Olivia De Lesantis

CONTENT WARNING: This piece contains themes that may be distressing to some readers, including references to sexual assault, domestic violence, gore, abortion, post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative amnesia.

15 Years Before, 1931, in a Small Town That is Not So Different From Yours.

The first time I saw him, the scalding midday sun was piercing through the stained glass heart of the Madonna. The dark whorls of hair on the back of his head were gilded crimson. The corded planes of muscle shifted in his broad back beneath the pale cream shirt. A single crystallised bead of sweat meandered from the nape of his neck. I had the inexplicable urge to lean forward and taste it before it could escape. 

The varnished wooden pew was moist with sweat beneath my knees. A rusted fan with bent spokes groaned in weak circles at the juncture of white wooden beams above the parishioners. Some were swatting themselves with folded paper fans, others were mopping their damp brows with handkerchiefs. 

‘…and to allow the mind to indulge in coveting the flesh will inevitably lead to sin. And sin rightfully deserves punishment…’ the Pastor’s cries oscillated, the baggy cowl of flesh beneath his chin shaking as he worked himself into yet another fit of frenzy. 

A calloused hand, with nails whittled down to white craggy stumps, clapped across my bare knees, jamming my legs together.  The hand was bony, the joints swollen, and yet full of force. Mother’s hand. I tore my eyes from the boy and met the blistering rancour of her gaze. 

We did not look alike. Where she was fair and delicate, eyelashes like angel-dust and spidersilk hair, I was a child of the sun, burnished olive brown and crowned with tangles of spilled ink. There was fullness in my figure, suppleness, where her bones protruded against the skin. People in town said her real baby had been snatched by the Fae, and I was left in its place — an unholy, bluish offering, riddled with foul magic. 

‘You are not praying,’ she hissed at me, the thin fissured line of her lips curling into a snarl. 

I returned my eyes to the scratchy, sun-bleached red cover of my bible, embossed with a golden cross. I flipped aimlessly through the stained, diaphanous pages, the red glow imprinting the words of various sinners onto my skin. Every so often, I let my eyes wander upwards, to the boy. 

When Mother was searching for the appropriate chapter and verse in her bible, I slid my slipper forward along the polished wooden floorboards until I reached the sole of his shoe. I nudged along its coarse surface. His head tilted over his shoulder towards me, painting the curves of his eyelashes in ecclesiastical incandescence. A faint smile glimmered on his mouth. I did not believe in God, but perhaps there was some morsel of truth in the phenomena of archangels. 

At the end of the service, when the church descended into quiet murmurs of Faire planning and petty grievances of this person or that person, we saw each other. He was tall, with wide-set eyes like deep molasses, a slanted grin and the easy, upright posture of a boy who was accustomed to being stared at. Relished it, even. He smelled musky and fresh all at once, like vetiver and leather. It was as if he had looked inside me with those densely-lashed eyes. People jostled past me in the aisle and yet we held each other’s eyes. 

I smiled. 

*

One Year Before, 1955, in an Estate on the Cliffside

The tape measure snaps its jaws greedily, biting around my waist and into my bare skin. I am standing in the cold, pink marble of my en suite in my undergarments. Like piranhas, four women are attending to various addendums of my body. One is tugging at the ringlets of my dark hair, fashioning them into swirling, voluptuous curves. Another is rubbing my limbs with oil, polishing the skin into a mirror. My nails are being filed into red talons, the artist tutting as she repositions my hand. 

‘You’re always fidgeting, M’am,’ she says, smiling up at me. 

‘I can’t help it,’ I reply absently, watching myself in the bathroom mirror. I am detached from this woman, this lithographic print of stylised beauty. I am still the girl running barefoot through the knee-high grass and burying my nose in the damp, woollen clouds of my sheep’s flank.  

‘Gained two inches around the waist,’ Martha says, slinging the tape measure around her neck and writing the measurements down on her notepad. She is a small woman with angular features that bunch into the centre of her rounded face, like an aged cat. Her grey-speckled hair is gelled into a tight coif, and she has tough-love pearl eyes. 

