Venus From Across The Country

Sometimes I can’t breathe. This happened most of all when I was a kid huddling under undulating green silk bedcovers from the storm outside the Manor. All of a sudden my breath would hitch, and my entire respiratory system would go out from under me, followed too closely by the rest of me. I had to take this horrible potion concocted by my mother from the herbs in the Manor gardens, too bitter and too burning to give any sort of comfort that I would be able to breathe again.

After the attacks my mother would have to lock me in my room for so long, until I stopped breathlessly crying, that it turned into my world and I was surprised when door finally opened. I wish I could fly, far far above the ground until the air becomes so thin that it wouldn’t matter whether I could breathe or not. Sometimes I am so very tired of breathing, I wish I could just lie down and die quietly, like the puppy I used to have.

It makes me feel alive, the hate, the rest of the values instilled in me by caustic words and acidic slaps. Whenever I abuse somebody else I feel the tiredness ebb away until I am just living in the moment where hard flesh hits a relenting face, where the words cut to the bone and the brain; throwing my hands up in the air in a mad jig in the spaces between corrosive words.

During these intervals, sometimes I would feel the ghost of the attacks materializing again, in my throat. The words would surge over the ghost, make it back down, stamp on its face and locomotive its way over the intended victim, leaving train-tracks of tears.

But then again, when I look at you, the words die in my throat and I spend the rest of the time you fired back, desperately trying to regain my breath, cursing myself, my stupid lungs. You knock and punch and kick the words out of me, like a blow that used to be administered to me, telling me that I was...

I honestly don’t blame him. I don’t blame my mother for raising her hands to her face, the gardening gloves full of uprooted blossom weeds, to hide her eyes. I don’t blame the servants for their gazes that slide off me too easily when I walk down with my head high and the bruises on my face rising. He is my father, after all, and the least you could do was respect him for upholding his ideals so tightly...

until all you could do for making a mistake was to enjoy the beating. To let the pain ripple across your skin and penetrate and wound and attack attack attack...

Just like your words. I wonder if you were the thing keeping me alive. The eternal victim victimized by a victimized vicious victim. It was just like the tongue twisters I had to say when I was five to make sure I had diction down pat, to overcome the horrifying social embarrassment that was my lisp. At night, after those lessons, I would lie in bed and close my eyes and see the rows of letters of phonetics clamped together, overlapping, overshadowing, overcrowding, and thumping, urgent music would play in my head, prodding me to tell them what was the magic way to pronounce this word, say if after me, boy...

Puppy.

The golden line of reasoning in every word, that the “p” was there, so it made a “puh”

sound. I used to have a puppy...

Magic.

Crucio.

You take my breath away, Harry.