by Patience Williams
Nora danced around her bedroom with a white feather boa draped around her neck and a glass of whiskey in her hand. The brown drink darted side to side while her voice slurred the lyrics to “Venus in Furs.” With her other hand, she pushed her heart-framed sunglasses back upon her nose to cover her eyes.
In 2027, GRACE & GRAVITY will be edited and published by the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Submissions for Volume 12: Grace in Justice are open through November 15th.
When her eyes drifted closed, her vision turned black and a trash can went up in flames. Nora took another sip. Her body swayed back and forth with the music. When her sunglasses threatened to fall off her face, she quickly banged them up against her eyes. Dancing forward a little, she pumped her right arm into the air with the music. She was the one who walked out of it, but she wasn’t the one who left. Her head dragged to the right as the song bass grew stronger and her heart hurt. When he was rude to her, she liked it. He chuckled something like a hit and a tidal wave erupted behind her and she rode it straight into him. He backed away, shaking off the wetness and blinking sea out of his eyes, shocked by her ferocity. They would often fight and she would stare at him while a reincarnated version of her ex stood parallel to him. She shouted to him all of the operas of rage. When she reached to hit him, her ex disappeared and she sang out in horror. “Don’t leave me,” she cried, pining for him in the chest of her current lover, until her voice and reason washed out. She would drown in a violent wave of emotion that left its bloodied streak on her face and bruised her body.
When Nora suddenly realized a girl child occupying the floor of her bedroom, staring at her with harrowingly wide eyes and an open mouth—a child unknown to her—she screamed. Then, she promptly fainted.
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“He’s going to be here soon.”
Nora’s eyelids fluttered as she woke up, cradling the side of her head in her hand and squinting at the young girl. Her eyes danced in a quiet frenzy.
“Who are you?” Nora asked.
“I’m your inner child.”
Nora picked herself up off the ground and went into the kitchen. She shook her head, then unscrewed the lid of a cola bottle. The soda was warm and flat.
Nora glanced over at the child watching her. “I must have gotten too high,”
Nora explained, certain that she was hallucinating. “Listen,” she thought to herself, “you’ve gotta stop taking Ativan with vodka.”
“I kinda like the feeling,” the child answered. However, Nora hadn’t spoken out loud. She blinked again, studying the young girl’s clothes and expressions. They looked familiar, but Nora couldn’t pinpoint from where.
Nora’s inner child shot another look at Nora while dancing over to the kitchen counter. She reached for the carton of Lucky Strikes and pulled a cigarette from its pack.
“Wanna smoke?” the child asked with no shame.
“What did you mean by that? That he’s going to be here soon?”
“He’s coming back, Nora.” Her inner child mumbled the lyrics to the song on the record player and shook the cola in her glass. “I’m going to get ready.” She took a coloring book from the coffee table littered with Chinese takeout boxes, magazines, and full ashtrays. After moving some papers around, she found a pack of colored pencils and grabbed them.
She walked to Nora and dropped them in front of her. “Color until I get dressed.”
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Nora’s fifth cigarette was almost burned down to the filter as it tilted to the side of her mouth. Her legs splayed out in front of her and her head rolled around as the record player played some more Morrison. Her inner child came back into the living room wearing a princess dress and Cinderella heels, and bent over to view Nora’s work. Her coloring sheet was upside down. Nora’s inner child studied it as though it were a Rembrandt. “Your coloring looks like shit,” her inner child told her.
“What? You watch your mouth when you talk to me!”
“Why?” the child retorted. “You never watch it when you talk to me!”
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Nora’s inner child threw one of her toddler Cinderella glass slippers at Nora’s face. Nora spilled her whiskey on her inner child’s white gown. The child and adult lunged at each other, full of rage and angry play, until there was a knock on the door. “He’s going to hurt me!” the child screamed.
Nora screwed her face in serious confusion as her inner child bundled her dress around her as though for protection.
“No honey,” Nora said softly. Then, with almost a sneer: “He’s not here for you. He’s here for me.”
“That isn’t true!” the child screamed. “When he abuses you he abuses me. Don’t be stupid! Stop inviting him back, and stop leaving me!” Her inner child rushed to the door and yanked it open to the man who repeatedly had hurt Nora.
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When Nora woke up, she spit a boa feather out of her mouth. The whiskey had dried on the front of her dress and she was slumped forward in the arms of a goddess humming a hymn in her ear. Her voice sounded like an angel’s harp. Nora’s hand was resting on her thigh and her legs were angled out to the side.
