literature

Sulk [Prologue]

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I was named Penelope Asher when I was born.

No middle name. Just Penelope Asher. Six syllables. Thirteen letters.

'A plain name for a plain Jane', as they say. Nothing fancy or exotic. I wasn't named after an island floating around the Caribbean. Or even a movie star sex goddess from the fifties. I was to be nothing exciting. Just ordinary.

A name that blended into society. A name that was 'traditional' and 'sweet'. A name that screamed good girl. Good wife material. Good motherly instincts. A name that could be found poorly written by hand on the side of a discarded coffee cup by the outskirts of the road.

Oh poor, Penelope Asher.

The more and more I spell the sounds out in my head and form the vowels with my lips, the more and more it sounds foreign and wrong. As though it should not exist at all.

Pen-el-lo-pe. It sounds like a small gas planet or a computer software invented in the nineties than a name for a person. It reminds me of one of those family friendly movies where an animal takes the lead role. The type that flop at the box office, or go straight to DVD release.

Bert the brave Bulldog.

Fleur the Fancy Flamingo.

Penelope the Fucking Parakeet.

It's simply a word made up of random letters, invented by a random person somewhere far down in history. I am an addition to the legacy of Penelope's. I am the black ink blot stain of such a 'classic and faithful' name.

I had a key ring once. I cannot recall whom it was gifted or bought from. But I do remember it was pink and held the letters of my name in silver sparkling scripture. The twin side held the several meanings of my name. One variation read that the origin stemmed from the word, bobbin, which in current translation fell close to 'weaver'. It was believed those named Penelope had a natural talent in sewing and dressmaking. That was one of the first occasions that I consciously doubted that it was the name for me.

Secondly, was the other meaning printed on the key ring, which said in Greek mythology my birth name meant 'duck'.

I'm not a duck. I'm entirely certain I will never be a duck, either. Unless I awake one morning to find feathers sprouting out my ass like I saw in a late night movie once. I have never felt like a duck, but more like a bird in a cage. Singing and crying out for such attention, only to be ignored. Trapped and longing to be freed.

Penelope Asher.

A bird with clipped wings.

Penelope the Fucking Parakeet.

It was strange that a name was thought to determine the personality of a person. Times have moved on from key rings; there are now books and websites in which you can research various names and their 'meanings'.

The meaning of Beatrice is 'a person who brings happiness'.

The meaning of Jane is 'God's gracious gift'.

Out of all the million of names that worldly tongues have created, I was lumbered with the one that meant 'duck'.

Pathetic Penelope Asher.

It was a name that had never quite fit to me. In clothing terms, it wasn't the right size. It was always too clingy or unshaped. Either a size too large that had been stretched and stretched by the hulking bump of a baby. Or so skin-tight, my lungs would more surely collapse from lack of air than being able to suck in long enough to pull over my chest.

How ironic it is then, that Penelope's are 'destined' to be skilled with clothing. I'm the girl that tries on every single item of clothing in the store and still cannot find the perfect fit. And don't get me started on shoes. I'm like one of the two ugly step sisters from Cinderella. In the rawest version of the story, (not the sugar-coated, all dancing all singing version Disney puked out) the two ugly step sisters cut pieces of their own feet off just to force the glass slipper to fit. Their only mistake? The Prince could see the blood through the glass.

That's why self-mutilation is most commonly found on wrists these days. It's easier to hide with sleeves and bracelets. A girl can move forward with her life, living as a princess if she so wishes, without the world knowing of the scars she bears.

Anything that's worth having is painful. Love. Marriage. You see, the two are separate.

In the perfect world, the two would go hand in hand. But in a world as fucked up as ours, people got married for other reasons. Money. Titles. Real estate. Plots of land so big they could build entire towns upon them. But they don't. People are selfish and cruel.

The people that named me were just as cruel. They had been incredibly unimaginative when sieving through the possibilities. Whilst most would take the time to carefully consider what few letters and lyrical syllables should glue to their bundle of joy, I was simply left branded as Penelope.

Hardly a moments thought had been taken when that name was written upon my birth certificate and uttered aloud into my baby ears. It was the one they call my Mother that had decided upon it. Apparently, she had been a huge Thunderbirds fan or something.

So, I was named after a puppet.

