(Untitled, Unfinished Short Story)

Who am I today?  She asks herself this question every morning.  Troubled?  Talented? Violent?  Well-behaved?  Or should I just be everything?
        Daimonia lays on her back, flat.  The blanket on top of her is still as neat and unwrinkled as when she slid under it.  The blanket scratches her through her nightdress, and its fibers are like little insects crawling across her body.  The mattress is only a little thicker than her gray blanket, and it sags in the middle, which makes her back sore all day.
        It is still night outside, but some of the blackness has faded and warmed into indigo.  The moon is sinking, she imagines, back into the expanse of stars and planets and other worlds; the moon is weary of all it has seen this night, Daimonia thinks.
        There are only three small windows in this room.  The room is a wide rectangle, with cold, wooden floors and a high ceiling.  The windows are at the top of the wall, touching the ceiling.  They are too high to reach and impossible to look through.
        She listens to the other girls’ breathing in a cacophonous orchestra whose every instrument is out of tune.  The air is stale and still.  She inhales, and the stench of unwashed bodies, rotting teeth, and anguish floods her mouth with its putrid taste.
        Slowly removing her hands from beneath her blanket she hesitantly touches her face, rubbing the skin lightly.  She dreams the skin is smooth and warm and soft.  She pretends, imagines, wishes that someone else was touching her.  She has been here since she was three and since has only been touched to be beaten.  But somewhere, lost inside the prison of memories she cannot unlock, is a stirring of remembrance.  Of being touched, a caress that did not bring her pain.  She tries to imitate it now.  As her fingers slide down her cheeks they stumble across a profound gash, a fissure in her face whose existence she had effectively blocked from her memory until this second.  Blood has dried around the edges of the wound, but the inside is wet and hot.  She moves her sticky fingers and examines them in the haze of the brightening indigo light.  She lowers them down, wiping the wetness on the seam of her nightdress.
        A girl shifts in her bed, her blanket making a grating sound on her skin.  Daimonia picks her head up to see who else might be awake, but her eyes are too unfocused to take in much of her surroundings, especially in the pre-dawn light.
        The girl who sleeps next to her is Bea, a fat short thing with too many freckles and eyes that are too far apart and set in an uneven line across her brow.  She cries all the time.  Daimonia thinks she knows why Bea was put here, something about a priest and a pregnancy.  Bea repulses Daimonia.  She cries and complains too much even though she knows it will not change anything.  Briefly Daimonia wonders about Bea’s child.  Does the thing look like Bea?  What is its name?  Is it still alive?  Does it miss its mother?  Will it become a priest when it grows up, like its father?
        Bea snores.  How could a priest break his vows for this fat stinking girl with too many freckles and strange eyes?  Daimonia is not being cruel.  She simply uses the other girls as a way to set herself free. By imagining what their lives are like, she can almost forget about her own.  Not that she wants to forget all of it.
        She wiggles her cold, stiff toes inside her thin black stockings.  Then she puts her hand on her collarbone, feeling for the cheap brass chain that is strung through her mother’s plain wedding band.  The band is poorly made, but Daimonia treasures it all the more because it enables her to imagine her poor mother, her apparition mother, who must have loved her to give her such a personal, meaningful thing.
        Then she hears footsteps.  Loud and dull at the same time.  Moving fast, moving angrily.  They stop abruptly outside the thick wooden door to the room.  Daimonia clenches her eyes shut, ordering her heart to calm itself.
        Click.  The key is in the door.  It swings open, groaning as if it too was just being rudely awakened.  Flickering yellow light pours into the room, painting unrecognizable shadows on the walls.
Daimonia decides that today she is going to be good.  Well-behaved.
A credit to her poor, dead mother.