in her room, in her mess, trying to right things. It felt like I had to live through the pain of growing up with her as a mother all over again.

THEN

When I was born, it was just us, me and Mom, such a young mother barely 19 years old, my bio dad, whom I would eventually call the sperm donor, out of the picture. Me and mom, us, living in my grandparent’s house. My mom was trying to finish college. She’d wanted to be a writer, a famous author, but that was a dream that had passed her by. My grandmother would even charge her to babysit me so she could go to class. Unreal. Ah, that lovely line of The Horrifying Women, looking out for number one. I imagine it was hard. My grandmother, the ignoring mother, and Mother, looking for love, longing for attention and having me, a baby, in the way of her fame. It wasn’t too long before Mother met the man who would become my stepdad.

My grandmother took in boarders, other college students. My future Stepdad would come to call on one of the coeds and play with me. One night, said coed was not home, and he asked out Mother. I don’t know how long they dated before they got married, but I know I was part of the package. Once they were married, we became an instant family, although Mother took his name and I still had the sperm donor’s name, separating me, severing me. Even though I was the catalyst of the union, they always let me know that I was Other. Mother was the star, and little did my stepdad know in the beginning that years would pass and he would never, ever be able to please her. He was also Other. The ‘Others’ are less than. They don’t matter at all.

NOW

My stepdad, too busy with his own life, couldn’t have cared less what I did with all Mom’s crap. He just wanted that room, the attic, emptied. It was her room anyway. He’d moved into another part of the house years ago. Always working, head down in the thick of it or traveling, both his own ways of escaping and protecting himself. I think he felt relief now, too. You see, nothing was ever good enough for her. Nothing he did, nothing I did, or anything we tried not to do. Mom would never be happy. That was a tough pill to swallow. I got it intellectually, but emotionally, yeah, no. You always hoped to be loved for who you were, knowing that you mattered. You hoped things would change. But Mother was miserable. And you know what they say about misery. Her hopes were squashed, so your hopes were going to be squashed as well. And love came with conditions like an unattainable reward, always dangled in front of me like a carrot on a stick. We were the ones she hadn’t completely pushed away. We were her captive audience, her only company. Hell, we lived here. Now that Mom was away, my stepdad could have moved out, but me as a minor, I think he felt stuck, obligated. And I was stuck, obligated to cleaning up her shit. But that was me, the ‘good girl,’ starved for attention. I’d always tried to be the ‘good girl,’ so here I was doing what I thought was right out of some fucked up allegiance.

Going through all of this shit, the physical things were, of course, bringing up other shit. It was like regressing, going back in time. There were her writings, of course, pages and pages of it. I found old love letters from the one that got away (That one dodged a bullet.) Trinkets, bits of jewelry, pressed flowers, corsages from her past. I was an archeologist. I was on a dig, looking for clues. This