A puppet draped in pink fabric with plastic straws of blonde hair. It seemed to be a recurring theme for Penelope's. The pit-stop version from Wacky Races was something similar. Ditzy and blonde. All eye lashes and lipstick. It is truly ironic when I consider the reflection that glares back at me in the mirror. The people that brought me into the world, my 'parents', had most likely assumed I would follow suit.

I suppose their disappoint came from the moment my scalp began spouting hair. Thick black locks that coiled and coiled into ringlets. The opposite of the blonde dream baby they had envisioned for the harrowing nine months I was carried.

It was from that moment I decided that I was never destined to be a Penelope.

Sorry Mother.

Sorry Father.

Sorry God.

I don't believe in God. Not really.

The school I was compelled to attend told of bible stories as though they were headline news. Each weekly assembly told of 'be thankful for this' and 'confess your sins for that' and 'forgive' and 'love thy neighbour'. Love seemed to be a common morale that was squeezed between the pages of John and the Proverbs. They made it sound so easy. If anything, it only convinced me further that God could not exist. No one could possibly be that compassionate. It wasn't within the nature of a human.

Of course, whenever the flaws of the holy book were questioned, I was met with filthy looks, as though I had just slaughtered a new born puppy. It was that 'how-dare-she-question-our-good-lord' attitude that poisoned me from religion altogether. After all, what has God ever done for me?

If God did exist, then I'd wish to ask him but one thing. Why did he allow me to be born into a world so utterly ridiculous?

I grew up rebelling against the laws of Christianity. It became a game for me to dispute all the beliefs that were force fed down my throat.

I am religiously bulimic.

I inhale their opinions, just for a moment, just to savor the fairy-tale that we were all children of God and all held a purpose, and then I spit it all back in the face of our great Lord. If someone told me that God created us all in his image, I would ask them why was it that we all looked different. If someone said that God watched over us all, I'd ask why would he let such horrific terrorists walk amongst his 'children'. And if God created us all in his image, why did he then look like a terrorist? Or allow a terrorist to look like a God?

That usually brought some silence, or an angry blustering storm of unholy rage. It was always very anti-Christian. Just like a broken bell from a test your strength carnival game, the metre of frustration would usually shoot high off the scale when I would remind them to 'love thy neighbour'.

In a battle of wits, I am always the strong man. I was smarter beyond my years back then. Always above the curve of destruction. Perhaps not self destruction, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Stories are always meant to be written with such structure and order. But what order and structure can be had to a life so unstable.

If my life was a book, it would be like this one. Jumpy and unfinished. Raw and rejected. It would have the red ink penned strike outs and corrections of an English school teacher. The type of educator that graded papers and left smiley faces at the bottom in correspondence to the effort. If my life was a school paper, it would bear a worried face. A frowny face. A confused, scrunched up, fucked up face with red bold letters underneath that would say 'see me'.

If my life was a book it would be unwritten. Which is fortunate, as this story is not about my life. I am simply a featuring role. A side line to the main plot. The distraction.

I have no issues being in the limelight, so to speak. Fame is an illusion after all. Once the magic trick is over, the curtains close and the audience move on to the next. That was why they say 'you only get five minutes of fame'.

Five minutes of fame.

Seven minutes in heaven.

It seemed everything pleasurable and desirable came in small bursts of time. Perhaps it was so we craved it more. It was never enough.

People go to the extremes to get what they want. Some people pray to God. They pray for help. For forgiveness. But the bible, in which my 'parents' praised so vividly, was the biggest con of all. If God were to claim royalties, he'd be living in one of those coast roasted mansions, sat between two gold plated fences with a picture perfect view of the sea front. White painted doors and square cut, four tiled windows with small pocketed flower beds under each sill.

There were houses like that in the city. I admired them from afar. From the glossy real estate magazines, that fell stray and gathered dust in the waiting room of every doctor and dentists across the country. And on television, from those poorly scripted reality shows that portrayed the lives of rich kids, spoiled rotten by their millionaire billionaire parents. It made me wonder what they had done to deserve such thoughtless luxury.

People like that had more money then sense, my 'Mother' had once said after we caught the back end of an episode of Rich Kids of whichever gated community held the highest amount of Forbes list residents.

