Mid Week Blues Buster 11

(I took this picture!  So I don't have to worry about giving anyone but me credit :)  But click it anyways and go check out all of the other entries in this weeks Mid Week Blues Buster!)

Dancing Flame

A mean ole bastard…

Gabriella stretched her arms out over her knees watching the dancing flames.  It had been years since she had been home, twenty six, she never thought this day would come.  She had left on bad terms with her father, but then he was not a pleasant person for anyone to be around.  She thought often about the day he caught her with Jacob in the barn.  He nearly beat the boy to death, a local football hero who would never play the game again. He got by with little more than a slap on the wrist after the local police, who he attended church with, learned of his reasons.  It was several weeks later before Gabriella could come up with enough strength of her own to leave her life in Kentucky behind.  An attempt to run away from her nightmares, at eighteen she did not realize they were always there looking back at her in the mirror.

The beating she had gotten because of Jacob was more than she could describe leaving a noticeable scar under her eye but they did not compare to the ones on her back.  It wasn’t the first time he had laid his hands on her.  At fourteen she had come home with a book about Jack the Ripper.  “Blasphemy” he yelled, “there was to be only one book allowed under his roof.”  It was weeks before she returned to school.

                                                      

She watched the flames dancing in the blackness.  She could almost see the figure of a woman one arm outstretched toward the heavens and the other wrapped around her body with a circle of flames at her feet.  She could see her face looking back at her seductively, wanting Gabriella to join her.  She knew who it was calling out to her.  She would never forget those eyes.

Gabriella had just turned nine.  Her mother had been gone almost two years for reasons she still did not understand but had come to suspect her father had murdered her.  She woke to the sound of a woman’s voice.  She still thought to this day it was her Momma trying to warn her, to help her to escape the terrifying life to come.  She thought she felt her warm loving touch on her face but it was only the summer night’s air creeping in through the window.  She sneaked from her bed, through the house but never saw her father.  Outside the house she heard the sounds coming from the garage where her father often repaired vehicles for extra cash.  Slowly she stalked with her bare feet she was only a few steps from the door when she heard his voice, “Cmon.”  Up to the door for a peak, she saw the three women immediately for the moonlight shinning in from the other door.  “You will show me the way,” her father yelled out.  They were bound together, unable to scream with her father circling them much the way she had seen her dog survey a carcass.  “You were delivered to me to show me the way to god.”

Gabriella peered through, her eyes met one of the woman’s and she began to scream even through her covered mouth.  Her father circled back, harshly grabbing her jaw before turning to see what caused a glimmer of hope in the woman’s eyes.  “Mah child,” he laughed.  He would make her watch everything he did that night, a young girl who loved and trusted her father not knowing the evil inside him.

She watched the flames.  Gabriella could no longer fight the tears as they streamed down her face.  She glanced to the bloodied knife in front of her.  She had come home to confront her father.  To right more wrongs than she could ever count.  Most of all she had come home to take revenge on what her father had turned her into. 

At twenty she found herself hitchhiking trying to escape other hard times.  A trucker had stopped to pick her up and tried to take advantage.  She saw what he wanted the moment he opened those doors, stepping inside she knew she was given a purpose in life.

(697 Words)