Further Along

     With a grunt, the last dark gree trash bag was heaved into place. The rail-thin blonde girl armed sweat off of her face and leaned wearily against the redwood fence.

     "BRIAR!!!"

     She jerked upright, nearly losing her oversized jeans in the process. On the porch of the well-kept ranch house, a glory of a woman was looking down the graveled drive. Between the flowered caftan, snotty five-year-old clinging to one swollen leg and the lime-green curlers, she was everything wrong about suburbia bundled into a single, red-faced package. "Ya need ta get ‘dem chairs back in da shed!" Her shrill voice carried easily on the air, and there was no mistaking the menace in her tone as she shook a scolding finger. "Be da devil ta pay if one o’ em gets water damage! Get ’em in da shed!"
     "Yes, Mrs. Maulder," the little girl muttered, hitching her jeans over her bony hips as she walked up the drive. The heavy wooden deck chairs were unwieldy and rough, and more often than not, gave everyone who sat in them splinters. The Maulders used them for parties, possibly why such events weren’t well-attended, and it was now Briar’s last chore to stow them away.
     Yes, Briar Dallas, the once-petrified child hiding behind her parents’ couch, was now fully eight years old…and on her fifth foster home. It wasn’t the worst, Briar reflected as she struggled with the damned chairs. Could it be worse than the first one? Or the second…?

     If one looked at it objectively, it was an amazement that Briar had survived past the murder-suicide of her parents. That night was still horribly vivid in her memory: the oddly quiet discussion on the phone between her mother and brother, then fresh to the Army; her father’s silent observation, noticed only by the four year old Briar. Her father had been so quick, calling her mother to the hallway, then striking with an axe. Briar couldn’t forget the screams that had sent her behind the couch, the dull, liquid sounds of the axe, the crack of bone, her father’s heavy breathing. Briar had remained utterly still, even when her father had gone upstairs. She’d sat through the booming sound of his demise, the gagging police, the investigation. When the officer had found her, she was drawing on the wall with a crayon stub and crying.

      She didn’t remember crying.

     It had been a blur after that. Police, people in suits, one woman with greying hair who’d given her a lollipop, a man in a black dress who’d looked disgusted. A bunch of people had gone through a single room, an older woman had recoiled from her, and she’d been taken on a long car ride.
Her first foster home had seen in her fifth birthday with a large party. She still had a crumpled photo of that afternoon. Looking at it, no one would have believed that the two older boys, her foster brothers, had molested her for months. Or that she slept with another foster child who regularly tried to smother her with a pillow, or lock her in cabinets. Who, from the picture, would have known that Briar could hardly eat? That to her, everything tasted of cornbread and pennies?

      When she was nearly six, the foster mother saw her sons off to college and disbanded her foster home. Briar went to a couple with four other foster children, all of them far older. As with any pecking order, they pushed her to the bottom. It was in this home that Briar was first raped. One of the older boys used her to express his sexual frustration, and the others saw it as an opportunity. School, when they finally sent her, was a nightmarish scene of mockery. It was a month after her sixth birthday that she was found stranded in a tree.
     Her third foster home was a flash, really. With an alcoholic mother and a depressive father on the verge of losing ther licensing as foster parents, there was no attempt at care. Briar, their only foster child, was subjected to any manner of abuse they cared to deal out. For the most part, it was the worst kind: neglect. When the court liason had made a surprise visit, more out of boredom than professional duty, she found Briar in the kitchen, picking through cockroach-infested garbage for food. She said nothing, merely took Briar to her own home for a bath and lunch. The judge was horrified as well as an overworked public servant can be, and ordered Briar to a children’s hospital for a month.

     It was in that month, while nurses clucked, cuddled and tried very hard to spoil her, that something of Briar was noted: she could draw very well. The nurses saved her drawings and made her the ward darling, albeit one without any family. A search had found her brother dead in northern Germany from a live-fire exercise. Briar’s memory of her brother was vague at best, and the news didn’t disturb her. If anything, she seemed to have learned that no one could be counted on, and such acceptance in one so young broke the caring women to tears. It was both a blessing and a curse for the little girl. Briar gained weight, filled out a bit and showed the sparkle that had been hiding in her eyes. The curse was that Briar now had a taste of what she had been missing. A month, an expectant child’s eternity, passed all too swiftly for Briar. She turned seven on her second day at her new foster home, and had only the well-wishes of the nurses to cling to when her foster father brutally raped her.

     Briar was so fragile that he nearly killed her in that first night. Her foster mother took care of her, apologized for her husband’s brutality, and was generally kind, if completely insane. Her tyrannical husband was a professor, and split his time between the students and his office. It was almost enough for Briar, this quiet, affluent home with a kind, motherly woman and plenty of paper and sunlight to draw in. Perhaps that was the most pitiful thing of all: Briar was almost happy there.
     It couldn’t last, as everyone knew. Despite the occasional, violent abuse from her foster father, Briar was content, if too thin and extremely jumpy. It was almost expected, the night her foster father came home drunk and broke seven of her ribs, fractured her pelvis and gave her internal bleeding with the rape and beating he administered. What little Briar could remember of that was a sense of profound regret, hearing the sirens and her foster mother’s hysterical screams.

     The stint in the hospital wasn’t nearly as pleasant this time. For one, the police were constantly in and out of her hospital room, asking questions. Lawyers and child service workers followed, and it was within two weeks, with her ribs carefully wrapped, that Briar was sent on her eighth birthday to this, the most recent foster home.
     To here: this repulsively normal, suburban home. The Maulders sneered at her, forced chores on her and left her entirely out of their family. Mrs. Linda Maulder was a good, devoted Lutheran who was doing her ‘Christian’ duty by taking in foster chi

ldren. She didn’t consider it her duty to shower them with love, or ‘spoil’ them as she put it. Mr. David Maulder was a cold, pretensious man who distained to look at his foster daughter, but certainly had no qualms about walking into her room late at night and forcing her mouth open to wake her before he began his abuse.

     So Briar’s life had gone, and so it went. Despite the history that was unreal for an eight-year-old, she remained one of the few people who found beauty in everyday life, and so naturally, she was cursed to never experience it herself.