Looking in the Mirror

3rd Place, First Things First! Writing Contest

by Gracie Hill

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Then he created my uncle and thanks to him, I’m three weeks from starting the eighth grade and three months from giving birth to a child that will also be my cousin. He told me to pretend that he was someone that I liked. So I closed my eyes and pretended that I was looking into the mirror. There was a little girl staring back at me with two ponytails on each side of her head and bangs that cascaded down over her eyes. She had smooth dark brown skin with no blemishes at all. Her full lips wore a smile that made her face look like it was filled with happiness. She was me and I finally liked me.

Pretending I was an innocent little girl who didn’t have all the painful emotional scars that made her feel ugly was what I thought about, in order to ignore the reality of the grown man who was raping me and silently stealing my innocence. The fact that he was my uncle made the emotional pain unbearable. Though I had never liked him much, he was still my mother’s only brother and I couldn’t even tell her because she died when I was nine.

My mother was killed in a car accident on her way to pick me up from school. I went to live with my Uncle Charles and his wife after the funeral. They didn’t have any kids and I think his wife, my Aunt Urlene, wasn’t too happy about me being there intruding in their home that felt like it was only meant to hold the two of them.

I had been living with my aunt and uncle for a year before he ever touched me inappropriately. But after the first time it was pretty much the same every time he came to my bedroom in the middle of the night. He would slide under the covers with me and tell me, “I came to take care of my business.” One day I saw him put away his gun. I took it and hide it in my bedroom. I planned on shooting him the next time he came to take care of his business. Then I decided to do it while he was asleep because I didn’t know what would happen if I chickened out with him standing in front of me. Late one night, I cracked their bedroom door and peeked inside. They were both asleep. I walked in and stood by his side of the bed. As I tried to aim the gun and shoot it at the same time, I dropped it. The bullet caught him in the shoulder but his sin against me caught him up for fifteen years. I live in a foster home now with a woman who has always wanted a daughter. I dreamed about my mother last night and she told me everything would be okay.