‘I could do a nice backless style, something to show off the arms,’ Martha drops her cat-eye glasses on the bridge of her nose, scrunching her nose. 

‘Listen, sweetheart, we can’t have her looking like she’s just popped out a couple puppies. Nobody wants to date their mother, they want the fantasy. Gloria Bonnaire,  the bombshell,’ says a gruff, chain-smoking voice. 

‘Don’t “sweetheart” me,’ Martha mutters under her voice, rolling her eyes up at me. ‘Old enough to be your grandmother.’ 

As it is with all of us girls, Gloria is a stage name. Plucked from the stars, especially for you to indulge in. To dream about. The same is true of Bonnaire. My maiden surname is far too Slavic and unsavoury for the puritan palettes of the press. 

Robert Calloway is leaning against the sink. You can hear a tint of the country still lingering in his pronunciations, a rustling drawl in his vowels. A cigarette is dangling from his lips and he is broad, with the beginnings of a pouchy stomach encroaching onto his burly form. He is dark and tall, with the dogged features of someone who would once have been arrestingly attractive. His dark curls have begun to fade into peppery grey. 

Robert stubs his cigarette out in the wet sink. It sizzles, wheezing out in dying breaths. ‘I’m going to have Dr. Sykes come round tomorrow. Give you some more of those pills, I don’t think this dose is high-enough. You don’t look like you’re sleeping, sweetheart.’ 

‘No, I’ll handle it myself,’ I reply. ‘I want to be alone now.’ 

The bitter, acrid taste of rotten tobacco blows across my face as he stands in front of me, tsking. 

‘Good,’ Robert runs his yellowing tongue along his lips. He holds my face in his thick, unyielding fingers, the his gold signet ring pressing into my throat so that my heartbeat slams against its thick band. ‘Cos’ here’s the thing, Gloria, you’re getting old, okay? I got girls lining up to take your place, and you’re not doing a whole lot right now to win my faith.’ 

‘I don’t need you,’ I hiss between gritted teeth, spit roiling on the tip of my tongue. 

‘Really?’ Robert laughs his corporate staccato laugh, squeezing tighter around my jaw. He draws his black eyes so close to mine that I can see the broken capillaries and the unflinching predatory darkness. ‘You are nothing without me. I made you. And I can ruin you. Understand me?’ 

‘Get out of my house,’ I pant at him. I scream, ‘Get out of MY HOUSE.’ 

*

15 Years Before, 1931, in a Small Town That is Not So Different From Yours.

She told me to get out. I was kneeling on the floorboards with my head bowed. My cheek was stinging with the red imprint of her open-palm. My hands were folded in the hem of my skirt, tears blotting small circles in the mottled white cotton. 

‘Speak, child,’ she demanded, her voice teetering on the precipice of shouting and sobbing. 

I looked up at her. I had to prise my swollen lips apart and what left my mouth was a scream from the very pit of my lungs. ‘I refuse.’ 

It was as if I had stabbed her. Her eyes were swimming with lucid venom, fingers knotting in my hair as she pulled me upward to stand. I was howling, tears pouring from my eyes and sweating on my reddened cheeks. I panted as she yanked my face toward hers, the steely blue of her gaze made blurry with her own tears. 

‘God has chosen you and you refute His will?’ She screamed, guttural and animalistic. ‘You are cursed. You are not my daughter. For years I have dismissed the claims in town, defended your dignity, but this is a sign.’ 

‘Your God is false for this,’ I spat at her feet. ‘I hope you are happy. I hope you can sleep at night.’ 

*

Eight Months Before, 1955, in an Unidentified Apartment 

He has come to take my photograph. A man close to my age, perhaps a few years older. He is burly, crowned with bryllcreamed dark hair. The clean-shaven face and soft, cherubic features are deliciously in contrast with the bold expanses of muscle. He wears a silly tie and horn-rimmed glasses. His pants are too short for his legs. He tells me his name is Leonard. 

