I think this is something that I really needed for myself. Mr. Skeleton Man and the Girl His eyes were dead fish caught in a fat fish bowl, floating blankly with dull color in his face. He smelled like cigarettes, piss, and the almost flowery scent of a dead body. His face loomed too close in the dark with his teeth all gleaming bright in a smile too wide. His skin stretched over every indention so that each bone was seen in the glow of the television. Mr. Skeleton Man’s hands were cold and clammy as though he had a fever. Mr. Skeleton Man lifted her shirt over her tummy, almost playfully. She only had mosquito bite sized breasts but he clenched them like they were fuller. She was seven and she was scared, though she didn’t know why yet. ‘Right before it happens... It’s the feeling a deer gets while being hunted, right before it’s killed,’ a rape victim named Ashley told me once, later on. Evolution is a peculiar thing. There is an evolutionary step in which a species adapts to the environment; and then there are more minor evolutions, such as a girl transforming into a new species of her former self. Evolution. Revolution. Both with a new beginning resulting from an outside—mostly violent—force. Mr. Skeleton Man slept alone in his bed at night in his decaying house. He told the girl to lie down in the symbol of his empty despair, in his bed, in her coffin. She collapsed stiffly on the bed like a puppet whose wires had just been cut. ‘I’m lonely,’ he said in a diseased voice, dying with his house and frosty bed. She didn’t understand the word ‘lonely’ or have a full grasp of the meaning that came with it. The desperate measures people take to rid themselves of that word and replace it with something else. Maybe that had been what Mr. Skeleton Man told himself when he took off her clothes mechanically, unzipped his pants, and forced his penis into her body too small for him. ‘You like to be fucked, you little slut,’ he would growl while his crackling hips jerked back and forth. She didn’t fight it, only closed her eyes and thought of nothing. Her body tore and bled a river, washing her innocence away. After handing the girl her Hello Kitty panties, he would drown her in her own guilt when he stuck a wad of bills in her hand. Sometimes he’d sneak the money to the girl under the dinner table after stroking her thigh or rubbing her crotch through her pants with his cold hands. She would always leave shaking and white as a corpse. For the next few years it happened over and over, each time a little of herself heart dying in his vacant embrace until there was nothing of herself left anymore. I took the place of the girl. Mr. Skeleton Man was the beginning of the revolution. I evolved. | 