Some kid had spent half a million dollars of her fathers money on 'an idea' she had whilst lounging around the pool on her fathers cruise boat. She wanted to start her own business selling t-shirts with her annoying and too-cool-for-anyone-with-a-metal-age-of-five-and-above slogans. The business failed after she recalled designs that she took a dislike to after a couple hundred thousand had already been printed.

She had asked her father for more money on her idea and he idly agreed. The entire business failed. No t-shirts were ever sold or even made it on the shelves. The girl stated as the credits began to plug that she had learnt the moral of the story.

"Never give up on your dreams," she said, flashing her surgery white teeth and orange tan peeled skin. She posed for the camera, showing off the rest of the mistakes 'Daddy' had paid for. Silicone breasts, three sizes too large to be in proportion and most probably a nose job, for her nostrils were too wide and flared uneven.

"Money fixes everything!" She chirps as the names of all the producers comes racing past, so fast that the eye barely catches it was even there. I wonder if they purposely run the pace that fast because they are too ashamed of admitting they were responsible for such trash TV. Or whether they were proud of their achievement, of exploiting such young adults with cheeks so full of money they shit gold. But still, the barbie wannabe seemed as proud as punch as she told of how her Father had invested in her next great 'idea'.

"Where there is money, comes success." She grinned so plastically that if her face got too close to a lit candle, it would melt clean from her bones.

I think what she meant to say was where there is success, comes money.

But regardless she carried on smiling and waving like a late night, cheap budget holiday commercial; the kind that only the elderly and those suffering from insomnia watch as they pray and pray to a God that does not exist to grant some peace on their overly active minds. When I need sleep, I pray to a different God.

A God named Benzodiazepines.

It says on the box that the drowsiness can last for up to twelve hours. And that it is advised not to operate heavy machinery or drive a car when taken.

Driving whilst overdosed on sleeping pills sounds like the start of a bad horror movie. I'll be sure to mail my great idea to the plastic, platinum card residence in the gated community of too-rich-to-function. Perhaps 'Daddy' will invest in the next car crash television series.

See what I did there? It's called a joke. At least, it is to my sick sense of humour.

It was things like that which often got me in trouble at school and at home. No one seemed to understand my sense of humour. Sarcasm was my personal favourite. I spoke it so much it became my most confident speaking foreign tongue. I was told not to include it upon my key skills listing when applying for work. I always thought employers looked for bi-lingual candidates.

All the adults that surrounded me when I was growing up struggled to find nice words to say. They called me trouble. Controversial. A handful. I was a burden to all that knew me. I was passed down from pillar to post. Neighbours and babysitters. Aunties and uncles. They were not true blood relatives, it was just a title given to every stranger that passed through the door.

My 'Father' left when I was six. I wasn't told why but even at that age, it was easy for me to piece together the dismantled fragments of my broken home. 'Mother' started bringing home her new boyfriends, or 'Uncles' as I knew them. They changed as often as the weather.

One morning I would be having breakfast with Uncle Robert. Then dinner with Uncle Carl. Over the years, there were so many uncles I lost count and didn't even make an effort to remember their names.

Uncle Whatever.

Names were important or not at all. Like mine. Penelope is an unimportant name. It's desperately normal. No one has called me Penelope since I was sixteen. As my leave from school approached, I planned an escape from the boring life that stemmed from the suburbs.

The last assembly at school was spent in church. The teachers sang hymns and read inspiring passages from their holy book of lies. The moment we were dismissed, I stood high up on the pews. My patent school shoes held such a sheen against the light of the white candles, like a halo. The eyes of a hundred Catholics fell upon me, judging me the way they always had. The odd one out. The bad egg. The misfit. I took one look at them and gave the large statue of Jesus nailed to the cross the finger. It wasn't that I hated him, but envied him.

He was a misfit too, according to the vague reading of the bible I had done. He longed for something more. A life full of excitement and miracles. He got lucky the day he was crucified. It's probably something that has never been said. Too controversial. But he got the golden ticket. He got off this train wreck of an earth before the storm him.

If the bible had been set in modern day, the world would be watching Jesus doing magic tricks on trash TV. Even he would get his five minutes of fame.

