Vulnerable (Barons of Sodom)

by Abriella
Blake

A Hearts
Collective Production

Copyright © 2014 Hearts Collective

All rights reserved. This document may not be reproduced in
any way without the expressed written consent of the author. The ideas,
characters, and situations presented in this story are strictly fictional, and
any unintentional likeness to real people or real situations is completely
coincidental.

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Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Epilogue

DET. RAMIREZ:
Just speak into the microphone, Bridie.
It's alright.

BRIDIE:
I'm sorry, fellas. I get a little nervous in
front of crowds. Bunch of tall drinks of water like yourself, too. So I just
talk into this?

DET. RAMIREZ:
Why don't you just take your time? Can
someone get Ms. Calyer a glass of water?

(static)

DET. RAMIREZ:
So how's about you start at the
beginning, sweetheart. Would you tell us about Caroline?

BRIDIE:
Caroline...yes. My aunt Caroline used to have
my back, before she fell down the rabbit hole. That was how she put it, too:
“I'll always have your back, sweet potato pie.” Then she'd get out her
“fixings” and set to cooking up the meth that would eventually take her life,
right there in our piddly little living room.

My mother had left me with my aunt sometime before I turned
seven, and no one had heard from her since. I never knew my father, so my aunt
was my only family. Aunt Caroline liked to refer to Mama in the hushed tones
often reserved for the dead, but I did wonder...for a while. I invented stories
in my mind about all of the adventures that had taken her away from me—perhaps
Mama was riding the rails with a hobo bandwagon, eating beans out of cans.
Perhaps she was dancing for grateful miners at a Vaudeville show in the
midwest. That's right—in all of my stories, my mother was part of a glamorous,
distant past. And in all of my stories, she was trying to get back to me—like
some kind of Odysseus. I remember Odysseus from eighth grade
English.
Wasn't good for too much back then, but I did know my way around a book.

It's a funny thing, having a childhood so thick with tragedy
that every worst-case scenario begins to feel inevitable. I got smart around
the same time I grew breasts (eighth grade again)—I learned hope was a
dangerous drug. More dangerous, even, than Aunt Caroline's nasty,
yellow-colored crystal. I learned that people are consistently cruel to the
skinny, poorly dressed girls from the trailer park part of Waco—even the other
skinny, poorly dressed girls from the trailer park part of Waco. I
didn't
learn
all of the things little girls are supposed to learn from their mothers. But
most useful of all, I learned that sadness—that getting sad—was wasted energy.
So, I got tough instead.

DET. RAMIREZ:
You got tough, huh? Will you tell us
about that? What did that mean for you, 'getting tough?’

BRIDIE:
Now hold your horses, cutie! I'm telling the
story, I tell it my way. Southern Belles, however tenuous a 'belle' they may be—we
gotta have some idea of decorum, right? Would someone freshen this up?

(Sounds of clinking glass)

Thank you.

Now before Aunt Caroline made a full-time job of staring at
daytime television through her veil of vapor, she used to teach pottery at
Santa Lupe Community. She used to wear her hair in thick braids and dress
herself up in bangles and turquoise jewelry. She showed me a picture of an
artist once—Frida something—and told me, “this is what I'm going for, sweet
potato pie. You see how serious she looks?”

We lived in that house together until I was two days shy of
eighteen. It was pretty boring, for the most part; I'd go to school, where I
was quiet, confused and miserable—then I'd come home. If Aunt Caroline was
sober that day, we'd maybe head into town in her rattley old truck and get
groceries, or bags of linen for her various sewing projects. More often, she'd
fumble around in a stupor and I'd explore the outskirts of the park, going a
bit further each day. I got to know that land well.

For a while, Aunt Caroline entertained a few gentlemen
callers—at whose behest I was always forced to leave the perimeter and look
around the park for girls my own age to play with. Her men were West Texas
versions of the literary type, mostly. Drifters. I remember one sweet-faced
young kid who spoke in a high voice and said he was a roadie with Uncle Tupelo.
But for the most part, I spent my time alone, wandering, getting to know the
plains in a particular way. West Texas isn't swampy like the East; it's not
bayou. All those cracked, dry spaces, the color of nothing, were hard to love—but
then, so apparently was I.

When I was two days shy of eighteen, my aunt brought home a
man who said he taught gym at the local high school, though I'd never seen hide
or hair of a Mr. Reginald before, and our “local high school” only had about
two hundred students. That was his name:
Wilbur Reginald
. And boy, was
he the limit: the physical epitome of a tall, dark and handsome stranger from
an old movie. My aunt made a big flutter over Mr. Reginald. She talked about
him the whole week long, before he showed up on our doorstep with a bunch of
wilting daisies. “Cary Grant is coming, Cary Grant is coming!” she said. She
put on some make-up and her best jewelry. She got close to looking the way she
used to look, in old photos, all for Mr. Reginald.

My aunt was something of a beauty queen before the rabbit
hole. Long blonde hair the color of corn and a round, smiley mouth. Mrs.
Robison at church said I got all my beauty from her—though I always figured I'd
taken after my long lost pops, what with the dark hair and the dark, wide eyes.
It didn't matter either way. At school, I could only tell I was good-looking
when the boys said ugly things to me as I walked past—and though I didn't give
a one of them the time of day, I did get to thinking that beauty was just
another liability for a poor country girl. And the girls? They were just so
mean
.
I kept to myself, remember.

Oh laugh it up, that's right, I was
vainly
beginning
to suspect that I was a
pretty
girl. I would look in my aunt's crusty
old magazines and compare my figure to the models'—and I suppose I did take a
bit of secret pleasure in the rounded curves of my hips. My long legs. My thick
hair. But it was something I couldn't enjoy in front of other people, so I
stuffed my beauty away. Tried to snuff it out behind dumpy clothes. I was
trying, at that age, to hide from the world.

But back to Mr. Reginald and his wilting daisies. He was the
tallest man I'd ever seen up close—had to stoop low just to cross our trailer's
threshold. He smelled of some kind of fancy cologne, which was unusual in those
parts. Most of the truckers and riff-raff we called neighbors preferred a
potpourri of Old Spice and tobacco. But Mr. Reginald, he was refined. Flat abs
visible beneath a freshly pressed blue shirt, the color of a Waco afternoon
sky. His hands looked manicured—they were soft in my palm, like they'd been all
lotioned up. And I'll never forget the way that man looked at me. Poor Aunt
Caroline, looking her damn best right beside me—she must have known right then
that she'd picked the wrong suitor. Just as I shoulda known from the moment he
walked in the door that this tall, dark, handsome stranger wanted me, me, me.

She put the daisies in a “vase,” or the closest thing we had
to it—one of those Mickey Mouse Happy Meal glasses they used to give away at McDonalds.
She'd spent all day making pasta in our cramped excuse for a kitchen. The whole
three rooms reeked of spaghetti. “
Bridie, you go play on the stoop until
dinner now—y'hear
?” She said to me, all cold and distant. Meanwhile, I
didn't want to leave the room. You have to remember that I was this lonely
little girl, and I'd never touched anyone, had no friends to speak of—and there
was something about this towering man. Oh! I remember he had one green eye and
one blue! Imagine that. I remember the feel of his five o'clock shadow on my
face as he brushed my cheek in hello. The smell of the oil in his hair. The
thick, muscular feel of a man's body—not a boy's body, but a man's—just the
aura of the thing, as I stood beside him in our kitchen. So when my aunt
Caroline told me to go play outside, you bet your ass I didn't want to. I
wouldn't have put it this way at the time, but I wanted Mr. Wilbur Reginald.
That, I must admit: I wanted that man something fierce.