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“Mama!” I screamed, frozen to the spot, unable to look away from the horror show happening between my legs. “Mama!” I yelled again.
It wasn’t Mama who answered my cries, but Daddy. He came bursting into my room but stopped short when he saw me.
“What the hell have you done?” Daddy thundered.
I shrunk on the spot, still terrified by the blood but now also terrified by Daddy. Mama came rushing in after him.
“Oh,” she gasped.
“What’s happening to me?” I cried. I felt lightheaded and nauseated; I wasn’t sure I could stand much longer. The blood just kept coming and with it, blackish slimy blobs. Am I dying?
Though the red and black blood kept me hypnotized, I faintly caught the sound of Mama dialing on the phone. The cacophonous beeps of her dialing were such stark contrasts to my delirious state of mind.
“Get in the tub,” Mama ordered.
“What?” I turned my head to see Mama, her face white as a sheet.
“The ambulance is on its way,” Mama explained. “They say you need to lie down in the tub.”
I barely registered her order, but I did as she said. I lay down in the tub, placing my arms on the edges, and waited. Waited for them to arrive or waited for death to come. Blood kept flowing like I was a spigot with a broken handle. It was amazing to me the amount of blood I had inside.
“Where’s Daddy?” As soon as I asked the question, I had my answer. I didn’t even to need look at Mama, though her face did say it all. I heard his telltale booming voice from outside my room; he was praying. As his thundering voice filled the bathroom like storm clouds, I was not filled with comfort.
“I command Jezebel to be thrown down and eaten by the hounds of heaven!”
Me. I was Jezebel. In my father’s eyes, I was not to be saved, but to be thrown down and eaten. Even as I lay in the tub, watching my very life essence flow out of me.
“Mama?” I looked up at her ashen face for some kind of comfort. Anything to let me know I didn’t deserve this fate. There was nothing. She turned her face from me as she had turned her face from me my entire life. I waited in the tub for my fate, my blood becoming my bathwater.
As I felt the last of my consciousness slipping away, I heard the front door crash open. Sounds of lifesaving commingled with Daddy’s somber praying.
“I rebuke and bind the spirits of witchcraft, lust, seduction, intimidation, idolatry, and whoredom connected to Jezebel!”
As the paramedics scrambled to get me strapped to the gurney, Daddy’s voice never ceased. His booming, terrible voice a bitter backdrop. He hadn’t moved an inch when the paramedics came rushing in. They had to scurry around him and his praying to try and save me.
When I was fully strapped in, they rushed me out of the bathroom and down the steps. I could hear them murmuring their own prayers, ones of hope, ones that I would make it out alive. I could see the fear on their faces. I could see all of this, but I was long past the point of feeling anything. I was cold and numb.
“I loose the hounds of heaven against Jezebel!”
Daddy’s voice was the last thing I heard before they closed the ambulance doors.
Cotton balls filled my mouth and my head was lead. Where am I? I tried to sit up but everything hurt.
“Gracie? Gracie are you awake?” I recognized the voice as Mama’s.
“Mama? Mama, what’s happening?” I reached my arms out, flailing them in front of me like a zombie, trying to find something solid to hold on to. Mama caught my arm and held on.
I saw sterile, pale blue walls and machines. I was lying in a bed with foreign blankets. Come to think of it, everything looked foreign. Despite being able to recognize my surroundings, it all felt odd. I knew where I was—a hospital—yet it all seemed so strange.
I was experiencing this first person and that wasn’t right. I shouldn’t have been in the hospital bed. I shouldn’t have felt the cold, smooth sheets. I shouldn’t have had the IV in my arm. I shouldn’t have heard the beeping next to my ear. I shouldn’t have seen my name up on the white board next to those of the nurses who were taking care of me.
“Why am I here?” I croaked to Mama.
“Don’t you remember?” Mama looked at me, her eyes worried. She always had a bit of fear in her, a byproduct of Daddy. Daddy was like a ghost that would always haunt us. When she looked at me with only worry and no fear, I wondered what was happening to me.
Was I dying?
And where was Daddy? Why wasn’t he there?