The goddess massaged her hair.
“Sweet child, it looks like you’ve summoned a lot today.”
Nora turned to face the woman. “What do you mean?”
“The man who hurt you. You wished him to return to you here. It’s why you were dancing. It’s why you were waiting.” She sighed. “She was right, you know.”
“Who?”
The goddess met Nora’s eyes. “Your inner child.”
“Didn’t recognize her.”
The woman shifted Nora in her arms so that she wasn’t slumped forward, but sitting a little straighter. “You drink and get high so you can see your technicolored daydreams, so you can watch memories of your past as big as a drive-in movie screen. What do you think happens when you surrender yourself to these fantasies that give you nothing? Why do you give yourself up so easily to them when they bring you pain?”
Nora’s eyes closed as the goddess leaned in and spoke like a lullaby. “You’re beautiful. But you’re weak. You get high, get drunk to watch yourself in the worst time of your life with much more awareness than you had before. That’s in the past, by the way. You’re safe here, right now. You’re okay. You’re sacred.” She sighed. “This is the way the world’s teaching you to live. Almost like you’re watching reruns of commercials, but they aren’t of products; they’re of your pain.
You lie down and you bring it back…” “Stop it.” Nora spoke harshly.
The goddess caressed her head. “Young women need to be told that the things they want won’t just happen to them. They have to do things for themselves. You aren’t living a television life. That’s a trap.” Nora exhaled. “When you go through the darkest days, you gain awareness. You gain a greater capacity to handle what this brings you. There’s pain, but there’s magic. You aren’t to keep returning to an image when you’ve grown bigger.”
The goddess continued. “There is power in the darkness. That’s why you can never stay. We won’t allow it. The darkness comes to you so that you grow out of it. You aren’t meant to stay; you’ve got so much to become. You aren’t meant to understand the darkness, honey. But you aren’t meant to return to it either.” A knock erupted on the door and Nora shot out of the goddess’s arms. Nora bustled about the apartment and grabbed a jacket and a tube of lipstick. “I understand you want to own this pain and what it’s done to you,” the goddess said. “You want to be its ruler—you want to control—but you’re just repeating the harm it’s done to you and what you never asked it to do to you. You aren’t enriching any part of your life or yourself with what you’ve learned.” She paused.
“Would you rather catch fire or start a flame?” “Both,” Nora said, slamming the door.
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The air was cold. The sky was gray, and the ground was full of asphalt. Ahead was the beach.
Nora clutched her shoes as she swept her hair out of her face and slumped forward as she trudged. She held her stomach. It hurt. Only after he up and left her there, nearly stranded in the middle of a place unknown, did she realize he wasn’t coming back for her. When she was with him, she felt like a hollowed version of a dream; she nearly floated. She couldn’t exist for herself, to herself; she was simply a servant of his fantasies—fantasies, which she soon realized, were not her own, and none of which belonged to her.
The sky was getting darker, but she saw a small plume of smoke rising in front of the waves. She bundled her scarf tighter around her neck and dug her feet into the sand. Down below was her inner child, standing in front of a bonfire. Nora’s heart raced as she ran to the small child and tried to bundle her in her arms, but she pushed her away.
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“He left me in the middle of nowhere,” the child spoke. Then, as her voice cracked: “But you abandoned me first.”
Nora nodded and wiped tears from the young girl’s eyes. The child started screaming, just as when she had first appeared on Nora’s living room floor. Nora chased her inner child and both began laughing. They twirled and danced near the fire. The child jumped into Nora’s arms and whispered secrets into her ear that made Nora laugh so hard that she fell over and both of them tumbled in the sand.
Solemnly, Nora’s inner child dropped Nora’s hand. She walked directly into the bonfire, immediately catching flame. Nora watched her quietly, watched as her highs and her daydreams burned around her.
Then, she joined her in the fire.
A former lecturer of English at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands, Patience Williams now works as a full-time lecturer at Howard University. As an interdisciplinary fellow from Rutgers University, she completed an MFA in fiction writing and earned a bachelor’s degree from Oklahoma City University in English literature. Her creative work has been published in Amsterdam, Berlin, and the American Midwest. In 2022 she launched a newsletter on Substack titled Get Free, which promotes sustainable teachings to overcome feelings of illegitimacy and inadequacy. She’d love for you to join her.