‘You remind me of someone I used to know a long time ago,’ I say as I settle on the chaise lounge in my sapphire beaded dress, a stockinged-thigh poking out of its daring slit. 

‘What was he like?’ Leonard asks from behind the lens of the camera, a curl escaping onto his forehead. The bulb flashes. 

‘I…’ my memory is shifting, flickering, like slides falling into place. ‘It was a long time ago.’ 

‘Ah, a complicated love story, huh? All of you girls always seem to be mixed up with the wrong sort,’ he replies, angling a light down on my face to capture the sultry halo of my eyes and lips. ‘Ought’a get yourself a nice guy.’

‘And that’s what you are?’ I ask. 

The camera flashes. He pulls a cigarette from behind his ear, the dim spherical glow of gold and red embers fall from its tip onto the fur carpet. He blows a circular ring upwards, revealing the thick column of his neck. He looks down at me, the bottomless molten brown of his eyes seeping into mine. 

‘My mother raised me right,’ he says after a moment.  

We gaze at each other, silent. He reaches into a leather satchel bag, presenting me with an object bursting with light, like moon-jewels. It is a diamond necklace with encrusted settings the size of quail eggs. I reach for it. 

‘A lady shouldn’t do up her own necklace,’ he says, sitting himself beside me on the chaise lounge. His fingertips skim the nape of my neck as he latches the clasp. I can feel his breath lingering hot and uneven on my shoulders. 

My chest is heaving, and I am overcome with the scent of my teenagehood. The frankincense steaming through the heat and into my lungs, mingling with the lust dancing on my lips and between my thighs. The boy before. What was his name? I can never remember now. I scavenge and I burrow into the recesses of my mind. His hand, my throat. Groans of rapture, my legs strewn on either side of his shoulders. My scream.

The necklace thuds as it settles against my collarbones. My body flushes with chilling heat, sweat beginning to writhe over my back and under my arms. I close my eyes. The bulb flashes. The metal is burning, searing into my skin, branding me in the shape of bulging diamonds. I am not in the apartment. I can smell wet hay, soft rushes beneath my bare legs. My head pounds. The room that is not my own is splitting into halves, quarters. Someone is whistling The Object of My Affection.  

I am clawing at my own throat, leaving angry red ravines on my manicured complexion. The bulb flashes. 

‘TAKE IT OFF, IT’S HURTING ME,’ I scream at Leonard.

The bulb flashes. That is all I can remember. 

*

15 Years Before, 1931, in a Small Town That is Not So Different From Yours.

That necklace was thinner, lighter. There were no diamonds. Just a fine gold chain with a cross on it. It sat in the hollow of my throat, touching cold virtue into the tender skin. I was laying there, undressed, the balmy night air catching the fine hairs around my temples, and he was running his fingers over the supple curvatures of my shoulders and down my breastbone. Back up to the necklace. His fingers hooked over the chain.

*

Three Months Before, 1955, outside a Film Studio.

I see him. Between the gaps in the rampart of flashing bulbs, between the jostling limbs and piercing long lenses. There he is. With his dust-flecked button down, scented with leather, hay and something darker, almost animalic. He is watching. Silently. His face is expressionless. Exposed and then revealed in flickering shadows by the teeming press crowd. 

*

15 Years Before, 1931, in a Small Town That is Not So Different From Yours.

He clenched the necklace in his knuckles, twisting and twisting. The gilded links became my very own crucifixion, carving raw crimson shackle indentations into my skin.

I kicked with as much force as I could into his groin. My foot slipped. His eyes were two soulless sockets. All light was gouged from them, his upper lip curling with a predatory, glistening seam of saliva. 

*

Three Months Before, 1955, outside a Film Studio.

