Red Hourglass : Dark Coming Of Age Romance Thriller

My Childhood

My name used to be Mary Summers. My mother abandoned me in the sunflower field that we once laughed and played in. I was in fifth grade when she disappeared. The field became a wasteland of yellowy slime, and I grew to detest the color yellow. Everything sunny, bright, and cheery took on a form of yucky ugliness and filled me with disgust.

I hated my mother with every single fiber of my being, yet I prayed that she would come back to the farm one day. I often imagined lying in her lap as she sang lullabies and rocked me to sleep on lazy afternoons. When I dreamt of being in her arms again, in-between heaven and Earth in fields of blue and yellow, it was pure joy.

One day, not long after she left, my stepfather interrupted my peaceful daydream. I was sitting outside on the white glider bench where my mother used to cuddle me. My stepfather grabbed me by the ponytail and dragged me into the house.

"Do the housework you useless bum! Start with the floors!" he shouted. He glared down at me with bloodshot eyes and shoved a giant mop into my small hands. "Be a good girl and you'll get dinner tonight. If not, you'll sleep outside."

I choked back tears as I mopped the floor. I hated my mother for leaving me with such a cruel man.

We had canned pea soup for dinner that night. He stared at me as I ate, making sure that I finished every drop. On days that I didn't finish all my food, he would hit me with a rolled up newspaper until I couldn't move.

I was afraid of him, but I couldn't confide in anyone-not my teachers, not my best friend, not anyone. I didn't want to reveal my loss, and I kept my hurt and pain hidden from the world. I held these dark secrets in a locked box in the furthest recesses of my heart. I secretly believed that my mother would come back someday ... and everything would be okay. And if not, I knew that I would leave this place once I was ready.

Going to school was an escape from my stepfather's violence. Vibrant flowers were painted on the walls of Summerdale Elementary, and our principal was a particular woman who ran the school with a big heart. She made sure that we all ate fruit at the morning assembly. The school had a few hundred students from the surrounding countryside, and it was my only oasis.

During one art class, I used a pair of scissors to cut shapes out of construction paper. I channeled all the pain into my work, cutting and cutting through page after page. It was then I realized that I could create art with a blade.

My obsession with blades grew as I used sharp, pointed tools to sculpt clay. I molded and indented the clay with my blades to create a distorted, hollow figurine of myself. I didn't see myself as a girl, or even a human being. I was a terrible monster that shouldn't have been born.

I quickly learned that I could use my figurines to project my perception of beauty into the ugliness that I had come to accept as myself. I began adding eyes, eyelashes, and curly hair to my creations, only to smash them back into formless lumps of clay. But for a brief moment, I could recreate myself as an imagined me.

Over time, I perfected a figurine of my mother. I added miniature wings so that it looked like an angel. I left it to dry, and then I painted my mother's soft eyes, long blond hair, and pink, kissable lips on the white figurine. I imagined her perfect angel figurine flying toward my disfigured figurine.

* * *

"Why are you always making figurines?" Anna asked as she inspected my creations with her almond-shaped eyes behind thick glasses.

Anna was my best friend and we called each other besties. She was short and had to sit in the front of class to see the board.

My fingers were sticky with wet clay that smelled like dung. I focused on sculpting my next figurine and didn't answer her.