The teachers were less thrilled with my last display of emotion towards the church. They were utterly horrified at what they witnessed. I stood for a minute, waiting for the big man himself to show up and punish me. I waited and waited for God to prove me wrong. I wanted him to smite me down and send me to the fired pits of hell. I wanted to go out with a bang. But he didn't. He remained the bitter disappointment that I had expected him to be. If God had retracted my soul that day, things would have been different.

He didn't show me the light because there wasn't one. Not for people like me. We were born to live in the dark.

So I left. I packed everything I owned into a suitcase and wandered towards the local bus station in town. It was raining that day. I remember because my toes were drowning in the puddles through the worn toe caps of my shoes. I had cleared the money my 'Mother' had left at home. There was always a few notes stashed underneath the fruit bowl for cigarettes. I often wondered why we even held a fruit bowl in our home. We weren't the type of family to make fruit salad and have guests round for afternoon tea. We weren't even a family.

I was a mistake. I heard my 'Mother' say so when she was talking to Uncle Whatever when I was nine. She said she wished I was never born.

"I had dreams...." She said, her eyes diluted, her throat burning from the brandy.

"....I could have been somebody. If not for Penelope, I could have had my name in the papers. I could have made something of myself."

Uncle Whatever nodded in sympathy and handed her a red transparent lighter, the fluid half gone.

"I could have been on television." Trash TV.

"I could have been in the homes of thousands of people." She had already, most nights.

"I could have lived."

I waited at the bus stop. I waited for over an hour, hoping that somebody would come and stop me. I sat outdoors, on a bench with my suitcase parked by my legs. I smoked one of the cigarettes I had stolen from the fruit bowl. I sat and smoked and watched the world fly by me in a blur of red and blue flashing lights.

I waited. I waited for God to prove me wrong. I waited for the Father I couldn't remember. I waited for the Mother who never wanted me.

Four cigarettes later, I threw in the towel. The world didn't want me. It never did. And I didn't want to be a part of it.

I counted all the change in my pocket and asked the driver how far it would get me. All I could hear was the annoying voice of Barbie Moneybags from 'Rich Kids of someplace better than here' reading from her script like a passage from the bible.

"Money talks!" She would smile so hard that her cheeks would ram up too far against her eyes and cause the fillers to budge. "Money gets us where we need to go!"

She was right on this one, rare occasion. For the right price, one could disappear off the face of the earth. Unfortunately for me, I could only afford up to the city. But that was all I wanted.

A fresh start.

A new beginning.

A resurrection.

I took my ticket and sat back in my seat. The world flew by the window, fast like the credits on Trash TV. I couldn't be sure if the world was ashamed of itself or proud.

Goodbye Mother.

Goodbye Uncle Whatever.

Goodbye God.

There wasn't anyone to mourn for me. Or bid me farewell or any of that shit. No one had noticed. It took several weeks for the 'Missing' posters to get printed. And even then, they used a photograph of me from an old year book. I remember laughing as I saw my fourteen year old self. A broach of the cross stuck to the tie of my uniform. My hair platted into messy knots, still half fucked from the hair dye I was forced to wash out. You could still see the stains of purple on the whites of my collar. I wondered why my 'Mother' had selected that photo of me out of the few she had probably. I guess it was because it was the most 'normal' I had ever looked.

Gap-toothed Penelope Asher.

I didn't look remotely like that anymore. No one would see any resemblance between the two of us. Except for the eyes. I had my Father's eyes, apparently. Not that I would know. Light blue, almost grey. Like the skies the night I left our town.

That was the night that Penelope Asher died.

Pathetic Penelope Asher.

Forgotten Penelope Asher.

Missing Penelope Asher.

There wasn't a funeral. I held one for myself, mentally. I said goodbye to the girl that I was born to be. The child of God. The girl who was destined to be good at sewing and being a duck. A girl that was faithful and kind. A girl that gave a shit.

That was same the night that Nixi Sage was born.
This is a side project I have been working on for the last couple of days.
I wasn't certain on a title, so it may be subject to change.
At this stage, it is to be a DeviantArt only original story.

Do not read if easily offended.

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Copyrighted to Berry Hart.
Do not use any of my works without permission.
© 2015 - 2024 mittensandpoppy
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KayyVenom's avatar
This has to be one of my most favorite pieces you've written. Truly outstanding. <3