It begins. Like snaking fingertips, spectrally light, sliding up and around my ankles. Over my kneecaps, up my thighs. The low rumble of a whisper curling around my earlobe. The fingers morph into hands, clenching and squeezing. Breath trails hot and sticky along my shoulder blades. My name is being shouted, strung out in howling calls.

‘Get him away from me!’ I yell, jabbing at his face. 

The photographers turn as a flock, snapping their lenses at unoccupied gaps in the corps.  

‘Smile, darling,’ the voice whispers.  

*

15 Years Before, 1931, in a Small Town That is Not So Different From Yours.

And then he laughed. Let the cross fall. I coughed and spluttered, clutching swollen, herringboned skin. 

‘I’ll tell them all what you did to me,’ I hissed, my eyes spewing hot tears. 

He kissed me hard on the mouth, fingers knotted in my curls and wrenching at the root. 

‘And who would believe you?’ He shook his head at me. I could see the gunmetal fillings in his molar teeth when he chuckled.

I shoved him away, digging my nails into the taut sinews of his chest. Bloodied horseshoes branded him from pectoral to collarbone. My breath heaved in and out of my chest in ragged bursts. 

*

Three Months Before, 1955, outside a Film Studio.

My head snaps backward on the axis of my neck. The cameras shutter, flooding my blurred vision with a barricade of sterile white explosions. Comets capturing the sickly green of my cheeks, the chunky spill of mascara sliding from my eyes. My knees shudder and buckle. The red carpet grazes my cheek and nose. Nobody rushes towards me. The photograph is perfect. 

*

One Month Before, 1955.

All I remember is the white slackness of her face, the bloodied coat-hanger and my splintered feet tripping over the gravel, slicing into unblemished skin as I ran.

*

A Week Before, 1955, from the Journal of Dr. Reuben Sykes. 

• Patient was found wandering the grounds of her house, standing in the middle of the road. Refused to be escorted back to bed. 
• Experiencing extreme cases of insomnia and night terrors. 
• Patient has intentionally destroyed several household valuables and thrown them with the intention of harming guests.
• Patient is exhibiting foul language. 
• Patient is demonstrating extreme laziness, and refusing to get up to meet daily commitments. 
• Patient is experiencing extended bouts of inconsolable sobbing.
• Patient cannot remember her own name. 

• Conclusions and recommendations: Patient has an extreme case of hysteria and paranoia both of which are common for women of her age, and lifestyle, to experience. Patient should continue to take mood stabilisers, as recommended in prior appointment. I recommend that the patient take a regular dose of amphetamine – as per prescription provided – to aid productivity and perk up her energy levels. Expect improvement within the next few weeks. 

* 

Five Days Before, 1955, in a Cliffside Estate.

I make myself like her again tonight. I set my hair in the rollers. I plaster on the foundation in thick smears. I draw on the beauty mark below my right eye. I make my eyes soft, slouched and sensual with a kohl pencil. I draw the widest red smile. And there she is: Gloria Bonnaire. 

The woman in the mirror moves her hand in synchronisation with me. She blows a kiss. I blow a kiss. We blow a kiss. We laugh, at first elegant and amused, and then guttural and tear-shot. We touch our face. We smear the symmetrical eyeshadow into clumsy black gashes. The smile is deranged, detaching itself from our gums. 

We reach for our skin. The upper corner of our lip is secreting raw, a jigsaw of flesh that is beginning to secrete glistening fluid. We tug at the loose, bleeding flap of skin and it loosens. We pull until the entire of our lipsticked smile is peeling, separating our demented puppet-smile from our flesh once and for all. And it doesn’t even hurt. Just a gentle tug and we are loose. It feels good. 

We are bare, we are a husk. We scream. 

*

The Day Before, 1955.

icanremember icanremember icanremember icanremember icanremember icanremember icanremember icanremember icanrememberi canremember icanremember icanremember icanremember icanremember icanremember icanremember icanrememberi canremember icanremember icanremember icanremember icanremember icanremember icanremember icanremember icanremember and i know what he did to me. and he is here. tapping on the windows at night. breathing down my spine. opening my fragrance bottles and inhaling the very essence of my soul. hiding my things. but i know where he is and i’ll be waiting in my nicest dress. 

