They Say He Took Her Tongue
The man she called Father was a control freak. He liked the house a certain way, and if something was out of place, it was probably going to come down on her. He had secret rules for everything: the dishwasher had to be loaded with the smallest items in front most of the time, but sometimes he wanted them arranged by color; the remote had to be left on the table at all times, except at certain times designated entirely by the man; the carpet had to be vacuumed in only one direction, so that the suction lines covered over each other, because if he found even a single line, she would get it. Sometimes her curfew was at nine; some days, it was at eight. After awhile, the rules changed so often that she didn’t even bother to argue that she hadn’t broken them.
He didn’t like when she had friends over, so she started going out. Then one day, he took her cell phone. Without her phone, he said, she couldn’t go out anymore. So she would stay in and call people on the house phone. That lasted until he told her that she could only use the house phone for one hour a day. She stopped trying to associate with people outside of school after that. She felt isolated and alone, but what could she do? When she tried to talk to people at school, they either couldn’t help, or the teacher would shush her. She learned very fast that adults like quiet children that way. Talking to her parents about it was out of the question: he would always accuse her of being ungrateful, disrespectful. Whenever she tried to speak alone with her mother, word would always get back to Father. So she stopped talking to him pretty much altogether.
She still did chores for a few months after that, for some reason. But the rules started to change even faster after she stopped talking. She didn’t clean the windows the right way and her father complained of streaks making it hard to see; she didn’t put the dishes into the cupboards correctly, somehow throwing off the balance of the entire house with a tilted bowl; she got her fingerprints on the coffee table while she was dusting, somehow making the house filthy in less than five minutes. Eventually she learned that she got in just as much trouble by doing the chores as she did by refusing to do the chores. So she stopped leaving her room. Books became her parents and radio became her friends.
After that her father complained that she was lazy. He mistook her compliance for apathy and her silence for attitude. She wondered sometimes if her very existence was offensive to him. That’s when the nightmares began. They ended with a gunshot. She didn’t scream when he fired; the neighbors never heard her make a single sound.
