Valentina sank in the couch with a wall clock in her lap and an unwaivering stare into time. pay close attention here and then it's so easy to lose yourself, but she's not lost, so don't fool yourself. mother's Maker's Mark on the dry bar and she brushes Val's hair with golden intentions while a monkey takes time to think about dying on her breaking back. distinguished father and the rain clouds above his newspaper dropping scents of pipe tobacco and musk to the untrained nose, he greets the neighborhood each morning with a smile that took years of practice in his polka dot boxers and exposed hairy chest from an initialled silk robe. she was unnaturally beautiful; intimidatingly beautiful - but, Val didn't talk for some reason. in the summer, her father gave me twenty-five dollars to mow their lawn while he and the wifey were out for dinner. when i finished i ordered pizza for Val and we'd watch sitcoms and she always clapped at the end. i loved her. i wanted to love her, the way a woman should be loved by a decent man. in the winter, her mother ran the vacuum cleaner and neither her or her manly man knew how to work the breaker box. so when i flipped the switch for them, i'd sneak and hand Valentina poetry i wrote just for her, and sometimes i'd see her crying in her room looking back to me from window to window - man i just wanted her voice. the marvelous Valentina went to college in 2009, and after two months in, she hung herself with a belt in her dorm closet. i received a letter from her though, before i'd heard the news - she told me that when she was 10, her father and his poker friends whom he owed money to, took her on a little "vacation" to his log cabin. they each took turns on her for payment, and when she screamed in pain, she was told to hush, hush, hush. when he took her back home, he told her: hush, hush, hush; and rocked her back and forth to calm her. hush, hush, hush. hush, hush, hush, babygirl. she wrote me - i love you so much, but i am too used up and filthy now to give myself to anyone. when i enter Heaven, God will cleanse my body and we can spend eternity together when it's your time to meet me there. the silence; it sometimes came to her as a broken entity, like when a person recollects small fragments of their infancy; a surreal blanket for a logical creature. surviving traces of an evidently chronological servitude to unhealing scars from those, former years. that day, i called up a dirty surgeon i fronted 50 dollars to, and told him he wouldn't have to pay me back if he could do me a big favor. her father was greeted the next day by a vacuum salesman with a...smile so much more perfect than his. the doc called me and put the phone up to this manly man's ear - and as each incision was precisely made, i just told him, hush: hush, for i am the unheard retribution that shall disconnect you from this world. ...and then he was silent.