*

The Day Of, 1955.

I have made it all perfect. Everything. A body-skimming, liquid black gown trimmed with a fur stole and opera gloves woven from silk. And from a small velvet box:  a fine gold cross on a chain. I am Her. 

I am standing in the doorway to the wardrobe, tucked away from the pale panel of moonlight spanning across the rich persian rug. 

It is only a few minutes before the doorknob begins to turn. Slowly, quietly, in the hopes of not waking me. The floorboards shudder and creak as though he has trampled upon arthritic bones. He hesitates. Pushes the door open.

The woody drift of vetiver and musky leather snakes beneath my nose. My breath is ricocheting from my lungs to my throat, but I clamp my mouth shut. I watch his hulking figure manoeuvre into the room, all motion coming from his lower body – the upper torso preternaturally stiffened. His head tilts, calculating, scanning. 

By the time he turns around, it is too late. He does not hear the soundless tip-toe of my feet on the rug. He does not see the glint of silver by my side. He only screams as the metal cleaver lodges into his chest, sputters and coughs as blood pours in rivulets around my diamond-clad hands. His knees snap from beneath him and he thuds onto his back, clutching and flailing at the sticky crimson handle of the cleaver. 

‘W-Wh,’ he gasps, his eyes dilated and penduluming back and forth helplessly across my blood-spattered face. He rasps, ‘W-why?’

‘Why?’ I walk up to him, the glossy toe of my stiletto positioned between his spasming legs. ‘Isn’t it funny — that’s what I’ve been asking myself all these years, “Why me?”, “What’s wrong with me?”’ 

I run a fingertip down the length of the blade, his chest puffing rapidly up and down. I close my fingertips around the hilt, pulling the cleaver from his chest with a squelch. 

‘And then I remembered exactly what you did,’ I say, smiling. I run the tip of my tongue along the blade, tasting the metallic tang of blood. I reach down with a bloodied hand and hold his sweat-streaked face in between my fingers, forcing our eyes to meet. ‘And I’ve been waiting for you to come back, just so you could see my face one more time.’ 

‘I didn’t—I didn’t’ he pleads.

I lean closer so that the cross is dangling from my chest onto to cavernous wound in his sternum, coating it in blood. My mouth is just above his ear. 

‘I want you to die knowing that I won.’ 

I raise the cleaver above my head. The scream that wrenches its way free from the pit of my lungs is raw and unearthly. The blade sinks into his body with a sickening crunch, splitting the bone clean in two. I leave it buried there. 

As I sink back onto my heels, I examine him once more. His face is not how I remember it, it is more rugged. There are the faintest traces of blemishes lurking around his jaw. The intoxicating smell is absent, as though it has simply left the room and closed the door behind it. I lift his lifeless head up, see the glassy seafoam of his eyes. 

My heart quickens. I look at my hands, shaking and speckled with blood. I reach for my necklace and I snap it free. The boy is always watching me, so now I must close his eyes. 

ABOUT OLIVIA DE LESANTIS

Olivia De Lesantis is a writer and creative director from Naarm. Her work primarily involves goddesses of deduction and ladies of ill-repute. She is an ardent feminist, and her poetry seeks to explore and unpack the various nuances of her womanhood. If her writing was a person, it would wear the finest gourmand fragrance and shoot from the hip. Olivia works as Creative Director at Stories Connecting Us; an emerging, innovative literary space for writers and readers. She is Director and Founder of Aphrodite’s Blush Creative Services; a freelance marketing agency centred around assisting businesses to connect meaningfully with their customers; website coming soon! You can connect with her via her Instagram – @livinotherwords.

Copyright Olivia De Lesantis, November 2024. All rights reserved; this intellectual property belongs solely to Olivia De Lesantis.